Manchester mother Naomi Jacobs had the fright of her life, when, struck by the very rare, stress-induced condition known as transient global amnesia, she found herself going to bed as a 32 year-old mother, only to wake up convinced she was only 15 and dreading her exams!

This unfortunate lady was suddenly back in1992, thinking she was about to sit her GCSE tests, and completely unaware of having had a baby boy, X-box games, or any of the technology taken so much for granted these days.

When she went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, she had the shoick of her life at having aged so dramatically, as she saw it ‘overnight’.

The icing on the cake that morning was the appearance of a little boy who insisted on referring to her as his mother, sixteen years having simply vanished from memory on that fateful night back in 2008.  She said, when asked, that her last memory of the previous night, before sleep claimed her, had been of falling asleep in her lower bunk bed, dreaming of the boy in her class that she fancied.

The utterly stunned Naomi, certain she was that schoolgirl still, was terrified to say the least, wanting only to find her mother, for an explanation of exactly who the odd child, not much younger than her was, and what was going on. Weeping buckets, she simply could not cope with the strangeness of waking up in a different century from the one she went to sleep in.

In her eyes, George Bush Snr was the US president, The British Prime Minister John Major, and the sight of the child Leo inter-acting with the TV just blew her away, it was such a shocking thing to see. At the time this weird event happened, now 35 year old Naomi was under lots of pressure in her life, running a home business, raising a child and studying for a degree.

The stress involved caused the condition, which oddly affected only what is known as the episodic section of her memory, so that all emotional memories simply vanished, while the learned ones, such as car driving skills, remained intact, these being in the semantic region of her memory. It took three years of dedicated work by friends and relatives before Naomi had a full memory again.

Her sister and best friend took over all communication issues, for Naomi was helpless to use e-mails or mobiles, laid awake at night in the beginning, trying desperately to piece her shattered life back together, though time, as always healed the wounds, and she is today fully recovered. It must, by any stretch of the imagination, have been a real nightmare to experience, and I sincerely hope it never happens to me.