[PHOTOS] Boy Locked In Coma Could Hear, Feel Everything Around Him

This is the story of a man who suffered a mysterious virtual coma for 12 years.

Martin Pistorius was just an ordinary boy with an interest in playing with gadgets when, at the age of 12, he suddenly started to shut down.

Defying doctors and any attempt at a diagnosis, he was sent home from school with flu symptoms and never returned.

Doctors had told his family he'd fallen into a mysterious coma as a healthy 12-year-old before emerging several years later completely paralyzed, unable to communicate with the outside world.

The frightening condition, which can be caused by stroke or an overdose of medication, is known as "total locked-in syndrome," and it has no cure, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In a first-person account for the Daily Mail, Pistorius described the period after he slipped into a coma: “I was completely unresponsive. I was in a virtual coma but the doctors couldn’t diagnose what had caused it.”

“I was treated for tuberculosis and cryptococcal meningitis, but no conclusive diagnosis was made. Medication after medication was tried – to no effect. I’d traveled beyond what medicine understood.” he explained.

When he finally awakened in the early 1990s, around the age of 14 or 15, Pistorius emerged in a dreary fog as his mind gradually rebooted itself.

"I had a sense that something was wrong," he told "The Wright Stuff,” a British TV program.

"I suppose you can almost describe it like when you are trying to wake up from a dream, but can't."

"It's was like you're a ghost witnessing life unfold in front of you and nobody knows you are there,” he added.

But Pistorius was there, so much that he remembered with clarity major events such as the death of Princess Diana, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and the Sept. 11 terror attacks. He watched his relatives go about their lives and listened to the things they said, though they had no idea he could hear them.

"But nobody thought I was even aware of them, let alone the fact that I not only knew about them, but was shocked or excited or saddened like everyone else," he told "The Wright Stuff."

“My father’s faith in me was stretched almost to breaking point. Each day my father, a mechanical engineer, washed and fed me, dressed and lifted me. A bear of a man with a huge beard like Father Christmas, his hands were always gentle. I would try to get him to understand that I had returned, willing my arm to work, but it was not moving.”

“Rage filled me. I felt sure I’d burst. I gasped for breath. "Are you OK, boy?" Dad asked as he heard my ragged breathing and looked up,” he described.

His recovery began with Barney, the big purple dinosaur he was forced to watch on loop at the special care center where he spent his days, according to NPR.

“I cannot explain how much I hated Barney,” he said.

Pistorius decided he'd had enough and dedicated his thoughts to something that offered some degree of control over his reality, such as telling time by tracking sunlight in a room.

By age, 26, he was able to use a computer to communicate.

It wasn't long before he'd gotten a job, enrolled in college to study computer science, started a web company and, more recently, written a book, "Ghost Boy," which was published in 2011.

Also, Pistorius fell in love, got married and is now living happily in the United Kingdom leading a perfectly regular life.

"Yes, life has its challenges, but then again, whose doesn't,” he stated.