The Dreams That Precede Death
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Summary
As the dying approach their death, up to 88% of them experience certain vivid, moving dreams. They can happen to people when they're both awake and asleep, and are described by them as being more real than real. My guest today has studied these visions and dreams for many years, and thinks they have important insights into the nature of life and death. His name is Dr. Christopher Kerr, and he is a hospice physician and end-of-life researcher, as well as the author of Death is but a Dream: Finding hope and meaning at life s end.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast as the dying
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approach their death up to 88% of them experience certain vivid moving dreams though dreams isn't
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even the best word for these experiences as they can happen to people when they're both awake and
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asleep and are described by them as being more real than real my guest today has studied these
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visions and dreams for many years thinks they have important insights into the nature of life
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and death his name is Dr. Christopher Kerr he's a hospice physician and end-of-life researcher as
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well as the author of death is but a dream finding hope and meaning at life's end we begin our
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conversation with Dr. Kerr's efforts to study end-of-life experiences on an objective scientific
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basis and how his research into these visions and dreams doesn't attempt to find their spiritual or
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paranormal origin but simply seeks to catalog the phenomenon from a clinical perspective we then
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discuss how long before death people begin having these dreams the content of the dreams and who
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shows up in them Dr. Kerr describes how pre-death visions and dreams are typically positive and
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comforting and how even the rare disturbing variety can end up being transformative and he
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shares what the dreams do not only for the dying but for their caregivers as well after the show's
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over check out our show notes at awim.is slash death dreams all right Chris Kerr welcome to the show
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thank you for having me so you are a hospice doctor and you've published a book death is but a dream
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finding hope and meaning at life's end tell us how did you get into becoming a hospice doctor well I
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wish I could tell you it was a noble aspiration but the truth is I just need to pay some bills I was a
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cardiology fellow pretty impoverished with kids and was looking for moonlighting opportunities I saw
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it now in the newspaper for a hospice doctor and I actually ironically I petitioned to get out of that
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rotation as a resident and so I did it and you know I wasn't here long and realized this was the most
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meaningful work I had ever done and never looked back 22 years later okay so when you were a young
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resident working at hospice buffalo to pay the bills you had an experience with a dying patient and a nurse
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that led you down this path that you spent the past two decades exploring the phenomenon of pre-death
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visions and dreams can you tell us about that experience sure you know it was a bit of a setup
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because I'd gone through training where we're really not taught to address the dying patient
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in the fullest sense and certainly don't have a any real appreciation for their experience so
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I find myself here I'm a fish out of water there's no technology and I'm kind of forced to be present at
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the bedside and I walked into the nurse's station this is a young guy who's dying of complications of HIV
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and he was in his 40s and I thought he could have more time if we did things to him you know IVs
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antibiotics and the nurse didn't even look up and she said oh no he's dying and and you know I said well
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how'd you know and he said well because he's seen his dead mother and you know within our culture
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and particularly those who are closer to the bedside like nurses this is a part an accepted part of their
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clinical interactions when they see this which is common they've actually you know learned to value
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it and that it had prognostic significance so she was seeing something basically that I wasn't which
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was I'm focused on the objective aspect of the patient and she's actually going deeper and trying
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to appreciate what he's actually experiencing. So nurses have known about this phenomenon of people
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having visions and dreams of typically it's we'll talk about this typically of dead relatives before
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they die has this been a known phenomenon with doctors and in medicine in the scientific field?
