I have a character in science fiction who, for Plot Reasons, has to go into a half-conscious vegetative state for an indefinite period. The idea is that her brain is uniquely structured to solve spaceflight-related problems, and sacrificing herself to her people she went into an induced coma so that her scientists could use her now-cleared-out brain to help the Empire. The details are more specific, but the point is she falls asleep without any sensory input but kept perpetually alive for roughly 10,800 Earth years.

Of course as with any society her society changes over these ten millennia. Ten millennia ago, we were just starting to give up nomadic life after the Ice Age, and now we're beginning commercial space exploration. Ten millennia ago, this character's civilization had explored several different planets and had established interplanetary colonization, and now, the Reformed Commonwealth that her civilization had once been unified under has evolved into a Galactic Empire that worships her as a god for her super-brain, and rather than having 1980s-grade computer technology and societal norms (tech and social dichotomies have already been dealt with) anyone can be whoever they want at any time and computers have instant access to all knowledge, and rather than having only a few stars under their control they have five million and spread all the way across the galaxy.

These ten millennia are sort of glossed over, however. The story follows the main character fairly tightly, sometimes deviating to give half a chapter to another character's POV, but now the main character is totally-unconscious until a human programmer ten thousand years after she falls asleep points out a solution that lets them wake her up without collapsing the Empire.

But from the MC's perspective, she falls asleep one moment and, a short dream later, wakes up in an entirely-new world with thousands of years of history suddenly being dropped right on top of her.

How do I fill in the reader on what happens here in an engaging way that doesn't just feel like a massive useless infodump? The lifespans of the main character's species (of course not human) are ~150-200 years due to slower metabolisms, and through rebirth and advanced technologies it can get up to around 1,000 years, so I can't just pass the narrative torch to another character, because they'll be dead by the time the MC wakes up. And I definitely don't want someone to just come up and give the God-Empress a history lesson, because that feels boring and the reader will probably just skip that.

I have a character in science fiction who, for Plot Reasons, has to go into a half-conscious vegetative state for an indefinite period. The idea is that her brain is uniquely structured to solve spaceflight-related problems, and sacrificing herself to her people she went into an induced coma so that her scientists could use her now-cleared-out brain to help the Empire. The details are more specific, but the point is she falls asleep without any sensory input but kept perpetually alive for roughly 10,800 Earth years.

Of course as with any society her society changes over these ten millennia. Ten millennia ago, we were just starting to give up nomadic life after the Ice Age, and now we're beginning commercial space exploration. Ten millennia ago, this character's civilization had explored several different planets and had established interplanetary colonization, and now, the Reformed Commonwealth that her civilization had once been unified under has evolved into a Galactic Empire that worships her as a god for her super-brain, and rather than having 1980s-grade computer technology and societal norms (tech and social dichotomies have already been dealt with) anyone can be whoever they want at any time and computers have instant access to all knowledge, and rather than having only a few stars under their control they have five million and spread all the way across the galaxy.

These ten millennia are sort of glossed over, however. The story follows the main character fairly tightly, sometimes deviating to give half a chapter to another character's POV, but now the main character is totally-unconscious until a human programmer ten thousand years after she falls asleep points out a solution that lets them wake her up without collapsing the Empire.

But from the MC's perspective, she falls asleep one moment and, a short dream later, wakes up in an entirely-new world with thousands of years of history suddenly being dropped right on top of her.

How do I fill in the reader on what happens here in an engaging way that doesn't just feel like a massive useless infodump? The lifespans of the main character's species (of course not human) are ~150-200 years due to slower metabolisms, and through rebirth and advanced technologies it can get up to around 1,000 years, so I can't just pass the narrative torch to another character, because they'll be dead by the time the MC wakes up. And I definitely don't want someone to just come up and give the God-Empress a history lesson, because that feels boring and the reader will probably just skip that.

To make it clear about how I'm asking is different from this question, which is decently similar: in this case, the character's backstory has already been given out in an engaging way (or so I hope), but in this case a massive amount of time has passed without her and there are many different storylines that have unfolded completely in the time she was gone. I don't necessarily need to provide the backstory to everything that happened while she was gone, as if I'm introducing new characters, but I'm specifically looking for a way to shift the time period forward by taking note of the historical events that took place while she was gone without just doing a history lesson.