The ancient Greeks called this state a dream, in the modern world it is called "coma". Since ancient times, people have tried to penetrate into this mysterious area of human consciousness, which is on the verge of life and death. But science is still unable to explain why this state occurs.
In most cases, the coma lasts from several days to several weeks. At the same time, every day the patient has less and less chances to return to normal life.
One of the unique cases of coma is the case of Edward O'Bara, who spent nearly forty years in a coma. Once upon a time, a woman was an attractive tall blonde. But then she got diabetes. One night in 1970, the girl woke up from pain, which was caused by a reaction to a newer medicine. Edward was immediately taken to the hospital, the girl fainted, then came to her senses, but then fell into a diabetic coma, from which she did not leave for forty years. Edward is currently an elderly woman who can breathe. Her eyelashes twitch at times, but she is still in a coma. Edward was looked after by her mother all the time, but she died at the age of 80. Now her sister Colin is looking after her. According to her, it is very difficult to do this, and not only physically and mentally, but also financially. The sister does not leave the woman for a minute,even sleeps with her in the same bed, as their mother did. The light in the room is never turned off so that Edward is not left in the dark.
Even despite the assurances of doctors that the woman will never come to her senses, Colin believes that one day her sister will wake up. The woman reads books to her sister every day, which should set her up in an optimistic mood, and constantly talks.
At the same time, medicine knows several happier stories when patients came out of a coma after many years. So, for example, in 2006, a resident of South Africa, Louis Wilsen, came out of a coma that lasted five years. He fell into a coma at the age of 25. The young man was run over by a truck. The most striking thing is that sleeping pills helped him out of the coma. Louis accepts it now, gradually recovering.
No less amazing is the story of Jan Grzhebski, a railway worker from Poland, who spent 19 years in a coma. Yang worked on the railway, in 1988 he was run over by a train, received a serious blow to the head. According to doctors, he should have lived no more than two or three years, but Jan's wife Gertrude did not agree with such a sentence. For many years she looked after her husband, all the while expecting a miracle. And it happened: in April 2007, Yang came to his senses. A man in many ways had to learn to live anew, because a lot of time passed and everything changed radically. Firstly, society, people have changed, everything has appeared in stores that could only have dreamed of in his youth. Secondly, and this was a pleasant surprise for Jan, during the time that he was in a coma, his four children started families, and they had 11 children.
Unfortunately, the theory of physicians was confirmed that after coming out of a coma, it is almost impossible to completely restore health. Jan Grzebski died of a heart attack in 2008.
Over the past twenty-five years, science has also known several cases when women who were in a coma gave birth. As a rule, these babies were premature, although there were exceptions. In 2006, a Kentucky woman, who was in a coma throughout her pregnancy, gave birth to a completely healthy baby girl.
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Doctors know very little about a coma. But at the same time, they noticed some patterns. People who have been in a state of coma often change, some become prone to aggression and violence, while others, on the contrary, become indifferent and passive. In most cases, severe depression is observed. In addition, very few come back from a coma, so few can tell about what they experienced in that state.
Sometimes inexplicable things happen to people who have been to the next world, but returned back. Some of them understand that they have opened some abilities that were not there before. So, for example, 51-year-old Englishman Tom McHugh all his life was engaged only in the fact that he participated in street fights. During the day he worked at construction sites as a handyman, and in the evening he went to the nearest pub with friends, and such trips, as a rule, ended in a fight. In 2001, Tommy suddenly suffered a stroke. The man spent a week in a coma, and when he regained consciousness, he suddenly began to draw for everyone and for himself. At first he painted on the walls with a paint brush, but then he realized that he needed an artist's brush. But no one taught him anything like that, and in his past life, to the point of coma, no arts interested him.
But the man felt that he wanted to paint. Everything happened by itself, and gradually all the walls in Tom's house were painted. Then the man set to work on the ceilings. Every corner of the house was decorated with sculptures that the man made himself, and the floor turned into a real work of art.
Many years have passed since then, but Tom still draws. His former friends do not recognize the artist as their bully friend. They are very surprised that Tommy can sit for hours over a canvas, recite poems, and he is also very fond of cats and all other living creatures.
According to doctors, the coma affected the work of Tommy's brain, activating those parts of it that are responsible for creativity. In other words, the coma opened a valve in the man's brain that changed his life.
But why do not everybody have such valves? The doctors have no answer to this question.
The story of the Briton was repeated with Anatoly Nikitin, a resident of Dnepropetrovsk. Two decades ago, he almost died of a heart attack, doctors pronounced clinical death, and performed resuscitation. As a result, the man who had previously worked as a surveyor also began to paint. Currently, the artist has more than two hundred paintings, most of which were acquired by private collectors.
And one more story of the artist. In 2009, British resident Alan Brown underwent a complex operation that lasted 19 hours. After the patient woke up from the operation, he also felt the urge to draw. When the nurse gave him a pencil and a piece of paper, Alan began to draw. According to the nurse, the drawings were simply magnificent, in some ways they resembled the works of Michelangelo. But before the illness and the operation, the man did not know how to draw at all …
Doctors have developed an explanation for such transformations, which has already become traditional: in a person who has experienced a coma, hidden abilities are revealed that were inherent in him from birth, but were, as it were, in a dormant state. But how, then, can one explain the cases in which people, after serious brain damage, demonstrated knowledge that they never had in principle?
So, in particular, a 13-year-old girl from Croatia, after a severe cold, suddenly fell into a coma. When the girl came to her senses a day later, she surprised the doctors very much by talking to them in pure German, at the same time, she almost completely forgot her native language. Of course, the girl knew a little German, but no more than at the level of the school curriculum, besides, the language was given to her with great difficulty. And suddenly, after a coma, the girl spoke as if she had lived all her life in Germany. It is clear that in this case there is no need to talk about any hidden abilities.
Another striking example is the story of Vilya Melnikov. In 1985, a man, after being wounded in Afghanistan, experienced clinical death, after which he discovered an extraordinary ability to learn. Currently, the man knows more than a hundred languages, including the ancient ones, and in addition, he studied sciences such as virology, astrophysics and entomology.
Since doctors cannot explain such phenomena yet, some enthusiasts suggest that a coma is not death, but a brain reboot. According to them, a person is a certain system that is pre-programmed for certain processes. A person is born, lives, gets old. But one day the process fails, a heart attack or stroke occurs, but then there is no death, but a reboot. A person comes back to life, but he is already programmed for new actions, sometimes even very difficult ones.
But who programs the human body, who puts all these abilities into it? There are no answers to these questions yet. Perhaps someday in the future people will be able to answer them, but so far there is nothing else to do but wonder at the possibilities of people who have returned to life after a coma.