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You know I less so because as soon as you stray again from the objectivity of medicine and as soon
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as you step further away from intervention measurable things things that can be imaged so more abstract
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as soon as you go from the brain to the mind I think medicine particularly in a modern in our in our more
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western world it gets harder to appreciate we've disassociated ourselves and really look at dying as organ
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failure rather than a closing of a life or human experiences and I think nurses pastoral care etc
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they're faced because they're present to deal with the patient in totality so this becomes undeniable to
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them whereas the doctor comes by as a spot welder and is in a position not to necessarily have to have
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regard for it. Well if the doctor did you know recognize okay this person's having a he's seen his
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dead grandmother how would they explain it would it be that scientific way? Yeah that's actually part of
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the problem and again it goes back to the distinction between you know mind soul spirit versus organic
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basis such as brain function so what they do is they try to put it within a medical framework so
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right away it goes to questions of brain function it goes questions of delirium or confusional states
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in other words it's doctors today the more we know the more they seek to claim definition around things
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so they have to explain it which is where we get stuck medically if we can't treat to cure we're stuck
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and if we can't diagnose explain in a scientific rubric then we're kind of lost and this is something
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you just have to stand back from and just have some degree of reverence for without necessarily
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finding its etiology or trying to pathologize right I mean is so when they see this is this a
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manifestation of a dying broken brain function? Yeah you highlight a lot of times they think well
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that's just he's losing oxygen to his brain that's why what's going on but I think you you found you
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did research on this like no a lot of times people are having these visions they're not they're they're
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fine. Yeah that was this this is how this basically happened I tried to teach this to medical students
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and residents and the response I always got was from the vantage point that they're sitting at
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is you know there's no evidence for this and and and that was true in a medical framework
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and it was easy to dismiss into this black box of what we call dementia or confusion so what we did
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are you know our findings aren't new they were just put in the right context is we did things like
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ruled out confusion so you had to be screened because the study was university approved you had
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to actually be screened to make sure you were cognitively intact and we also went upstream in illness and
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this is really important so we're not talking about the minutes and hours before death the brain is
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deoxygenated and confusion is more common than not we're talking about the days and months before death
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so a lot of these people are living independently highly functional and then what we did of course is we
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filmed them because there was always going to be the doubter and it was we tend to project our belief
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on what we think a dying person is frail feeble inarticulate perhaps confused and so what we did
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is we let the patient speak for themselves and that turned out to be a very powerful additive to the
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research findings so you know if I'm being challenged in a lecture setting on this you know you just press
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play and you have to see it for yourself well why did you think it was important to study this phenomenon
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scientifically you know I think because and this actually turned out it has turned out to be true
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I mean this got momentum that's gone around the world and hasn't stopped and it's not that our work
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is so novel or unique in its findings but it had never been put in a proper clinical context in a
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caregiver context so why it matters is this originally I was trying to influence the medical community and I
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soon found out I'm kind of holding the wrong end of the stick the people for whom this resonates the
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most are actually patients in the dying process and probably more importantly is their caregiver
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so if you look at my TED talk for example what's most interesting isn't the TED talk it's it's the you
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know six seven thousand responses where people are sharing their experiences so in other words if you're a
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caregiver confronted with this this may not have explanation for you you're not sure how
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to interpret so normalizing it you know one of our roles is to take away the obstacles between the
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loved one and the bedside so translating this giving it validity and that's what's propelled this work
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forward and around the world really is that it matters to the people who are who are still connected
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to others who may be nearing the end of their life and it absolutely goes into bereavement in other
