DOCTOR STUDIES 14,000 DREAMS OF DYING PEOPLE
Vic Bishop, Staff Writer
Waking Times
Waking Times
We tend to look at death as the end of a life, but surely there’s more to the story than that. And while we know that people have very similar stories to tell after a near-death experience, often speaking of a tunnel of light and then being returned to the mortal world, we rarely consider what happens to our dreams as we approach the end.
For years, Dr. Christpher Kerr and his team at Hospice Buffalo in New York State have been documenting and studying the dreams of patients as they approach death.
Dr. Kerr’s shows something fascinating and inspiring about the last stage of life: the people we love who’ve already died are there on the other side waiting for us. It’s as if those friends, family members and loved ones who’ve already left this world are just beyond the veil waiting for us, communicating in dreams.
Dr. Kerr’s shows something fascinating and inspiring about the last stage of life: the people we love who’ve already died are there on the other side waiting for us. It’s as if those friends, family members and loved ones who’ve already left this world are just beyond the veil waiting for us, communicating in dreams.
READ: 12 COMMON SYMBOLS IN DREAMS AND WHAT THEY MEAN
In the days and weeks before death, people tend to have more frequent and more vivid visions and dreams involving welcoming encounters with these loved ones. The result is that fear of death begins to shift into a peaceful interest in what is come, and they begin to feel encouraged on their journey.
Am J Hosp Palliat Care. 2015 May;32(3):269-74. doi: 10.1177/1049909113517291. Epub 2014 Jan 16.
End-of-Life Dreams and Visions: A Qualitative Perspective From Hospice Patients.
Author information
Abstract
End-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are well documented throughout history and across cultures with impact on the dying person and their loved ones having profound meaning. Published studies on ELDVs are primarily based on surveys or interviews with clinicians or families of dead persons. This study uniquely examined patient dreams and visions from their personal perspective. This article reports the qualitative findings from dreams and visions of 63 hospice patients. Inductive content analysis was used to examine the content and subjective significance of ELDVs. Six categories emerged: comforting presence, preparing to go, watching or engaging with the deceased, loved ones waiting, distressing experiences, and unfinished business.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24443170
Furthermore, for children who are dying and haven’t lived long enough to lose a friend or relative, the dreams will often feature a deceased pet who appears to encourage them on in their journey toward death. Many people report such positive experiences in these types of dreams that they want to go back and are eager to connect to that other reality again.
Doctor Kerr was recently featured in a short news segment discussing the his work.
End-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are well documented throughout history and across cultures with impact on the dying person and their loved ones having profound meaning. Published studies on ELDVs are primarily based on surveys or interviews with clinicians or families of dead persons. This study uniquely examined patient dreams and visions from their personal perspective. This article reports the qualitative findings from dreams and visions of 63 hospice patients. Inductive content analysis was used to examine the content and subjective significance of ELDVs. Six categories emerged: comforting presence, preparing to go, watching or engaging with the deceased, loved ones waiting, distressing experiences, and unfinished business.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24443170
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24443170
Furthermore, for children who are dying and haven’t lived long enough to lose a friend or relative, the dreams will often feature a deceased pet who appears to encourage them on in their journey toward death. Many people report such positive experiences in these types of dreams that they want to go back and are eager to connect to that other reality again.
Here’s doctor Kerr in a 2015 TED talk, where he shares a great deal of insight about the meaning of death and how we can overcome the fear of dying.
The fear of death is the greatest fear humans have, but if we look closely at what happens when someone dies, death begins to look like a natural transition into a place of great comfort and peace.
About the Author
Vic Bishop is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com. He is an observer of people, animals, nature, and he loves to ponder the connection and relationship between them all. A believer in always striving to becoming self-sufficient and free from the matrix, please track him down on Facebook.
