Thread: Do you dream in a coma?

Originally Posted by astralboy

You dream every time your physical body is asleep.
You dream even when you're awake but your conscious focus is in the physical dimension so you don't percieve non physical experiences (dreams).
Even if your brain is dead you dream, but of course you don't remember it while you're in a physical body, because it needs a brains interpretations. Dreaming (non physical experiences) is indepedant of the body and the brain. Non physical is our true nature.

So yes you dream while you're in coma, but if there is brain problems you just can't remember from the physical perspective.

I recommand a book : The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

Damn man, I love everything you said. Sadly, there's no way of proving that consciousness is non-local to the body with our current technology, but scientists are certainly having a difficult time finding consciousness in the brain.

To add something to the topic, I think that you dream while you're in a coma. Although if the brain is not active, then the dreaming is most likely not very similar to what we experience as dreams in sleep and in the waking life. I've noticed that all dreams I create are preempted by feeling, and then it's like my brain translates that feeling into what we normally think of as dreams. This probably won't make sense to anybody that reads this, but I am going to add it anyways! I suspect that our experience of dreaming while in a coma would be more like experiencing the raw music of being.

Yeah, I wouldn't go as far to say its impossible to dream in a coma. However, Mr. "German Surgeon" could very well be correct. But, this does not mean nothing at all is happening with our consciousness. Maybe we're not dreaming, invited back to your home universe for a stay while your earth vessel (your body) is recovering. Seems far fetched.. Yet just as easily, just as plausible.

Originally Posted by WolfeDreamer531

Does anybody rememberhow hard it is to remember your dreams some nights after only being asleep for a few hours? Well, imagine trying to recall your dreams that after being in a coma for days, weeks, months, or years. Even if you could dream in a coma, I seriously doubt that the average person would (or could) remember dreams that they might have had in a coma.

The problem that some of you seem to have with the idea of knowing whether you've dreamed by whether you remember it after having come out of a coma is actually fairly simple to solve and can even be found in the original reason for this thread, which is in the case that you can dream in a coma, from there lucid dream in a coma. Lucid dreaming has shown time after time from sleep experts and avid lucid dreamers that it drastically improves one's ability to remember their dreams. The problem everyone has with rapidly deteriorating memories of dreams lies in the nature of dreams themselves and their location in the brain. Dreams happen outside of the memory center for the brain, and because the memory center isn't reactivated until you wake up it makes it very difficult to remember your dreams at all much less to remember your dreams after a day or a week or a month. There are a couple ways of extending this dream memory and stop one's memories of dreams from deteriorating one of which is the practice of lucid dreaming. If the portion of the brain which is responsible for dreams isn't recognized by doctors examining coma patients, then maybe that's because coma's and other forms of lengthy sleep provide a separate type of brain activity which doctor's (even the German Yahoo Answers ones) haven't been able to accurately study because the family of coma patients aren't exactly in the mood to accept experimental testing agreements, especially when there's a chance they aren't dreaming at all so no results might be gathered. Or maybe they are just in a sleep state in the recovery period, but to be devil's advocate, the constant argument that part of the definition of a coma is it implies a state of unconsciousness is rather mute. The term unconsciousness could mean anything, from a hard working student being "unconscious" after having worked a little too long, to the medical terminology where the "unconscious" patient doesn't respond to physical stimuli, but even then the Wikipedia article referenced never mentions a lack of dreams. Back to remembering dreams, the easiest ways are to be woken up when it can be determined that you are in the middle of a dream so that the residual moment in the dream drains into the newly awakened memory section of the brain. Other ways include keeping a dream journal, which is written immediately after waking, using lucid dreaming masks which provide an odd bi-product of enhanced dream memory, using lucid dreaming, which can provide you with far more memorable experiences since you are aware enough to create whatever you want within the dream, and combinations of all of these. Furthermore for those of you who are feeling amazed by the idea that you could be the only real consciousness because all the others are created by your own, or the idea that all your life could be in a coma dream or when you die you'll live a new life by simply waking up in the new life which will continue to the next dream life and so on, you might be interested to imagine the ideas of dimensional projection and possible infinite dimension overlap. These are the ideas that our entire universe/all the universes in all the dimensions are simply a projection in a universe where it has some number of additional dimensions to hold our dimensions like images, and from there you can imagine that that universe is inside another one with even more dimensions and so on. Or maybe to grow from this topic what if for the sake of argument, you can dream in a coma, so from birth you go into a lifelong coma which from there becomes your life, however lets add to this that it turns into a lucid dream very early on, and you go through your entire life (which lasts several 100x longer than any normal life because of the concept of dream time) knowing that you're just asleep and will never see the real world, but without caring because you are basically god for the duration of your entire life and all the experiences you have feel just as real to you as pain feels to us when we're awake because you were never awake to feel otherwise. So the dreaming person dies with no regrets, the concept that they would simply get bored in their dream eventually doesn't work because there is a literally infinite amount of possible entertainment, and the literal limit to one's will to live is simply their given imagination. Sometimes I wish that the concept shown in inception that dreams inside of dreams last longer than the original dream because if you could put yourself in a lucid state that makes it sound like you could make your dream's ratio between time passed in real life and time passed in your percieved dream potentially near-infinite, but the problem is your brain can really only generate a dream processing scenario so fast in reference to real life.

Please feel free to respond to this message in segments or otherwise.

Originally Posted by Dream-Master

You don't dream when in a coma since your brain activity in the cortex is reduced.

Total BS

Originally Posted by Semja

I didn't really want to get into a debate about it. I was out for hours, stone cold, I stopped breathing or was breathing so faintly it was not noticeable. I have fainted before. I didn't faint on that occasion. It didn't just happen, there were external causes. Whatever happened I'm not proud of it, I posted it out of interest. If it wasn't a coma its the closest I've been to a coma. Call it what you will.

coma [n],
a state of prolonged unconsciousness, including a lack of response to stimuli, from which it is impossible to rouse a person.

It's hard to tell if you were. One of the reasons they could of found out is shinning a light in your eyes and seeing if your pupils reacted to it.

Remember someone talked about a person that went into coma. He went through a lot of memories and had to get back to his body in the hospital in order to wake up...
Sounds more like a a story than fact, although it was interesting. I'm not saying that this have actually happened I just felt to mention it if someone else ever heard of it.

I was in a coma for 6 days and have started a thread about what i experienced.

The experience for me was i never became lucid in the coma dream untill i went to sleep in that dream did i become lucid but only to the extent i was aware i was asleep in the dream but not in a coma.

So when i went to "sleep" in the dream i was aware i was asleep and had an experience almost like astral projection but i was not aware i was in a coma.

Originally Posted by adde707

Remember someone talked about a person that went into coma. He went through a lot of memories and had to get back to his body in the hospital in order to wake up...
Sounds more like a a story than fact, although it was interesting. I'm not saying that this have actually happened I just felt to mention it if someone else ever heard of it.

I had this experience when i went to sleep in my dream while i was in a coma, i would go to sleep and it would be like experiencing astral projection where i would be elsewhere in this dream city and if i was unable to wake myself i had to travel to where my body was to wake myself up.