I predicted my twins while living another life in a coma

"It wasn't a dream, I wasn't watching it happen, I was doing it and living this whole other life."

Keenan Acton, 26, spent more than four weeks in an induced coma after collapsing at a Hyrox fitness competition in October 2024.

More than 18 months on, the dad-of-two is still grappling to understand the life he says he lived while unconscious, including his wife having twins and moving to a large lakeside house.

In a somewhat surreal turn of events, his wife Olivia is currently pregnant with twins.

"Now I'm just hoping and waiting for this nice big glass house overlooking the water," he joked.

Keenan, a gym owner and fitness fanatic from Rossett, Wrexham, has very little memory of the day of his collapse and only knows what happened because others have filled in the blanks.

"My wife was watching us, waiting for us to come in, and I dropped and had a seizure," he said.

He was taken to Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, where Olivia was told his brain was swollen and multiple organs were failing. He was put in a medically-induced coma.

Keenan had suffered rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening medical emergency caused by rapid, extensive skeletal muscle breakdown, which can be brought on by extreme exertion.

Three weeks in, Keenan was brought out of the coma but on the fourth day of being awake, he suffered a cardiac arrest.

He was resuscitated and placed back in the coma, where he remained for a further eight days - during which Olivia was told several times he could die.

"I think what I find the hardest is not what I went through, it's what everyone else had to go through and knowing that my wife had to live through that," he said.

"On one occasion, she was told I had 24 hours left."

When Keenan was brought out of the coma, he had no idea that his experiences while unconscious weren't real.

"One of the first things I said to Liv when I woke up was, 'how are the babies?'," he recalled.

Olivia "was really confused" and asked him if he meant Roman and River - their sons, who were then aged four and three.

Keenan continued: "I was getting quite annoyed and asking her to get her social media out because I believed that we announced it to everyone on social media."

Being told they did not have baby twins and had not moved house was crushing.

"I instantly felt like a piece of me was missing."

When asked to describe what he experienced while in the coma, Keenan was emphatic that it was not a dream.

"It was real, I wasn't watching it happen, I was doing it, I was living it."

He recalled his wife giving birth to the twins while on holiday and, on returning home, being in "a nice big glass-fronted house overlooking the water".

"And we had the four kids," he said.

"It made me feel on top of the world."

He said many of his experiences while unconscious were "dark and horrible", including "being forced to do some not very nice things".

While he didn't want to relive some of the darker things, one example was being "moved into the middle of nowhere and put in this hut" where he had to continually use an exercise machine to stay alive.

"I had a Garmin watch on my wrist and it was counting down from eight days.

"When I woke up, I said to my friend that this had happened and he said to me: 'Mate, your second coma was eight days long.'

"It's crazy, isn't it."

A medically-induced coma is when sedatives are used to put a patient into a reversible state of deep unresponsiveness, to try and protect the brain from traumatic damage.

A number of intesive care patients have reported experiencing vivid dreams while in a coma and studies in Greece and Australia have explored this phenomenon.

Former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, who was in a coma following a high-speed car crash in 2006, has spoken of having a vivid dream of visiting a tree at his favourite spot in the Lake District while unconscious.

Keenan wanted to understand more about his memories of being in a coma, so the BBC arranged for him to meet consultant clinical psychologist Pieter du Toit, who is clinical director of the charity Brainkind.

"When you were in your induced coma your brain wasn't shut down," Pieter told Keenan.

"It wasn't the switch was flicked off, but there was a lot going on."

Keenan wanted to know why he experienced having twins and moving house, rather than anything else.

"Our dreams and our experiences in coma, or the ones we remember, are the things that are important to us," said Pieter.

"Our minds are always creating a narrative, a story, a whole."

On Keenan's experience of being in the hut, Pieter said it showed how the brain was a "metaphor and meaning-generating machine".

He added Keenan's brain likely took the experience of being in hospital and created a scene which was linked to the associated themes of isolation, fighting for survival and the prospect of death.

In December 2024, while the family were living in Chester, Keenan was discharged from hospital using a walking frame and, just weeks later, he was back at the gym.

Eight months after leaving the hospital, Keenan and Olivia got married, surrounded by their friends and family.

But he said the icing on the cake was finding out Olivia was pregnant, due in June - and there was a surprise in store.

"We went for the scan and the lady turned around and she said, 'oh, there's two of them in there'," he said.

"Of course, it ties into what I've seen in the coma. What was going on in my head at that moment in time was like, 'this is magical'."

Keenan said there was no history of twins in either of their families and the twins were conceived naturally without the use of IVF or other fertility treatment.

"I think it's too much of a coincidence for me to not believe that [my coma] was a look into the future and what was to come," he said.

"I think you've got to experience it to believe it."

Pieter said "science would say.. it's probably just coincidence", but added science couldn't explain everything.

"What I would say about our scientific understanding is that there are limitations," he said.

"It's all about what makes sense to the person, what's helpful to us, rather than being right about something."

Keenan said, since his collapse, he has had a whole new perspective on life.

He's sold off part of his gym and now prioritises being with his family.

"Life for me personally, and for the family, is better than it was before," he said.

"I'm not rushing around dead stressful, I see my kids eat breakfast, daddy's at home to read a book for bedtime and at home for bath time.

"I'm not going to call what happened a blessing in disguise because it wasn't a blessing for anyone and it put everyone through hell.

"Physically, I can't do what I used to be able to do but I've realised that some things are more important in life."