This article (They’re Waiting For Us On the Other Side – Doctor Studies 14,000 Dreams of Dying People) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Vic Bishop and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio and internal links.
https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/02/28/theyre-waiting-for-us-on-the-other-side-doctor-studies-14000-dreams-of-dying-people/
https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/02/28/theyre-waiting-for-us-on-the-other-side-doctor-studies-14000-dreams-of-dying-people/
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A New Vision for Dreams of the Dying
By Jan Hoffman
Feb. 2, 2016
One evening in the late fall, Lucien Majors, 84, sat at his kitchen table, his wife Jan by his side, as he described a recent dream.
Feb. 2, 2016
One evening in the late fall, Lucien Majors, 84, sat at his kitchen table, his wife Jan by his side, as he described a recent dream.
Mr.
Majors had end-stage bladder cancer and was in renal failure. As he
spoke with a doctor from Hospice
Buffalo ,
he was alert but faltering.
In
the dream, he said, he was in his car with his great pal, Carmen. His
three sons, teenagers, were in the back seat, joking around.
“We’re
driving down Clinton Street,” said Mr. Majors, his watery, pale
blue eyes widening with delight at the thought of the road trip.
“We
were looking for the Grand Canyon.” And then they saw it. “We
talked about how amazing, because there it was — all this time, the
Grand Canyon was just at the end of Clinton Street!”
Mr.
Majors had not spoken with Carmen in more than 20 years. His sons are
in their late 50s and early 60s.
“Why
do you think your boys were in the car?” asked Dr. Christopher W.
Kerr, a Hospice Buffalo palliative care physician who researches the
therapeutic role of patients’ end-of-life dreams and visions.
“My
sons are the greatest accomplishment of my life,” Mr. Majors said.
He
died three weeks later.
For
thousands of years, the dreams and visions of the dying have
captivated cultures, which imbued them with sacred import.
Anthropologists, theologians and sociologists have studied these
so-called deathbed
phenomena.
They appear in medieval writings and Renaissance
paintings,
in Shakespearean works and set pieces from 19th-century American and
British novels, particularly by Dickens.One
of the most famous moments in film is the mysterious deathbed murmur
in “Citizen Kane”: “Rosebud!”
Even
the law reveres a dying person’s final words, allowing them to be
admitted as evidence in an unusual exception to hearsay rules.
In the modern medical world, such experiences have been noted by psychologists, social workers and nurses. But doctors tend to give them a wide berth because “we don’t know what the hell they are,” said Dr. Timothy E. Quill, an expert on palliative care medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Some researchers have surmised that patients and doctors avoid reporting these phenomena for fear of ridicule.
Christopher
W. Kerr, a Hospice Buffalo palliative care physician who researches
the therapeutic role of patients’ end-of-life dreams and
visions.
Brendan Bannon for
The New York Times
Now
a team of clinicians and researchers led by Dr. Kerr at Hospice
Buffalo, an internist who has a doctorate in neurobiology, are
seeking to demystify these experiences and understand their role and
importance in supporting “a good death” — for the patient and
the bereaved.
These
events are distinct from “near-death experiences,” such as those
recalled by people revived in intensive care units, said Pei C.
Grant, the director of the research team. “These are people on a
journey towards death, not people who just missed it.”
Hospice
Buffalo, in Cheektowaga, N.Y., cares for 5,000 patients a year,
mostly with visits to private homes and nursing facilities. After
doctors, nurses, social workers or chaplains ask patients, “How
have you been sleeping?” they often follow up with, “Can you
recall any dreams?”
Mainly Comforting Visions
I
was laying in bed and
people were walking very slowly by me. The right-hand side I didn’t
know, but they were all very friendly and they touched my arm and my
hand as they went by. But the other side were people that I knew —
my mom and dad were there, my uncle. Everybody I knew that was dead
was there. The only thing was, my husband wasn’t there, nor was my
dog, and I knew that I would be seeing them. —Jeanne
Faber, 75, months before her death from ovarian cancer.