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words in the end of all this I think we should where I end up is basically less reliant on the medical
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community to catch up and to help connect family to patient and to patient to this experience but it's
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more an empowerment you know people our culture is changing we don't want the doctor's death we don't
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want to sterilize dying process we want to say we want the voice to be heard so this is a form of
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empowerment as well I think and how do you scientifically research a subjective experience
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like dreams and visions like you said there's no objective there's nothing a chart you can look at
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it or graph saying yeah this person's having a vision right now I mean if someone says I see my
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my dead father in the corner there you know you look and you don't see anything so how do you
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study a subjective experience like that well you know again it's really important to point out that
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we're not trying to find the basis of this we're just trying all we're trying to do is translate
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these experiences and document them with some scientific rigor so again you rule out confusion
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a very important thing that we did was we talked to these patients every day up until death because
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dying is a process and we wanted to see the kind of the changes that happened as patients near death
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we were very good at coming up with questionnaires for example that were standardized so we scaled
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things so how real is this to you zero to ten we looked at the content we asked whether it was
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comforting distressing or both and again we graded that so we were trying to at least do some comparisons
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and to put put some structure behind our findings and then we had more open-ended questions where we
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asked people to go into more of a narrative and we analyzed that actually and then there was filming
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and then we looked at we did interesting things we've put known validated instruments like on the
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topic of post-traumatic growth and we applied it to these people so it could it be true that even
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though there's physical lessening and decline could you psychologically spiritually be actually growing
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and adapting and gaining insight and understanding during the dying process so dying is a paradox
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and so those are some of the ways we approach this and just to be clear you're not making any
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claims about you know the source of these dreams like they're supernatural kind of like the embraced
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by the light type stuff right yeah so so if if there's if there's one ground we wanted to be solid
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on it was that the risk of going into this research is that it's this blank canvas and you can kind of
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paint your your own biases and perspectives and we were really really clear we're looking at the
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pre-death process without trying to extrapolate into the afterlife the religious the paranormal
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anything like that at all we're simply trying to record and translate their experiences without
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assigning it either cause or meaning okay so based on your research kind of big picture what do these
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pre-death dreams and visions have in common when do they typically start and kind of what do you see
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most frequently with their content sure you know we generally see them appear around that
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two to three week mark prior to death although we've gone months upstream and we do see them there as well
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and generally the path is an increase in frequency of these events as one approaches death and then
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during that time as you get closer the content also shifts so the closer you get to death the more
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likely it is that you see people who you've loved and lost and what's really fascinating is when we
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measured comfort levels to content so you know does this content give you a high level low level of
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content we found was that the most comforting dreams were the dreams where people were reunited with those
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they loved so there's this built-in process that as you get closer to death the fear of actually dying
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lessens and and you're ever more comforted by your inner experiences which includes reconnecting
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some really interesting thing themes come out though you know you you tend to edit and and remove the
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people who either harmed or conditioned their love for you so you may see one parent and not another
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that the whole idea of time and distance seems to go away so you could have lost a parent when you
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were five and you're 95 but it's her voice you hear so it's it's like you're being put back together
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to the most fundamental relationships that you've had and they tend to focus on love and sometimes
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forgiveness if you have wounds from having lived that need to address often those appear in these
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processes as well and just to be clear this happens for people who know that they're dying like you
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don't have this experience if you die in a car accident you know you know i get that question a
