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Dying people’s dreams and visions aren’t new, but studying them scientifically is

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette dreams illustration.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette dreams illustration.

One evening in the late fall, Lucien Majors, 84, sat at his kitchen table in Lancaster, N.Y., wife Jan by his side, as he described a recent dream. Majors had end-stage bladder cancer and was in renal failure. As he spoke with a hospice doctor, he was alert but faltering.

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Two months before she died of colon cancer, 78-year-old Rosemary Shaffer dreamed about spiders and ladybugs.

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The New York Times

Researchers who interviewed 59 patients in hospice heard many stories of dreams or visions in which the terminally ill people packed for a journey, saw or spoke with their deceased loved ones, received forgiveness for pain they’d caused in the past or dealt with unfinished business. About one in five caused the dreamer distress, but most brought comfort.

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," Majors said, 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!"

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," 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 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 Charles Dickens. One of the most famous moments in film is the mysterious deathbed murmur in Citizen Kane: "Rosebud!"

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 (see 1.usa.gov/1UGMaxm).

In New York, a team of clinicians and researchers at Hospice Buffalo led by Kerr, an internist who has a doctorate in neurobiology, is seeking to demystify these experiences and understand their role and importance in supporting "a good death" -- for the patient and the bereaved.

Such events are distinct from "near-death experiences," such as those recalled by people revived in intensive care units, said Pei C. Grant, 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?"

...

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 (see 1.usa.gov/1QY79N0), the researchers conducted multiple interviews with 59 terminally ill patients admitted to acute care at Hospice Buffalo's residential facility, which is 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 Majors, often traveled with dear companions as guides.

Although many patients said they rarely remembered their dreams, these they could not forget.

• 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 (see 1.usa.gov/1Px549H). Investigators, counselors and palliative care doctors are trying to identify and describe the phenomena. Quill said he believed their various 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.

"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."

URGENCY AND PEACE

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.

"I was an aggressive physician, always asking, 'Is there more we can do?'" said Kerr, who is also the chief medical officer for Hospice Buffalo. "There was a patient who I thought needed to be rehydrated, and we could buy him some time." But, he said, a nurse, familiar with the patient's dreams, cautioned: "'You don't get it. He is seeing his dead mother.' He died two days later."

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.

Kerr recently gave a talk at TEDxBuffalo about the research (see the video of "I See Dead People: Dreams and Visions of the Dying" on YouTube.com at bit.ly/1JVMO9V). He 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.'"

...

Jessica Stone, 13, had Ewing's sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. A few months before she died she was lying in bed, her mother by her side, and 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 OK.' I felt relief and happiness and I wasn't afraid of it at all," Jessica said.

...

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.

Some 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 seeing of 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 Brennan and finished her conversation.

In her notes, Brennan described the episode as a "hallucination," a red flag for delirium. When the episode was recounted to 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?" 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."

...

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."

-- dreams of 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, Rosemary Shaffer, a former elementary schoolteacher and principal. 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," 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, Hutton said.

Several months ago, 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," 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."

ActiveStyle on 02/08/2016

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