For
their primary study,
published in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, the researchers
conducted multiple interviews with 59 terminally ill patients
admitted to acute care at Hospice Buffalo, a facility furnished in
warm woods, with windows that frame views of fountains, gazebos and
gardens. Nearly all the patients reported having had dreams or
visions. They described the majority of their dreams as comforting.
About one in every five was associated with distress, and the
remainder felt neutral.
The dreams and visions loosely sorted into categories: opportunities to engage with the deceased; loved ones “waiting;” unfinished business. Themes of love, given or withheld, coursed through the dreams, as did the need for resolution and even forgiveness.
In their dreams, patients were reassured that they had been good parents, children and workers.
They packed boxes, preparing for journeys, and, like Mr. Majors, often traveled with dear companions as guides. Although many patients said they rarely remembered their dreams, these they could not forget.
Dr.
Kerr holds the hand of a patient, Rebecca Nowak. He says that
sometimes when dying people are sedated, “we are sterilizing them
from their own dying process.”
Brendan Bannon for
The New York Times
A 76-year-old patient said he dreamed of his mother, who died when he was a child. He could smell her perfume and hear her soothing voice saying, “I love you.”
An
older woman cradled an invisible infant as she lay in bed. (Her
husband told researchers it was the couple’s first child, who had
been stillborn.)
Nine
days before she died, a 54-year-old woman dreamed of a childhood
friend who had caused her great pain decades earlier. The friend, who
had since died, appeared as an old man and said, “Sorry, you’re a
good person,” and “If you need help, just call my name.”
This
is certainly research in
its infancy. The investigators, counselors and palliative care
doctors, are trying to identify and describe the phenomena. Dr. Quill
said he believed the studies would help make these experiences more
accessible to skeptical doctors.
“The huge challenge of this work is to help patients feel more normal and less alone during this unusual experience of dying,” he said. “The more we can articulate that people do have vivid dreams and visions, the more we can be helpful.”
Other
research suggests that dreams seem to express emotions that have been
building. Tore Nielsen, a dream neuroscience researcher and director
of the Dream
and Nightmare Laboratory, at the University of Montreal, surmised
that at the end of life, such a need becomes more insistent. Troubled
dreams erupt with excessive energy. But positive dreams can serve a
similar purpose.
“The motivation and pressure for these dreams is coming from a place of fear and uncertainty,” he said. “The dreamers are literally helping themselves out of a tough spot.”In the weeks and days before death, the dreams of the patients in the study tended to occur with greater frequency, populated with the dead rather than the living. The researchers suggest that such phenomena might even have prognostic value.
Certainly,
many dying patients cannot communicate. Or they recount typical dream
detritus: a dwarf lifting the refrigerator, neighbors bringing a
chicken and a monkey into the patient’s apartment. And some
patients, to their disappointment, do not remember their dreams.
Dr.
Kerr, who recently gave a talk at TEDxBuffalo about
the research, said he was simply advocating that health care
providers ask patients open-ended questions about dreams, without
fear of recrimination from family and colleagues.
“Often when we sedate them, we are sterilizing them from their own dying process,” he said. “I have done it, and it feels horrible. They’ll say, ‘You robbed me — I was with my wife.’”Complexities of Delirium
While
the patient was lying in bed, her mother by her side, she had a
vision:
She saw her mother’s best friend, Mary, who died of leukemia years ago, in her mother’s bedroom, playing with the curtains. Mary’s hair was long again. “I had a feeling she was coming to say, ‘You’re going to be O.K.’ I felt relief and happiness and I wasn’t afraid of it at all.” — Jessica Stone, 13, who had Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, a few months before she died.
She saw her mother’s best friend, Mary, who died of leukemia years ago, in her mother’s bedroom, playing with the curtains. Mary’s hair was long again. “I had a feeling she was coming to say, ‘You’re going to be O.K.’ I felt relief and happiness and I wasn’t afraid of it at all.” — Jessica Stone, 13, who had Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, a few months before she died.