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lot and so about 10 percent of deaths are acute right but but yeah it's a hard thing to study
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obviously but you've got to wonder sometimes you know you you the expression my life flashed before
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my eyes you know and this week there was a a case that was widely reported in in the media around the
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world actually of somebody who they were doing a brain study on for seizures and he happened to die
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in the study and before death and others have reported this he had this you know massive dumping of the
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certain type of wave which is focused on memory and recall and that was just prior to death so yeah i i there's
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no way to know but it is interesting um what the dying tell us even those who are you know very acute
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and sudden deaths but it's hard to tell and also the way you describe these dreams and visions it's
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for some people they have visions while they're awake correct and then some people that is have dreams
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very vivid dreams yeah we're really stuck there and i this is where i'm really quite frankly don't know what
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to do with this the thing of it is is that we call them dreams because that's the only nomenclature we
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have the truth is the things we hear the most from our patients is that you don't understand i don't
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normally dream or this was virtual for me it was a happening i'm not recalling it it occurred and when
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we ask for how real it is they score it 10 out of 10 and it's not like we walk in and see people who
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are seeing things that we don't see you know dying is at its core it is progressive sleep
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you're in and out of sleep states and you know this may be a different form of sleeping and dreaming
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where it kind of blurs into wakefulness it's really hard to decipher that like loose like like lucid
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dreaming yeah yeah lucid dreaming no yeah that makes that's a good description so i think to give
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people an idea of what these visions and dreams are like i think it would be helpful to describe some
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for us and this is what you do in your book death is but a dream one that i found really powerful
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was the pre-death vision of your patient mary tell us about her oh sure yeah mary was wonderful actually
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i'm still in touch with members of her family 20 years later or whatever it's been so mary was a
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magnificent woman an artist and and very communicative about what she was experiencing at the end of her
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life so she was making references to people and things and she had four children who were always
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the bedside and they understood the references and then out of nowhere she starts cradling a baby
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that they couldn't see obviously cooing and kissing the baby and stroking the baby's the infant's head
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and she kept referring to him as danny and nobody knew the reference and then a day or two later her
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sister flew in from another state and the children say you know mom's dreaming of danny and then the kind
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mystery was solved danny was her first child and who had been lost shortly after birth but had passed
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early after birth and that you know it was a sort of wound that was so so painful that that she wouldn't
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talk about it in life and we see this a lot you know these these kind of spiritual or psychological
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wounds and damages that may not have been i mean i may not have been addressed in life actually get
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addressed in the dying process and we see it with veterans who have had pdst and survivor's guilt
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you know those are wounds that often get healed we've got a lot of cases but an awful lot of mothers
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and fathers who have lost children seem to be reunited again back to this idea that they're kind
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of put together or made whole yeah it's it's really pretty remarkable yeah you you've you've treated
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several veterans over the years and you had one like a world war ii vet who before he died he started
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seeing dead comrades of his and his visions yeah he was remarkable because he um that was another
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family who came in and actually contributed to the book he was from texas and went to war at i think he
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was 17 and he was on the uss texas and the normandy and he never spoke of what had happened he wouldn't
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go to veteran events he was so traumatized and his wife obviously was able to validate that he had
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suffered horribly with nightmares and restlessly and cried in his sleep and he came in because he
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couldn't sleep because these visions now these nightmares were getting more intense and disruptive and
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really not allowing him to rest and you know in his dreams initially he's seeing body parts and
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hearing screaming and then i come in one day and he had slept beautifully and he had two dreams one that
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was extremely comforting which was he got to relieve what he said was the best day of his life when he
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got his discharge papers and the other one was a neutral dream and what had happened was he was on the
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beach of normandy and he's approached by a soldier and who tells him you know we're coming for you now
