A Florida-born man was found unconscious in a California hotel room, and wasn't quite himself when he woke up.
Michael Boatwright, a U.S. Navy veteran woke up speaking only Swedish, CNN reported.
The man had lived in Sweden several times over the past is suffering from dissociative amnesia.
He was flown to Sweden where he was greeted by Ewa Espling, a woman he had briefly dated in the 1980s.
The Riverside County Department of Mental Health bought Boatwright the ticket after he expressed a strong desire to move to Sweden.
""I just want to be able to live a normal life and hopefully get my memory back," Boatwright told CNN.
Since Boatwright forgot how to speak English, he said he "felt like a stranger in his own country." He seems more comfortable in Sweden.
"I think it's the best solution for Michael, because he can't speak English," Espling told CNN. "To recover fully, I think he needs to come where he's safe and understands what's happening around him."
Espling helped Boatwright arrange a living situation.
"He's going to have a home as long as he needs it," she told CNN.
The woman saw Boatwright's story in a newspaper article, she had not seen him since 1984.
"Michael asked me, 'Why are you doing this for me?' Because I know Michael would have done the same thing for me. If he had found me in the papers. This is a very nice man with a very big heart," Espling said.
Boatwright told CNN he suffers from intense nightmares too frightening to describe. Dissociative amnesia is often associated with a traumatizing event.
"After death, this is probably the worst thing you could ever go through," he said.
Once he gets his memory back Boatwright hopes to become a tennis instructor, tennis rackets were in the hotel room he was originally found in.