Many
in hospice suffer from delirium, which can affect up to 85
percent of
hospitalized patients at the end of life. In a delirious state,
brought on by fever, brain metastases or end-stage changes in body
chemistry, circadian rhythms are severely disordered, so the patient
may not know whether he is awake or dreaming. Cognition is altered.
Jessica
Stone, bottom, with her mother Kristin. Ms. Stone, who died of
Ewing’s Sarcoma, spoke
movingly about
a dream of her dead dog, Shadow.
Jon R.
Hand
Those who care for the terminally ill are inclined to see end-of-life dreams as manifestations of delirium. But the Hospice Buffalo researchers say that while some study patients slipped in and out of delirium, their end-of-life dreams were not, by definition, the product of such a state. Delirious patients generally cannot engage with others or give a coherent, organized narrative. The hallucinations they are able to describe may be traumatizing, not comforting.
Yet
the question remains of what to make of these patients’ claims of
“dreaming while awake,” or having “visions” — and the
not-uncommon phenomena of seeing deceased relatives or friends
hovering on the ceiling or in corners.
Donna
Brennan, a longtime nurse with Hospice Buffalo, recalled chatting on
the couch with a 92-year-old patient with congestive heart failure.
Suddenly, the patient looked over at the door and called out, “Just
a minute, I’m speaking with the nurse.”
Told
that no one was there, the patient smiled, saying it was Aunt Janiece
(her dead sister) and patted a couch cushion, showing “the visitor”
where to sit. Then the patient cheerfully turned back to Mrs. Brennan
and finished her conversation.
In
her notes, Mrs. Brennan described the episode as a “hallucination,”
a red flag for delirium. When the episode was recounted to Dr. Kerr
and Anne Banas, a Hospice Buffalo neurologist and palliative care
physician, they preferred the term “vision.”
“Is there meaning to the vision or is it disorganized?” Dr. Banas asked. “If there is meaning, does that need to be explored? Does it bring comfort or is it distressing? We have a responsibility to ask that next question. It can be cathartic, and patients often need to share. And if we don’t ask, look what we may miss.”
Dr.
William Breitbart,
chairman of the psychiatry department at Memorial Sloan Kettering
Cancer Center, who has written about delirium
and palliative care,
said that a team’s response must also consider bedside caregivers:
“These dreams or visions can be interpreted by family members as
comforting, linking them to the legacy of their ancestry.
“But if people don’t believe that, they can be distressed. ‘My mother is hallucinating and seeing dead people. Do something about it!’” Dr. Breitbart trains staff to respect the families’ beliefs and help them understand the complexities of delirium.
Some
dream episodes occur during what is known as “mixed-state sleep”
— when the boundaries between wakefulness and sleep become
fragmented, said Dr.
Carlos H. Schenck,
a psychiatrist and sleep expert at the University of Minnesota
Medical School. Jessica Stone, the teenager with Ewing’s
sarcoma, spoke
movingly about
a dream of her dead dog, Shadow. When she awoke, she said, she saw
his long, dark shape alongside her bed.
Dr.
Banas, the neurologist, favors the phrase end-of-life experiences. “I
try to normalize it for the family, because how they perceive it can
push them away from that bedside or bring them closer,” she said.
Reliving Trauma
The
patient had never really talked about the war. But in his final
dreams, the stories emerged. In the first, the bloody dying were
everywhere. On Omaha Beach, at Normandy. In the waves. He was a
17-year-old gunner on a rescue boat, trying frantically to bring them
back to the U.S.S. Texas. “There is nothing but death and dead
soldiers all around me,” he said. In another, a dead soldier told
him, “They are going to come get you next week.” Finally, he
dreamed of getting his discharge papers, which he described as
“comforting.” He died in his sleep two days later. — John,
88, who had lymphoma.
Not
all end-of-life dreams soothe the dying. Researchers found that about
20 percent were upsetting. Often, those who had suffered trauma might
revisit it in their dying dreams. Some can resolve those experiences.
Some cannot.
