The Current23:09What dying people see in their dreams
As Charlotte Good was dying of pancreatic cancer in a Toronto hospital in 2007, she experienced a dream or vision of her own mother — who had died years before.
Charlotte’s daughter, Cynthia Good, was staying over that night and sensed that she’d sat up.
“I got up and I went to her side,” said Cynthia, a former publisher and educator living in Toronto.
“She just said to me, ‘I see my mother, she is holding beautiful dresses.'”
As she held Charlotte’s hand, Cynthia said: “Go to your mother.”
Charlotte didn’t seem afraid, but peaceful, and perhaps even happy, Cynthia said. The two women had spent the evening together at Toronto Grace Health Centre, and Cynthia remembers Charlotte being alert. They’d completed a crossword puzzle together and watched the Blue Jays game — even singing along to Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
“She went back to sleep and I went back to sleep. But probably not much later, I was aware that she wasn’t breathing, and the nurse was in the room.”
Charlotte, 75, died that night. But the dream offered great comfort in that difficult time.
“I think she felt that she was … actually going to her mother. And what a beautiful thing to believe at that moment,” said Cynthia.
Dr. Christopher Kerr has spent more than a decade researching these kinds of dreams and visions, interviewing hundreds of people about their experiences as they get closer to death.
“Dying is this unique vantage point, which changes one’s perspective and perception,” said Kerr, a physician and CEO at Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, in Buffalo, N.Y.
“It naturally draws you inward. There’s reflection, and often people focus on the best points of having lived and having mattered. And that’s usually our relationships.”
Dreams help us process emotion
Since Kerr’s first paper in 2014, he has published multiple studies on the phenomenon, and explores those findings in a 2015 TedTalk and his book Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End.
In his studies, patients respond to a standardized questionnaire about what they experienced and how real it felt. Many reported seeing deceased loved ones or even old pets. Love, forgiveness and reassurance were common themes.
Neuroscientist Tore Nielsen says our dreams play an important role in regulating our emotions around major life events.
“Death is just one of those situations — where it’s maybe most acute — that we would need the help of our unconscious, dream processor,” said Nielsen, the director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal.
While we don’t know definitively what happens physiologically when these dreams or visions occur, it’s possible the brain has “evolved to be able to produce these end-of-life experiences, for both family and the dying person, just to ease the transition,” he said.
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Kerr said the dreams usually aren’t metaphorical or abstract, but are based on real experiences. Patients intuitively understood what the visions meant to them, he added, with some even objecting to the word “dream.”
“If you hear an old song on the radio and you’re flooded with recollections from high school, it’s kind of that same thing,” he said.
Nielsen says our understanding of dreams, and indeed all study of consciousness, is still growing. But he pointed out that dreams and visions are very different things. Most people dream multiple times a night, while visions are much rarer “hallucinatory events that occur when you’re awake,” he said.
Kerr acknowledged that the researchers have struggled with whether to call them dreams or visions. But he said he isn’t trying to find a root cause for the phenomenon. Instead he hopes his research will highlight how meaningful they can be for the dying, and help physicians to be open-minded.
Other researchers are also looking at the phenomenon. A meta-analysis published in 2022 looked at 18 studies, which together suggested 77 per cent of patients surveyed had experienced end-of-life dreams and visions. The analysis found that health-care professionals and volunteers expressed a need for further education on how to support these patients.
Kerr is aware that some skeptics may dismiss these testimonies as delusions, perhaps influenced by medication used to manage end-of-life pain and stress. But he said that his team screened for delirium and confusion, and recorded videos of participant interviews.
He said those videos depict “people who look and sound like us, who are cognitively intact, who are acutely aware,” describing their visions with “absolute clarity … absolute conviction.”
‘My mom and dad were there’
Months before her death from ovarian cancer, 75-year-old Jeanne Faber had a dream where a long line of deceased relatives walked past her as she lay in bed.
“My mom and dad were there. My uncle, everybody I knew that was dead was there,” she said in the video recorded at Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo.
Faber told researchers that it was wonderful to see her mother, who she hadn’t always gotten along with. She woke up feeling good about the dream.
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Kerr said Faber’s testimony shows an “absence of fear,” and that the majority of people he’s interviewed found the visions comforting.
“When we envision the dying process from this perspective of health, it’s immediately fear-laden — and that’s not what they’re describing,” he said. “They don’t seem unsettled. This feels natural.”
He said when there is discomfort related to a vision, it’s often related to resolving loss or difficult issues. One woman he interviewed had a child in prison, and was questioning her role as a mother.
She had a vision of her own parents, who told her she was a good mother, and had been loved.
“We’ve all lost, for having lived. And often that gets addressed,” Kerr said.
Death can be ‘rich in meaning’
It was only when Kerr took a job in a hospice, more than two decades ago, that he came into contact with patients experiencing these dreams. He said it’s not anything he was trained to deal with.
“Medicine’s about curing, not comforting necessarily, when there’s no cure.”
“When you pause and you become that kind of physician, that’s where some of the deepest meaning is found.”
Toronto-based death doula Kayla Moryoussef thinks our approach to death is “too medicalized,” and that an emphasis on battling to beat death can steal focus from the process of acceptance.
“I think it needs to be a paradigm shift in the language we use around this, and the acceptance of the fact that it is a natural part of life,” said Moryoussef, who is also a community worker and registered social service worker.
As a doula, Moryoussef helps people prepare for death and plan their final moments, even leaving letters and gifts for loved ones. She’s seen her clients experience these dreams or visions, and said they were “always comforting.”
Kerr said that comfort can be “enormously important” for their loved ones.
“How people leave us matters,” he said. “Death is either seen as empty and, you know, organ failure and decay — or it’s something that’s rich in meaning and life-affirming.”
In Toronto, Cynthia Good said sharing that moment of her mother’s vision helped her immensely in her grief — because she knows her mother had “a good death.”
“I feel so comforted that she had that final vision, and that that is what took her away,” she said.