'I slipped into a coma and woke up with somebody else's memories'

On New Year’s Day 2012, Alpha Kabeja was cycling along a North London road on the way to his girlfriend's house, feeling a little guilty about having spent the previous evening celebrating the festivities without her.

It was then that the then 29-year-old, who'd been cycling without a helmet that rainy afternoon, was struck by a van, which drove away from the scene.

Although his crushed body bore no visible injuries, a CT scan at nearby University College London Hospital revealed that his bleeding brain had taken such a powerful hit, it had actually moved around in his skull.

Alpha spent the next three weeks in a coma, while surgeons attempted to remove part of his skull to alleviate the swelling.

It was feared that Alpha would have severe memory problems, and his family was advised to prepare for significant amnesia.When he did finally awake, however, he was able to remember complex details of events that hadn't actually happened.

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As reported by the Boston Globe in 2016, Alpha had vivid memories of being on his way to visit his pregnant girlfriend, who was expecting twins.

He believed he carried with him an ultrasound, tucked away in a notebook filled with ideas for songs, and even asked nurses if they'd seen it. His memories of being an expectant father were so clear that he even remembered the names he'd chosen for his unborn son and daughter - Sky and Nikita.

Thinking back on the day of the accident itself, Alpha believed he had just been to a successful job interview with an assistant to the director of operations at MI6, where he'd been working with a man called Michael Mitchells. He also thought he possessed a small private plane.

None of this was true, but to Alpha, it felt very real indeed. He told the publication: “The memories felt real, but I didn’t understand them, in a way, actually. I didn’t quite understand them.”

For six months after his horror accident, Alpha was convinced his memories were real, and it was only when he contacted the M16 offices directly and learned the offices hadn't been open on January 1 that he began to doubt himself.

His family and friends didn't challenge him, with Alpha, who can now laugh about his confusion, recalling: “They were not questioning, they were just letting me go along with it!”

It's believed these false memories could have been Alpha's brain attempting to make sense of the gaps he'd been left with during his time in a coma, weaving this narrative from other memories, including things he'd seen in films, such as the private aircraft.

Shedding some light on this phenomenon, Julia Shaw, a memory researcher at London South Bank University, explained: “When you wake up, your brain is trying to reconnect pieces because your brain is trying to recover that sense of you, that sense of memory, that sense of history. And in that process of recovery and essentially healing, you can make connections in ways that are fantastical and impossible”.

Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com

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