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and somehow in that interaction he was reached in a way he couldn't reach in life which was that he was
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relieved of that burden and the nightmares end he rested peacefully and he died in sleep but it was
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remarkable to think of how many decades he had struggled with this and those parts of ourselves
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are residual they're there and they come to surface at the end which is really makes sense dying changes
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your perspective and your perceptions your vantage point you're not going to think about you know taxes
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or whether i gotta get my car oil changed you're going to you're going to ultimately be distilled down to
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the most important elements of having lived and for you know these processes don't deny the hard parts
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living i mean then this isn't about flowers and rainbows it's about you and for a guy whose life was
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so defined early and then haunted by war it just makes sense that this is what came to him at the end
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we're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show and so you
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mentioned some with some people these dreams like time kind of stops existing like they they're it's
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very fluid they'll go backwards and forward in time you talked about one example you had a patient where
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he started seeing a dead uncle that had died you know a long time ago and then the guy himself
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started thinking like man i'm back in 1922 i'm 10 years old again yeah is that a pretty common thing to
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happen yeah it's really weird because they'll they'll come in and out and they've got a foot in both
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worlds right for parts of this and they're very un most people are very unfiltered or disinhibited in
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describing it and it's a sort of experience it's interesting they don't come out asking questions
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right the time for therapy is over these are their actual lived experiences so they'll describe them
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that way and you know in that case the guy's comes out and he's going wow it's like you know i'm in 1927
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how'd they do that so there's some bewilderment but what always intrigues me is if that happened
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to you or i tonight you know we'd be we'd be pretty rattled that's not what happens there's a knowing
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that comes with this and again it goes back to this idea that they it's felt like it occurred but
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they're not haunted and they don't wake up looking for metaphors or analytics i've never had a patient
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say hey doc what do you think this means they just come out of it as always an actual experience
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so a lot of your patients that are dying they see dead family members but some patients don't see
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family members any patients that fit that bill that come to mind yeah an awful lot of people dream of
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things of travel which are pretty clear to understand there's transition or somebody's waiting for them
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usually that feels in their description like that it's a guide or they're confident or they're not
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alone this idea they're not alone it's really important see that a lot with children pets are
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extremely common i don't know it's it's almost 40 and they're often be the pets from childhood
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and if you think about it whether human or pet in terms of objects of our love that's unconditional
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and who we feel that unconditioned love back pets are indistinguishable from some of our best human
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relationships so you'll hear a lot and it's funny because they may not recall the details of the pet
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you know before they start the dying process but as they get deeper their their their recollection
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and it goes to the full all senses you know it's like i can smell my mother's perfume that kind of
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thing and same is true with the animals there's this idea of reuniting with something that was really
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formative and impactful to them so a lot of oftentimes these visions are very positive right
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they people have them and they they feel a sense of integration there it gives them comfort but you've
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had patients who have negative experiences with these visions and dreams any examples come to mind there
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yeah you know about 12 to 15 percent of people have pretty traumatic if not discomforting kind of
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experiences and and and what you know probably the best example his name was duane and he was a super
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jovial guy despite the fact he was in his 40s and he had spent most of his life in prison he had had
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neck cancer so he'd open wounds on his neck and he's talking to us and we're asking about these dreams and
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first he starts joking you know they're all sexual then all of a sudden he starts to shake and cry and
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this is all on film and he reveals that what he's experiencing is the people who he's harmed in
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his life and he had seriously harmed some people mostly in self-defense he says we're stabbing him
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where his uh open wounds were and again you know not denying death these events and they're they're
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they're not obscuring the actual life that the person led but what happened was and this is so true of
