Do comatose patients dream?
A friend just spent a little more than a week in a coma. She remembers having horrible dreams that she couldn’t escape. She could hear doctors talking to and about other patients in the intensive care unit and thought all those diseases/conditions/surgeries were happening to her. My sister happened to be her attending physician and told me this was very common among coma patients.
Slate has an article about the different “kinds” of comas. It’s essentially a very broad term to describe a variety of non-conscious states. What’s very freaky to me is the worst-case scenario of patients who get a bad mix of anaesthesia, and wind up immobile but mentally awake during surgery, and feel everything.
What’s very freaky to me is the worst-case scenario of patients who get a bad mix of anaesthesia, and wind up immobile but mentally awake during surgery, and feel everything. I can personally testify to this, as it happened to me when I had minor elective laproscopic surgery. I couldn’t move or speak from the anaesthesia, but I definitely had an awareness of pain and cutting and innards being moved around. The strangest thing to me is that I remember the sensations and I know I was horrified at the time, but don’t really have any strong memory or impression of the terror itself.
I love Ask MetaFilter. When you have a question best answered by a neurologist, guess who drops by. As promised, I asked my sister to contribute to this thread. In particular, I asked if she could clear up some definitions (which she agreed was the major source of confusion) and to comment on awareness and memory under anesthetic.Coma is a state of profound, and usually, prolonged unconsciousness, meaning the patient cannot be aroused even by intense stimulation. The term, Coma, is usually reserved for unconsciousness caused by disease or injury, such as severe head injury or a metabolic disturbance such as very low blood glucose. I’ve got no idea if patients in a true coma can dream or not. This would be a question more fitting for a neurologist. The EEGs I’ve looked at (with a neurologist officially reading them) done on comatose patients are grossly abnormal and do not indicate the patient is in a state resembling natural sleep (they aren’t in REM sleep, etc.). Anesthesia is a loss
