The Art of Manliness - The Dreams That Precede Death

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast as the dying

00:00:11.360 approach their death up to 88% of them experience certain vivid moving dreams though dreams isn't

00:00:16.660 even the best word for these experiences as they can happen to people when they're both awake and

00:00:20.360 asleep and are described by them as being more real than real my guest today has studied these

00:00:24.680 visions and dreams for many years thinks they have important insights into the nature of life

00:00:28.380 and death his name is Dr. Christopher Kerr he's a hospice physician and end-of-life researcher as

00:00:33.160 well as the author of death is but a dream finding hope and meaning at life's end we begin our

00:00:37.280 conversation with Dr. Kerr's efforts to study end-of-life experiences on an objective scientific

00:00:41.640 basis and how his research into these visions and dreams doesn't attempt to find their spiritual or

00:00:45.740 paranormal origin but simply seeks to catalog the phenomenon from a clinical perspective we then

00:00:49.980 discuss how long before death people begin having these dreams the content of the dreams and who

00:00:54.000 shows up in them Dr. Kerr describes how pre-death visions and dreams are typically positive and

00:00:58.000 comforting and how even the rare disturbing variety can end up being transformative and he

00:01:01.900 shares what the dreams do not only for the dying but for their caregivers as well after the show's

00:01:06.000 over check out our show notes at awim.is slash death dreams all right Chris Kerr welcome to the show

00:01:19.940 thank you for having me so you are a hospice doctor and you've published a book death is but a dream

00:01:25.620 finding hope and meaning at life's end tell us how did you get into becoming a hospice doctor well I

00:01:31.160 wish I could tell you it was a noble aspiration but the truth is I just need to pay some bills I was a

00:01:38.520 cardiology fellow pretty impoverished with kids and was looking for moonlighting opportunities I saw

00:01:45.600 it now in the newspaper for a hospice doctor and I actually ironically I petitioned to get out of that

00:01:51.740 rotation as a resident and so I did it and you know I wasn't here long and realized this was the most

00:01:57.780 meaningful work I had ever done and never looked back 22 years later okay so when you were a young

00:02:04.520 resident working at hospice buffalo to pay the bills you had an experience with a dying patient and a nurse

00:02:11.640 that led you down this path that you spent the past two decades exploring the phenomenon of pre-death

00:02:19.200 visions and dreams can you tell us about that experience sure you know it was a bit of a setup

00:02:24.440 because I'd gone through training where we're really not taught to address the dying patient

00:02:30.740 in the fullest sense and certainly don't have a any real appreciation for their experience so

00:02:36.100 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

00:02:42.140 the bedside and I walked into the nurse's station this is a young guy who's dying of complications of HIV

00:02:49.140 and he was in his 40s and I thought he could have more time if we did things to him you know IVs

00:02:55.280 antibiotics and the nurse didn't even look up and she said oh no he's dying and and you know I said well

00:03:02.580 how'd you know and he said well because he's seen his dead mother and you know within our culture

00:03:08.880 and particularly those who are closer to the bedside like nurses this is a part an accepted part of their

00:03:15.060 clinical interactions when they see this which is common they've actually you know learned to value

00:03:21.400 it and that it had prognostic significance so she was seeing something basically that I wasn't which

00:03:28.420 was I'm focused on the objective aspect of the patient and she's actually going deeper and trying

00:03:34.900 to appreciate what he's actually experiencing. So nurses have known about this phenomenon of people

00:03:40.960 having visions and dreams of typically it's we'll talk about this typically of dead relatives before

00:03:46.420 they die has this been a known phenomenon with doctors and in medicine in the scientific field?