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these negative more negative discomforting ones is they're often the most transformational
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and he wakes up and he asked to speak to a daughter and we got a hold of her brought her in
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and for the first time he came to some kind of reckoning and he apologized for who he was and said that he
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loved her very very much and this happened in the hallway and they wouldn't let go of one another
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and then after that he slept again you know sued healed put back together in some way and that's
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what i think is so interesting is these these negative ones actually aren't and don't end up
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feeling that way at least to me forgiveness is real accounting for things is real being released
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from obligations is real and uh so so although they're they're negative they end up being very meaningful
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you have a chapter on children which is you know always the saddest thing to happen when a child
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dies and for a child they might not know anyone who died right the grandparents might still be alive
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so when you have children going through this process what do they dream or have visions of
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children do this remarkably well and i'm actually an adult doctor by training so i'm have this kind of
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discomfort and recoil around ill children but it's a long story but i was kind of forced to participate
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over the years and now i'm very involved with overseeing children's care and you know a couple
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of things that are i think are fascinating one is that you know that these experiences are so self-informing
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you know the idea that we're going to either deny somebody the reality of their own dying processes
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you know the joke is on us because these experiences even in very demented patients often become
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informing and that's true with children children figure this out and in very interesting ways so
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yeah they often won't know an adult who has died but inevitably they know a pet an animal that has may
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not be theirs could be their neighbors their grandparents and they'll come back to them and the meaning
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tends to be the same and again these children several of them are on film and interestingly on
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the film they two of them say the same thing which is basically the presence of this dog that i lost or
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my grandmother's parrot means that i'm not alone and that i'm loved and they typically see them in health
00:26:46.800
and then they'll do very interesting things because you know they don't have a concept of finality of
00:26:52.740
mortality at all and they don't know what it's like to be without the person or situation they're
00:27:00.280
dependent on or within so in the film you know one young lady dreams that she's in a castle and and
00:27:08.620
so she imagine you know she's actually surrounded all the way around 360 with with insecure and there's
00:27:14.820
warm light coming in and when we ask what it meant she goes you know it's a safe place the other young
00:27:21.340
lady was was she was 13 raised by a single mom she didn't know life separate from her dependency on
00:27:27.580
her mother but what she did is she had a dream where her mother's best friend who had died shows up and
00:27:35.040
she's in her mother's room you know readjusting the curtains the light in her mother's room so this fear
00:27:42.460
fear of being again without her mother was replaced by a maternal figure and you know again what kills
00:27:51.980
me is these these kids know intuitively what this means they're not interested in the analytic piece
00:27:59.380
of it they they're more interested in how they were made feel and what they came to understand and
00:28:05.740
again that that the idea is that they're leaving something and but that they're going to be okay
00:28:13.100
that they're not alone they're secure and that they're loved so looking at all these experiences
00:28:19.460
and researching this again you can't make a hypothesis about the source of them right like
00:28:26.340
are they coming from the beyond or is it just in the psyche but do you have like if you theorize like
00:28:31.500
why why is it that so many people go through this process before they die where they start having
00:28:36.380
visions of loved ones and and dead dogs and things like that what do you think what do you think is
00:28:41.760
the purpose of it you know i'm i'm probably a good messenger on this because i don't necessarily have
00:28:47.820
a religious philosophy and and the more spiritual paranormal stuff actually kind of you know intuitively
00:28:54.040
kind of creeped me out so i i i don't it's not validating a view i have i think where
00:29:01.440
i end up is is one is just to have immense reverence for it and i think the other the big
00:29:08.860
take home for me is that dying is more than we see and that there's a hopeful more positive story
00:29:17.700
and the overarching theme is really love and that we remain connected to those who we've loved and lost
00:29:27.100
so that there's this kind of continuity between and across lives and you know it sounds cliche but
00:29:34.040
that they're never gone from us we end up kind of where we began and you know i i don't know whether
00:29:41.340
that argues for a continued consciousness because the people who are died seem to have access to the
00:29:48.520
people who are still living i i don't know and and to be honest with you i don't care i've just learned
00:29:55.160
to respect it and be in awe of it and um and you know maybe it's not for us to know and i think
00:30:03.520
that's maybe where we end up okay so people have these visions of family members before they die
00:30:09.200
possibly to you know sort of it's an integration it's just kind of the transition from life to death
00:30:13.760
find comfort but what about you said early on our our conversation that you think these dreams help
00:30:21.280
people the caretakers of the dying what effect have you seen these pre-death visions have on those
00:30:27.660
who are taking care of uh dying family members oh it's it's immense it's powerful you know this makes
00:30:34.100
sense you know how we see somebody leave us absolutely influences how we grieve how we process how
00:30:43.080
we go from loss to remembrance you know is death horrific and a lessening and an emptying of finality
