A teacher who fell into a coma and apparently woke up almost 2,000 years into the future returned to write a detailed timeline of the coming centuries in his diary.

Swiss-born language professor Paul Amadeus Dienach had suffered a lifetime of poor health, and in 1921 slipped into a year-long coma. Dienach eventually recovered, but awoke with the memory of living another man’s life for those 12 months. He had, he said, somehow occupied the body of a man living in in the year 3906.

In a diary, which was never intended for publication, he wrote about the colonisation of Mars, a devastating nuclear war, and the establishment of a world government that ushered in a new golden age for humanity – all very wild concepts for a man living in the early 1920s.

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The Cosmos Lab podcast explains how, in failing health, Dienach entrusted his handwritten notes to one of his students, Georgios Papahatzis: “As Papahatzis began translating the notes, he stumbled upon unexpected content.

“The pages contained detailed passages discussing a prophesied nuclear conflict, the potential colonisation of Mars, the idea of a global government, and insights into futuristic technologies such as flying vehicles, holographic displays, and even contact with extraterrestrial beings.

“Initially, Papahatzis dismissed these revelations as mere science fiction. However, as he delved deeper into the text, he gradually realised that what he had initially thought to be fictional stories were, in fact, entries from Dienach's diary.

Dienach claimed how, after falling into a coma, he awoke in an unfamiliar hospital. Disoriented, he tried to ask the doctors what was happening but was unable to understand their answers. Eventually, someone realised that he was speaking German and told a stunned Dienach that he was in fact a famous physics professor named Andreas Noram, and that he’d been in a serious accident.

Dienach looked in a mirror, to see an unfamiliar face looking back at him and flew into a panic. “Sceptical and disbelieving, Dienach looked out of the window to see a surreal landscape with skyscrapers towering into the clouds and futuristic vehicles zooming around and defying gravity,” the podcast explained.

He began to wonder if he had died and this was heaven. At the same time, the doctors treated him as the injured physicist, and accepted his claims of having passed out in 1921 as the symptoms of his head injury.

According to the podcast, over the coming days “he became strong enough to walk around”. He continued: “He described his surroundings vividly, talking about walls made of crystal that gave him a wide view of the scenery. He also noticed objects made of warm, soft-coloured glowing metal.”

Night after night, Dienach read through historical texts from the far future, aided by something like an iPad. They continued: “He immersed himself in the marvels of the future, hungrily absorbing knowledge through a remarkable device called the Reagan Schwager. This device… illuminated the darkness with its glowing three-dimensional images, accompanied by captivating sounds and narrations.”

When he eventually reawakened from his strange near-death dream of the future Dienach wrote down as much as he could remember.

The first 300 years of the second millennium, he wrote, were blighted by overpopulation, environmental crisis, food shortages and wars around the globe. An attempt to establish a colony on Mars in the 2200s flourished at first, he said, but ended in some environmental disaster that killed all of the colonists.

In 2309, according to Dienach, nuclear war between China and the West results in massive loss of life and mass migrations away from the fallout zones. The eventual outcome is the establishment of a world government to ensure that the horror of war is never repeated.

He adds that the idea isn’t universally popular, and it takes hundreds of years before everyone is ready to give up the idea of separate countries. But in his wildest prediction of all, Dienach wrote that in 3382, some change in the human brain will give rise to a new sense, or ability, called hyper-vision that somehow changes the way that people think.

After a “Dark Age” lasting more than 10 centuries, Dienach claimed, a great new Golden Age for humanity will begin in the year 3400, with the billion remaining humans living in peace and prosperity worldwide. He says the people of this far future were like “carefree children, unburdened by worries or fears.”

Like many alleged visions of the future, it’s difficult to know how seriously we should take Dienach’s claims. But the fact that this unassuming Swiss-Austrian teacher made no attempt to profit from his writings in his lifetime suggests that – whether his his experience was genuine or not – his claims were sincere.