00:03:51.800 You know I less so because as soon as you stray again from the objectivity of medicine and as soon

00:03:59.000 as you step further away from intervention measurable things things that can be imaged so more abstract

00:04:05.700 as soon as you go from the brain to the mind I think medicine particularly in a modern in our in our more

00:04:12.960 western world it gets harder to appreciate we've disassociated ourselves and really look at dying as organ

00:04:20.620 failure rather than a closing of a life or human experiences and I think nurses pastoral care etc

00:04:27.920 they're faced because they're present to deal with the patient in totality so this becomes undeniable to

00:04:34.360 them whereas the doctor comes by as a spot welder and is in a position not to necessarily have to have

00:04:42.160 regard for it. Well if the doctor did you know recognize okay this person's having a he's seen his

00:04:49.600 dead grandmother how would they explain it would it be that scientific way? Yeah that's actually part of

00:04:55.240 the problem and again it goes back to the distinction between you know mind soul spirit versus organic

00:05:02.200 basis such as brain function so what they do is they try to put it within a medical framework so

00:05:08.160 right away it goes to questions of brain function it goes questions of delirium or confusional states

00:05:14.380 in other words it's doctors today the more we know the more they seek to claim definition around things

00:05:22.700 so they have to explain it which is where we get stuck medically if we can't treat to cure we're stuck

00:05:29.360 and if we can't diagnose explain in a scientific rubric then we're kind of lost and this is something

00:05:36.460 you just have to stand back from and just have some degree of reverence for without necessarily

00:05:42.260 finding its etiology or trying to pathologize right I mean is so when they see this is this a

00:05:49.920 manifestation of a dying broken brain function? Yeah you highlight a lot of times they think well

00:05:55.360 that's just he's losing oxygen to his brain that's why what's going on but I think you you found you

00:06:00.900 did research on this like no a lot of times people are having these visions they're not they're they're

00:06:04.420 fine. Yeah that was this this is how this basically happened I tried to teach this to medical students

00:06:10.580 and residents and the response I always got was from the vantage point that they're sitting at

00:06:16.500 is you know there's no evidence for this and and and that was true in a medical framework

00:06:22.360 and it was easy to dismiss into this black box of what we call dementia or confusion so what we did

00:06:30.240 are you know our findings aren't new they were just put in the right context is we did things like

00:06:37.220 ruled out confusion so you had to be screened because the study was university approved you had

00:06:43.580 to actually be screened to make sure you were cognitively intact and we also went upstream in illness and

00:06:50.800 this is really important so we're not talking about the minutes and hours before death the brain is

00:06:55.300 deoxygenated and confusion is more common than not we're talking about the days and months before death

00:07:00.940 so a lot of these people are living independently highly functional and then what we did of course is we

00:07:06.320 filmed them because there was always going to be the doubter and it was we tend to project our belief

00:07:14.400 on what we think a dying person is frail feeble inarticulate perhaps confused and so what we did

00:07:21.220 is we let the patient speak for themselves and that turned out to be a very powerful additive to the

00:07:27.300 research findings so you know if I'm being challenged in a lecture setting on this you know you just press

00:07:34.700 play and you have to see it for yourself well why did you think it was important to study this phenomenon

00:07:39.220 scientifically you know I think because and this actually turned out it has turned out to be true

00:07:46.000 I mean this got momentum that's gone around the world and hasn't stopped and it's not that our work

00:07:51.660 is so novel or unique in its findings but it had never been put in a proper clinical context in a

00:07:58.700 caregiver context so why it matters is this originally I was trying to influence the medical community and I

00:08:05.920 soon found out I'm kind of holding the wrong end of the stick the people for whom this resonates the

00:08:11.260 most are actually patients in the dying process and probably more importantly is their caregiver

00:08:17.340 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

00:08:23.720 know six seven thousand responses where people are sharing their experiences so in other words if you're a

00:08:30.560 caregiver confronted with this this may not have explanation for you you're not sure how

00:08:35.900 to interpret so normalizing it you know one of our roles is to take away the obstacles between the

00:08:41.720 loved one and the bedside so translating this giving it validity and that's what's propelled this work

00:08:48.820 forward and around the world really is that it matters to the people who are who are still connected