00:30:50.820
versus something that's actually life affirming so imagine and i've seen this so many times you've got
00:30:57.580
two life partners together been together 60 years they lost a child and and you know one spouse is
00:31:05.020
looking at his partner and she's holding the child that's lost that completely recontextualized dying
00:31:13.400
from horror pain loss emptiness to actual love connectiveness and again life affirmation so we
00:31:25.220
looked at this we've actually done two studies and i think in aggregate we've got surveys or interviews
00:31:30.560
of over 700 bereaved family members and just what seems obvious is true which is that it absolutely
00:31:37.680
influenced some very positive ways particularly if it's explained you know and it's it's given
00:31:44.260
some kind of understanding we we did was then we looked at various instruments or there's there's
00:31:50.680
instruments you can use to survey instruments to measure grief processing and people who had
00:32:00.100
witnessed this in a positive way absolutely showed a healthier adaptation through the process
00:32:07.560
of grief and so it's it's gone from something you see anecdotally to something that's objectively
00:32:13.680
measurable and you know my own view is that if you know if those stories are some of the most
00:32:20.480
meaningful is how those left behind are influenced and by their loved one dying if they're seeing these
00:32:28.940
things how do you hope your work changes the way we approach the dying process particularly in the west
00:32:34.400
yeah it's it's a it's a great qualifier because what's really really important is there are cultures
00:32:40.860
and peoples who for whom this is just baked into their belief system you know i'm working with a
00:32:48.500
film producer in australia who's dealing with the indigenous people of south america and australia
00:32:52.780
and this is actually part of how they remain connected to their ancestors and it's just a given
00:32:59.980
you know i i hope it increases the conversation i hope again it views dying from a strictly medical
00:33:06.840
paradigm and more of a human event one that recognizes that the patient has something to say
00:33:13.560
that they have meaning right up until the very end i hope it brings the loved one closer to them
00:33:19.600
and that somehow they remain connected and they can process loss differently i hope honestly that it
00:33:26.440
it gets pulled into a more human realm than a sterilized medical one this has to be more than
00:33:34.900
medical death has to be more than medical futility and failure and you know i think we're seeing that more
00:33:41.020
and more as particularly baby boomers are facing this issue they're not viewing medicine in the same
00:33:48.380
you know it's a tool in the toolbox but that's not the end of it so we see death cafes and death doulas
00:33:54.380
so i just hope this work enters that conversation and it's more rich and meaningful and reclaimed
00:34:00.280
well you mentioned that you you discovered that your audience your primary audience is really the
00:34:05.940
family members who are taking care of dying people and not so much the medicine medical field but have
00:34:10.440
you seen like have you gotten a toehold a little bit in the the world of medicine where there
00:34:14.820
where you see doctors taking these this these visions seriously yeah you know we do see we do see
00:34:23.040
we have some evidence to suggest that the the light that's been shot on this has put it on the radar
00:34:28.700
at least i think what's most interesting is the doctors there's a set of doctors that you're basically
00:34:35.760
preaching to the choir and the ones that recognize this actually experienced it personally rather than
00:34:42.360
clinically so i think what it does is it's probably there's some data that suggests that they were
00:34:48.360
there's a reluctance to acknowledge this and i think that helps i think that empowering the nurses
00:34:55.520
and the folks who really do this work at the bedside who care for patients i think it's given
00:35:00.200
them a stronger voice i think there's some evidence for that yeah i think so it's a harder rock to chip
00:35:06.560
away at but i think maybe we are oh let's say someone is listening to this and they've got a loved one
00:35:12.880
who is dying and i think everyone listening to this eventually will have a loved one who's going to die
00:35:17.000
and your loved one's having these pre-death dreams and they're talking about them like how do you how
00:35:24.100
do you respond you know when they tell you oh i see my long dead grandmother over there in the corner
00:35:29.500
what how do you interact with that you know i i mean the first rule of anybody who's having that
00:35:35.760
experiences don't fragment it don't counter it don't try to redirect them to the present you obviously
00:35:43.560
acknowledge and and validate you know we see this a lot clinically when people try to tell a patient
00:35:51.520
to deny their reality it's harmful and then dying that's already lonely becomes more isolating
00:35:57.620
so encouraging to not only you need to give it kind of permission to occur and to
00:36:05.380
encourage people i'll give you a very quick story i you know oftentimes dying people will revert to
00:36:11.480
their native language and there was an immigrant from poland and i come in and the daughter's in
00:36:16.620
the corner of the room looking scared as her mom's recalling in polish you know her childhood
00:36:23.080
and the daughter's alarm thinking she's got brain tumor or it's drugs or whatever explain that it's
00:36:29.580
normal etc come back the next day and she's got a notepad and she's hearing for the first time
00:36:35.000
rich details about her mom's childhood friends her grandparents the pet she had so my point is is
00:36:43.540
get closer to it ask honor and you might be surprised that you're in there too and um and you know it
00:36:53.540
there's a lot of richness in hearing how somebody is describing the best parts of having lived
00:36:59.800
well chris this has been a great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about
00:37:04.160
the book and your work sure sure there is a website it's uh dr christopher kirk k-e-r-r dot org
00:37:13.800
and at that site there's some summary of our research findings i think we have seven or eight manuscripts
00:37:19.100
published about 1500 patients there's also links to patient family videos which i think is the most
00:37:25.140
important part there's link to the tedx talk also how to see the netflix special and the pbs
00:37:31.660
show as well as the book well fantastic well chris kerr thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:37:36.340
yeah very much so thank you great questions my guest here is dr christopher kerr he's the author of the
00:37:41.940
book death is but a dream it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more
00:37:45.640
information about his work at his website drchristopherkerr.com also check out our show notes at
00:37:49.720
aom.is slash death dreams where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:37:53.760
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
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