When
should doctors intervene with antipsychotic or anti-anxiety
medication, to best allow the patient a peaceful death? For the
Hospice Buffalo physicians, the decision is made with a team
assessment that includes input from family members.
Dr.
Kerr said: “Children will see their parents in an altered state and
think they’re suffering and fighting their dying. But if you say:
‘She’s talking about dead people, and that’s normal. I’ll bet
you can learn a lot about her and your family,’ you may see the
relative calming down and taking notes.”
Without receiving sufficient information from the family, a team may not know how to read the patient’s agitation. One patient seemed tormented by nightmares. The Hospice Buffalo team interviewed family members, who reluctantly disclosed that the woman had been sexually abused as a girl. The family was horrified that she was reliving these memories in her dying days.
Armed
with this information, the team chose to administer anti-anxiety
medication, rather than just antipsychotics. The woman relaxed and
was able to have a powerful exchange with a priest. She died during a
quiet sleep, several days later.
This
fall, Mrs. Brennan, the nurse, would check in on a patient with
end-stage lung cancer who was a former police officer. He told her
that he had “done bad stuff” on the job. He said he had cheated
on his wife and was estranged from his children. His dreams are never
peaceful, Mrs. Brennan said. “He gets stabbed, shot or can’t
breathe. He apologizes to his wife, and she isn’t responding, or
she reminds him that he broke her heart. He’s a tortured soul.”
Some
palliative care providers maintain that such dreams are the core of a
spiritual experience and should not be tampered with. Dr. Quill, who
calls people with such views “hospice romantics,” disagreed.
“We
should be opening the door with our questions, but not forcing
patients through it,” Dr. Quill said. “Our job is witnessing,
exploring and lessening their loneliness. If it’s benign and rich
with content, let it go. But if it brings up serious old wounds, get
real help — a psychologist, a chaplain — because in this area, we
physicians don’t know what we’re doing. ”
Jonathon Rosen
Solace for the Living
In
the first dream,
a black spider with small eyes came close to her face. Then it turned
into a large black truck with a red flatbed, bearing down on her.
Terrified, she forced herself awake. In another dream, she had to
pass through her laundry room to get to the kitchen. She glanced down
and saw about 50 black spiders crawling on the floor. She was so
scared! But when she looked closer, she saw they were ladybugs. She
felt so happy! “Ladybugs are nice and I knew they weren’t going
to hurt me,” she recounted later. “So I made my way to the
kitchen.”— Rosemary
Shaffer, 78, two months before she died of colon cancer.
The
Hospice Buffalo researchers have found that these dreams offer
comfort not only for the dying, but for their mourners.
Kathleen
Hutton holds fast to the end-of-life dream journals fastidiously kept
by her sister, Mrs. Shaffer, a former elementary schoolteacher and
principal. Rosemary Shaffer wrote about spiders and trucks, and then
the ladybugs.In
one dream, she saw
flowers at a funeral home, which reminded her of those her daughter
painted on handmade scarves. She felt loved and joyful.
“I
was glad she could talk about dreams with the hospice people,” Ms.
Hutton said. “She knew it was her subconscious working through what
she was feeling. She was much more at peace.”
Knowing
that has made her own grief more manageable, said Ms. Hutton, who
teared up as she clasped the journals during a visit at the hospice’s
family lounge.
Rosemary
Shaffer described a dream where spiders transformed into ladybugs
months before she died of colon cancer.
Jon R. Hand
Several
months ago, Mrs. Brennan, the nurse, sat with a distraught husband,
whose wife had pancreatic cancer that had spread to the liver. She
had been reporting dreams about work, God and familiar people who had
died. The patient thought that she would be welcomed in heaven, she
said. That God told her she had been a good wife and mother.
“Her
husband was angry at God,” Mrs. Brennan said. “I said: ‘But Ann
is not. Her dreams aren’t scary to her at all. They are all about
validation.’
“He
just put his head down and wept.”
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