00:08:55.440 to others who may be nearing the end of their life and it absolutely goes into bereavement in other

00:09:01.040 words in the end of all this I think we should where I end up is basically less reliant on the medical

00:09:06.820 community to catch up and to help connect family to patient and to patient to this experience but it's

00:09:14.260 more an empowerment you know people our culture is changing we don't want the doctor's death we don't

00:09:20.280 want to sterilize dying process we want to say we want the voice to be heard so this is a form of

00:09:27.220 empowerment as well I think and how do you scientifically research a subjective experience

00:09:32.440 like dreams and visions like you said there's no objective there's nothing a chart you can look at

00:09:36.500 it or graph saying yeah this person's having a vision right now I mean if someone says I see my

00:09:41.140 my dead father in the corner there you know you look and you don't see anything so how do you

00:09:46.900 study a subjective experience like that well you know again it's really important to point out that

00:09:51.960 we're not trying to find the basis of this we're just trying all we're trying to do is translate

00:09:57.700 these experiences and document them with some scientific rigor so again you rule out confusion

00:10:04.500 a very important thing that we did was we talked to these patients every day up until death because

00:10:09.420 dying is a process and we wanted to see the kind of the changes that happened as patients near death

00:10:15.420 we were very good at coming up with questionnaires for example that were standardized so we scaled

00:10:22.320 things so how real is this to you zero to ten we looked at the content we asked whether it was

00:10:27.960 comforting distressing or both and again we graded that so we were trying to at least do some comparisons

00:10:34.160 and to put put some structure behind our findings and then we had more open-ended questions where we

00:10:40.960 asked people to go into more of a narrative and we analyzed that actually and then there was filming

00:10:47.260 and then we looked at we did interesting things we've put known validated instruments like on the

00:10:52.980 topic of post-traumatic growth and we applied it to these people so it could it be true that even

00:10:59.680 though there's physical lessening and decline could you psychologically spiritually be actually growing

00:11:05.120 and adapting and gaining insight and understanding during the dying process so dying is a paradox

00:11:10.780 and so those are some of the ways we approach this and just to be clear you're not making any

00:11:16.360 claims about you know the source of these dreams like they're supernatural kind of like the embraced

00:11:20.580 by the light type stuff right yeah so so if if there's if there's one ground we wanted to be solid

00:11:27.440 on it was that the risk of going into this research is that it's this blank canvas and you can kind of

00:11:35.160 paint your your own biases and perspectives and we were really really clear we're looking at the

00:11:41.860 pre-death process without trying to extrapolate into the afterlife the religious the paranormal

00:11:48.920 anything like that at all we're simply trying to record and translate their experiences without

00:11:54.940 assigning it either cause or meaning okay so based on your research kind of big picture what do these

00:12:01.420 pre-death dreams and visions have in common when do they typically start and kind of what do you see

00:12:06.180 most frequently with their content sure you know we generally see them appear around that

00:12:11.100 two to three week mark prior to death although we've gone months upstream and we do see them there as well

00:12:17.760 and generally the path is an increase in frequency of these events as one approaches death and then

00:12:27.340 during that time as you get closer the content also shifts so the closer you get to death the more

00:12:34.520 likely it is that you see people who you've loved and lost and what's really fascinating is when we

00:12:41.080 measured comfort levels to content so you know does this content give you a high level low level of

00:12:46.600 content we found was that the most comforting dreams were the dreams where people were reunited with those

00:12:53.120 they loved so there's this built-in process that as you get closer to death the fear of actually dying

00:13:00.600 lessens and and you're ever more comforted by your inner experiences which includes reconnecting

00:13:07.260 some really interesting thing themes come out though you know you you tend to edit and and remove the

00:13:14.100 people who either harmed or conditioned their love for you so you may see one parent and not another

00:13:19.720 that the whole idea of time and distance seems to go away so you could have lost a parent when you

00:13:25.960 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

00:13:32.040 to the most fundamental relationships that you've had and they tend to focus on love and sometimes

