“Awakening is made of dreams”

“Brain activity upon waking from a coma is a phase of fluctuation that leads to dreams that we easily remember and enrich with our interpretations.”

There are many studies on near-death experiences, confirms Professor Sandro Sorbi, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Florence and Director of Neuroscience 1 at Careggi.

“Often, after waking up from a deep coma, we are told very detailed accounts of what appear to be glimpses of the afterlife,” he asserts. But, even if it is interesting and worth listening to, it cannot be defined as such in scientific terms.”

“Coma – explains the neurologist – is, as the leading scientists have known, a sleep from which one cannot wake up. There are patients who remain with their eyes closed without any special tools to keep them alive for a short or long period. “Almost everything in it works, except for the mechanism of awakening.”

Professor Sorby explains that the first stage of emerging from a coma is the vegetative state: for a few hours or even years, the patient opens his eyes, but is unable to establish a relationship with the outside world.

Awakening from a coma or vegetative state can also be recorded through diagnostic tools such as an electroencephalogram: the brain trend result is similar to the phase of awakening from conventional sleep, in the sleep-wake oscillation, between wakefulness and sleep. “It is a stage full of dreams, ones that we remember afterwards and which we may be able to recount, in one form or another.”

Our narrative does not always accurately reproduce what we dreamed: since there are no recordings, it will never be possible to verify this, but “we tend to enrich dreams with our meanings, especially based on the context in which we find ourselves – continues the professor – waking up can lead In the context of resuscitation to appropriate explanations such as “return from coma in reality”. Therefore, for science, being near death is merely interrupting the pursuit of a dream.

But for those who personally lived this moment, the experience that led them to “look into the afterlife and back to life” will surely last forever.