alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.
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.
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.
It's an amazing sensation. Not a pleasant one.
So is it similar to dreaming?
Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?
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.
huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this
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.