00:13:40.240 forgiveness if you have wounds from having lived that need to address often those appear in these

00:13:46.960 processes as well and just to be clear this happens for people who know that they're dying like you

00:13:52.320 don't have this experience if you die in a car accident you know you know i get that question a

00:13:58.640 lot and so about 10 percent of deaths are acute right but but yeah it's a hard thing to study

00:14:04.560 obviously but you've got to wonder sometimes you know you you the expression my life flashed before

00:14:10.560 my eyes you know and this week there was a a case that was widely reported in in the media around the

00:14:17.900 world actually of somebody who they were doing a brain study on for seizures and he happened to die

00:14:22.760 in the study and before death and others have reported this he had this you know massive dumping of the

00:14:30.720 certain type of wave which is focused on memory and recall and that was just prior to death so yeah i i there's

00:14:37.840 no way to know but it is interesting um what the dying tell us even those who are you know very acute

00:14:44.760 and sudden deaths but it's hard to tell and also the way you describe these dreams and visions it's

00:14:51.680 for some people they have visions while they're awake correct and then some people that is have dreams

00:14:56.740 very vivid dreams yeah we're really stuck there and i this is where i'm really quite frankly don't know what

00:15:04.400 to do with this the thing of it is is that we call them dreams because that's the only nomenclature we

00:15:09.380 have the truth is the things we hear the most from our patients is that you don't understand i don't

00:15:15.400 normally dream or this was virtual for me it was a happening i'm not recalling it it occurred and when

00:15:22.780 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

00:15:29.080 are seeing things that we don't see you know dying is at its core it is progressive sleep

00:15:35.260 you're in and out of sleep states and you know this may be a different form of sleeping and dreaming

00:15:41.380 where it kind of blurs into wakefulness it's really hard to decipher that like loose like like lucid

00:15:47.940 dreaming yeah yeah lucid dreaming no yeah that makes that's a good description so i think to give

00:15:53.120 people an idea of what these visions and dreams are like i think it would be helpful to describe some

00:15:57.020 for us and this is what you do in your book death is but a dream one that i found really powerful

00:16:02.100 was the pre-death vision of your patient mary tell us about her oh sure yeah mary was wonderful actually

00:16:09.220 i'm still in touch with members of her family 20 years later or whatever it's been so mary was a

00:16:14.960 magnificent woman an artist and and very communicative about what she was experiencing at the end of her 0.77

00:16:21.680 life so she was making references to people and things and she had four children who were always

00:16:26.960 the bedside and they understood the references and then out of nowhere she starts cradling a baby

00:16:31.820 that they couldn't see obviously cooing and kissing the baby and stroking the baby's the infant's head

00:16:37.940 and she kept referring to him as danny and nobody knew the reference and then a day or two later her

00:16:46.760 sister flew in from another state and the children say you know mom's dreaming of danny and then the kind

00:16:53.660 mystery was solved danny was her first child and who had been lost shortly after birth but had passed

00:17:00.720 early after birth and that you know it was a sort of wound that was so so painful that that she wouldn't

00:17:07.740 talk about it in life and we see this a lot you know these these kind of spiritual or psychological

00:17:15.280 wounds and damages that may not have been i mean i may not have been addressed in life actually get

00:17:22.720 addressed in the dying process and we see it with veterans who have had pdst and survivor's guilt

00:17:29.060 you know those are wounds that often get healed we've got a lot of cases but an awful lot of mothers

00:17:34.620 and fathers who have lost children seem to be reunited again back to this idea that they're kind

00:17:40.900 of put together or made whole yeah it's it's really pretty remarkable yeah you you've you've treated

00:17:47.360 several veterans over the years and you had one like a world war ii vet who before he died he started

00:17:53.720 seeing dead comrades of his and his visions yeah he was remarkable because he um that was another

00:18:03.460 family who came in and actually contributed to the book he was from texas and went to war at i think he

