In a story that sounds like a The Twilight Zone episode, 19-year-old French girl Clélia Verdier awoke from a medically-induced three-week coma after a suicide attempt, during which she dreamed an entire life. The first thing she did upon regaining consciousness? Well, do what any mom would do and ask if her children were okay.
The confused medic said she didn’t have any children. The realization slowly dawned on her that they had only existed in an incredibly vivid and detailed dream. In an interview outlining her experience, Verdier said that despite never having given birth, she still has false memories of labor:
“I could feel so many things. When I dreamed about giving birth, I felt the stress. I also felt a lot of pain”
She went on to detail her dream children, “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 went on to detail her vivid memories of skin-to-skin contact with her babies, with the dream spanning the first seven years of their lives.
Verdier remembers her daughters’ personalities as if they were real, saying that one was shy and the other “a bundle of energy”, and can clearly still recall regular domestic minutiae like “walks, meals we shared, and bedtime stories”.
“I will always be their mother”
A French teenager awoke from a 3-week coma believing she had raised kids for 7 years in an alternate life
— Interesting AF (@interesting_aIl) May 12, 2026
She’s now taking therapy to deal with grief pic.twitter.com/xd19wXD9uM
And so, as you might imagine, the slow understanding that none of this was real hit her hard:
“When they told me they didn’t exist. It was a shock. I was so convinced it was real that the first time I saw my parents again, I told them they were grandparents.”
A year on from waking up, she still can’t quite process that her family wasn’t real and seems to be mourning them:
“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.”
Verdier now plans to become a mom for real in the coming years, but doesn’t expect her actual children to erase the dream ones. She underlines that Mila, Miles, and Maïlée “will have a different place in my heart, but one just as important” as her future kids. If she’s a year on from waking up and still experiencing grief for her dream family, that’s likely something she’ll carry for the rest of her life.
Here’s hoping she’s not still dreaming, this current reality isn’t just more of her coma, and we don’t all knowingly live in a universe that exists solely within a French teenager’s brain.
