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In France, when 19-year-old Clélia Verdier woke up from a medically induced coma, her first instinct was to ask for her three daughters. Instead, doctors shattered the reality she had been living in: the children had never existed.

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Verdier, from Lyon in France, had slipped into a coma in June 2025 after what she described to the Daily Mail as a “serious suicide attempt by taking a large amount of medication”. She remained in a medically induced coma for three weeks — but inside her mind, an entirely different life unfolded.

Unaware that she was unconscious, Verdier experienced what she described as “extremely intense” dreams and nightmares that became indistinguishable from reality. Among them was a vivid and emotional journey of becoming a mother.

The teenager said the experience felt frighteningly real, complete with physical sensations, emotional turmoil, and years of memories.

‘I could feel so many things. When I dreamed about giving birth, I felt the stress. I also felt a lot of pain. In this dream, I gave birth to triplets, whom I named Mila, Miles, and Maïlée. Maïlée died shortly after birth. I felt so awful – overwhelmed with sadness and guilt,’ she recalled.

The hallucination was so detailed that Verdier even remembered holding her babies for the first time.

‘It was incredible. I felt an overwhelming wave of love,’ she added while describing the first “skin-to-skin contact” she experienced in the dream.

Inside that imagined world, years passed. Verdier watched her daughters grow up, develop personalities, and become central to her life. One child, she remembered, was “quite shy”, while another was a “bundle of energy”.

‘I remember walks, meals we shared, and bedtime stories,’ she said, adding that she ‘loved them with all her heart’.

But the emotional high came crashing down the moment she regained consciousness.

When Verdier asked to see her daughters, medical staff informed her that the children were never real. The revelation left her devastated and emotionally disoriented.

‘That’s 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,’ she said.

Even a year later, the emotional scars remain fresh. Verdier admitted she still struggles to separate herself from the life she experienced in the coma.

‘Now I feel very disconnected from others. 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,’ she said.

Despite the heartbreak, Verdier says she hopes to have children one day.

‘They will have a different place in my heart, but one just as important,’ she said.