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I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I w

by tirant 1y ago

I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away. However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again. I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.

energy123 1y ago
"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.
baxtr 1y ago
So is it similar to dreaming? Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?
- torben-friis 1y ago
  I’ve had similar experiences. In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term. It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
  - tirant 1y ago
    Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
- tirant 1y ago
  Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up. As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming. I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
  - baxtr 1y ago
    Very interesting thanks for sharing. And also a bit scary. It seems like you have found ways to live with this condition.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bw86 11mo ago
    Ha! I like the thought of unconciousness triggering a "kernel OOPS" and the brain dumping out a backtrace of everything. Makes you wonder who is supposed to debug it later ...
asimovDev 1y ago
huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this
cantor_S_drug 1y ago
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia... When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.” In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
- Firehawke 1y ago
  Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back. I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
  Had a similar incident in my teens. I was at scouts and we’d set up a monkey swing on a branch next to a river. While I was on it, I somehow realised the knot on the branch was coming undone and was able to witness its unravelling in slow motion. The fall was also slow, as I hit the ground I cried out, but more from shock than any pain. Very luckily I had landed on the soft sandy riverbank rather than the rocks in the river I had been above just moments before.
yolo3000 1y ago
I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.
- hn_acc1 1y ago
  10 times? Wow.. That seems like a lot.. AFAIK, even once is indication of potentially serious trauma.
  - technothrasher 1y ago
    I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years. I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal. Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
  - justupvoting 1y ago
    Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so. People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques. People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens. The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates. I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of. What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata. But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
lordnacho 1y ago
For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing. I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut. Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
- VagabundoP 1y ago
  Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually. And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
  - gausswho 1y ago
    I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking. The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma. Is that accurate?
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      No, it's just a creepypasta. Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy. Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep. Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement. Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
DougN7 1y ago
I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.
- fancyswimtime 11mo ago
  agree with this; fits with how the brain values recording of memories when adrenaline is present
iso1631 1y ago
I got knocked off my bike about 20 years ago and was unconcious long enough that an ambulance had arrived. I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.
- paufernandez 11mo ago
  Same here, I flew head first down a ramp because I slammed the breakes too hard and the next thing I remember is people asking if anybody had a handkerchief or something, since my head was bleeding. A solid five minute blackout.
SoftTalker 1y ago
I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.
iberator 1y ago
I had similar expirience. Time slowed down like 500x, and I had dream like visions and flashbacks - all within 1,2 seconds before hitting the ground. From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.
EvanAnderson 1y ago
I once lost consciousness after a bad bike wreck that left me bleeding significantly from both knees. I lost consciousness while sitting on a bench waiting for my wife to arrive after walking my bike back to the trail head. I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench. The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again. Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.
rpmisms 11mo ago
It's an amazing sensation. Not a pleasant one.
gaoshan 11mo ago
all of my incidents of losing consciousness were absolute voids to me. Once I apparently hit the back of a car on my bike and I just kind of woke up with no idea what had happened (I say "apparently" because I don't really know... I was riding my bike and suddenly I was laying on the side of the road, no in between. The other time my father punched me in the face, knocking the back of my head into the corner of a metal oven hood. I remember that but then the next thing was coming to on the ground with him over me, hands around my neck squeezing. Nothing whatsoever in between the start and end of events.

by tirant 1y ago

energy123 1y ago

"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.

baxtr 1y ago

So is it similar to dreaming? Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?

torben-friis 1y ago
I’ve had similar experiences. In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term. It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
- tirant 1y ago
  Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
tirant 1y ago
Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up. As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming. I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
- baxtr 1y ago
  Very interesting thanks for sharing. And also a bit scary. It seems like you have found ways to live with this condition.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bw86 11mo ago
  Ha! I like the thought of unconciousness triggering a "kernel OOPS" and the brain dumping out a backtrace of everything. Makes you wonder who is supposed to debug it later ...

asimovDev 1y ago

huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this

cantor_S_drug 1y ago

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia... When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.” In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Firehawke 1y ago
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back. I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
jonathanlydall 1y ago
Had a similar incident in my teens. I was at scouts and we’d set up a monkey swing on a branch next to a river. While I was on it, I somehow realised the knot on the branch was coming undone and was able to witness its unravelling in slow motion. The fall was also slow, as I hit the ground I cried out, but more from shock than any pain. Very luckily I had landed on the soft sandy riverbank rather than the rocks in the river I had been above just moments before.

yolo3000 1y ago

I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.

hn_acc1 1y ago
10 times? Wow.. That seems like a lot.. AFAIK, even once is indication of potentially serious trauma.
- technothrasher 1y ago
  I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years. I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal. Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
- justupvoting 1y ago
  Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so. People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques. People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens. The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates. I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of. What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata. But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.

lordnacho 1y ago

For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing. I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut. Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.

VagabundoP 1y ago
Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually. And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
- gausswho 1y ago
  I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking. The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma. Is that accurate?
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    No, it's just a creepypasta. Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy. Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep. Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement. Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.

DougN7 1y ago

I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.

fancyswimtime 11mo ago
agree with this; fits with how the brain values recording of memories when adrenaline is present

iso1631 1y ago

I got knocked off my bike about 20 years ago and was unconcious long enough that an ambulance had arrived. I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.

paufernandez 11mo ago
Same here, I flew head first down a ramp because I slammed the breakes too hard and the next thing I remember is people asking if anybody had a handkerchief or something, since my head was bleeding. A solid five minute blackout.

SoftTalker 1y ago

I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.

iberator 1y ago

I had similar expirience. Time slowed down like 500x, and I had dream like visions and flashbacks - all within 1,2 seconds before hitting the ground. From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.

EvanAnderson 1y ago

I once lost consciousness after a bad bike wreck that left me bleeding significantly from both knees. I lost consciousness while sitting on a bench waiting for my wife to arrive after walking my bike back to the trail head. I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench. The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again. Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.

rpmisms 11mo ago

It's an amazing sensation. Not a pleasant one.

gaoshan 11mo ago

all of my incidents of losing consciousness were absolute voids to me. Once I apparently hit the back of a car on my bike and I just kind of woke up with no idea what had happened (I say "apparently" because I don't really know... I was riding my bike and suddenly I was laying on the side of the road, no in between. The other time my father punched me in the face, knocking the back of my head into the corner of a metal oven hood. I remember that but then the next thing was coming to on the ground with him over me, hands around my neck squeezing. Nothing whatsoever in between the start and end of events.