So I've never experienced it but I heard a little about it in this dvd

Take These Broken Wings | Wild Truth

One of the women Catherine Penny was catatonic----she couldn't even open her eyes beyond small slits for a while but she still managed to get to her pdoc appointments while living in a hospital so even though she was capable of some movement she didn't have full control and never spoke to anyone like for years. Anyway its sounds like she was aware of the world not dissociated from it and one day her pdoc said something that made sense to her and she started getting better. These are stories of recovery without psych meds so they are a bit older and I imagine it would be viewed as unethical now not to treat with meds. Still catatonia is pretty rare so I wasn't sure if you would get first person accounts or not so I wanted to give you at least one story to look at.