Clélia Verdier has vivid memories of giving birth to triplets. She remembers the agonizing pain of labor, the joy of holding her daughters for the first time and the devastation when one died soon after.
The only catch? She was never pregnant, never went into labor and never became a mom. In reality, she was in a medically-induced coma in a hospital the entire time.
Verdier isn’t the first to dream up a whole life for themselves while in a coma, only to wake up and discover that none of it was real.
But for Verdier, 19, from Lyon, France, it was especially complicated to come to grips with the realization that the babies she felt like she had given birth to never even existed.
She explained to the Daily Mail that she ‘made a serious suicide attempt by taking a large amount of medication’ in June 2025, and was placed into a medically-induced coma for three weeks.
She remembers having ‘extremely intense’ dreams and nightmares during the coma, but because she was ‘not aware that she was in a coma’ at the time, they ‘became her reality.’
One dream, in particular, has stuck with her: the one in which she became a mother.
She explained that it seemed so real and she could feel both physical and emotional pain throughout the hallucination.
‘I could feel so many things. When I dreamed about giving birth, I felt the stress. I also felt a lot of pain,’ she recalled.
‘In this dream, I gave birth to triplets, which I named Mila, Miles, and Maïlée. Maïlée died shortly after birth. I felt so awful – overwhelmed with sadness and guilt.’
Verdier even remembers the first ‘skin-to-skin contact’ that she had with her babies.
‘It was incredible. I felt an overwhelming wave of love,’ she added.
While she was only in the coma for three weeks, she said the realistic dream spanned across seven years, which meant she got to watch her daughters grow up.
She said each of her daughters had distinct personalities: one was ‘quite shy’ and the other was a ‘bundle of energy.’
‘I remember walks, meals we shared and bedtime stories,’ she added.
She ‘loved them with all her heart,’ and when she was finally awoken from the coma, the first thing she did was ask the medical staff where her children were.
‘That’s when they told me they didn’t exist. It was a shock,’ she said. ‘I was so convinced it was real that the first time I saw my parents again, I told them they were grandparents.’
Verdier said it was extremely difficult for her to come to grips with the realization that the seven years she had spent with her daughters had all been made up inside her head.
And now, almost a year on, she is still struggling with the pain from the ordeal.
‘Now I feel very disconnected from others,’ she admitted. ‘I still miss [my daughters] today.
‘I lived as a mother – even if it was “just a dream,” with everything I felt and experienced, I will always be their mother. It was my only reality for a while.’
The 19-year-old said she hopes to one day have real children, but added: ‘They will have a different place in my heart, but one just as important.’
Verdier is not the first to experience this. In 2021, a woman named Caroline Leavitt wrote an essay for Psychology Today, entitled, In a Coma, I Dreamed a Whole Other Life – I’m Still Dreaming It.
‘When I woke up, it felt like someone had pulled me violently from one world I knew to another, as if I had stepped from one room to another,’ she wrote.
‘I began to talk to Jeff, my husband, to my friends Nancy and Lindy, who had sat by me every day, that I had been living in this imaginary town, and that it had been, well, incredible.
‘It had all these stores, and my apartment was hard to get to, but it was big and beautiful and I knew the streets, the people, and I knew it was real.’
Claire Wineland, who spent two weeks in a medically-induced coma, told ABC in 2015 that she had vivid dreams of visiting Alaska, despite never going to the state in real life.
‘I’ve never been to Alaska. I’ve never shown any interest in Alaska, but for some reason while I was asleep, I kept going to Alaska in my head, and it was so beautiful,’ she said.
Stephan Mayer, director of neurocritical care at Mount Sinai Health System, who works regularly with coma patients, explained in a previous interview that medically-induced comas are very different than comas caused by trauma.
‘What happens is that you have glimpses of awareness. It’s sort of like an old TV with static,’ he explained.
‘It’s just lots of fuzz until the picture comes on for just a minute – and then, boom, gone again. What you end up with is a collection of disjointed, disconnected glimmers of awareness.’