00:18:10.140 was 17 and he was on the uss texas and the normandy and he never spoke of what had happened he wouldn't

00:18:18.240 go to veteran events he was so traumatized and his wife obviously was able to validate that he had

00:18:25.020 suffered horribly with nightmares and restlessly and cried in his sleep and he came in because he

00:18:32.500 couldn't sleep because these visions now these nightmares were getting more intense and disruptive and

00:18:37.600 really not allowing him to rest and you know in his dreams initially he's seeing body parts and

00:18:43.860 hearing screaming and then i come in one day and he had slept beautifully and he had two dreams one that

00:18:51.460 was extremely comforting which was he got to relieve what he said was the best day of his life when he

00:18:56.980 got his discharge papers and the other one was a neutral dream and what had happened was he was on the

00:19:03.020 beach of normandy and he's approached by a soldier and who tells him you know we're coming for you now

00:19:08.880 and somehow in that interaction he was reached in a way he couldn't reach in life which was that he was

00:19:17.340 relieved of that burden and the nightmares end he rested peacefully and he died in sleep but it was

00:19:26.220 remarkable to think of how many decades he had struggled with this and those parts of ourselves

00:19:33.020 are residual they're there and they come to surface at the end which is really makes sense dying changes

00:19:40.080 your perspective and your perceptions your vantage point you're not going to think about you know taxes

00:19:46.240 or whether i gotta get my car oil changed you're going to you're going to ultimately be distilled down to

00:19:51.880 the most important elements of having lived and for you know these processes don't deny the hard parts

00:19:58.180 living i mean then this isn't about flowers and rainbows it's about you and for a guy whose life was

00:20:06.200 so defined early and then haunted by war it just makes sense that this is what came to him at the end

00:20:14.300 we're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show and so you

00:20:20.500 mentioned some with some people these dreams like time kind of stops existing like they they're it's

00:20:26.260 very fluid they'll go backwards and forward in time you talked about one example you had a patient where

00:20:32.300 he started seeing a dead uncle that had died you know a long time ago and then the guy himself

00:20:38.020 started thinking like man i'm back in 1922 i'm 10 years old again yeah is that a pretty common thing to

00:20:44.780 happen yeah it's really weird because they'll they'll come in and out and they've got a foot in both

00:20:49.340 worlds right for parts of this and they're very un most people are very unfiltered or disinhibited in

00:20:55.680 describing it and it's a sort of experience it's interesting they don't come out asking questions

00:21:01.140 right the time for therapy is over these are their actual lived experiences so they'll describe them

00:21:07.260 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

00:21:12.980 how'd they do that so there's some bewilderment but what always intrigues me is if that happened

00:21:19.140 to you or i tonight you know we'd be we'd be pretty rattled that's not what happens there's a knowing

00:21:25.800 that comes with this and again it goes back to this idea that they it's felt like it occurred but

00:21:32.300 they're not haunted and they don't wake up looking for metaphors or analytics i've never had a patient

00:21:38.220 say hey doc what do you think this means they just come out of it as always an actual experience

00:21:44.460 so a lot of your patients that are dying they see dead family members but some patients don't see

00:21:51.280 family members any patients that fit that bill that come to mind yeah an awful lot of people dream of

00:21:56.740 things of travel which are pretty clear to understand there's transition or somebody's waiting for them

00:22:02.540 usually that feels in their description like that it's a guide or they're confident or they're not

00:22:07.420 alone this idea they're not alone it's really important see that a lot with children pets are

00:22:12.960 extremely common i don't know it's it's almost 40 and they're often be the pets from childhood

00:22:18.960 and if you think about it whether human or pet in terms of objects of our love that's unconditional

00:22:27.020 and who we feel that unconditioned love back pets are indistinguishable from some of our best human

00:22:33.880 relationships so you'll hear a lot and it's funny because they may not recall the details of the pet

00:22:41.200 you know before they start the dying process but as they get deeper their their their recollection

00:22:47.140 and it goes to the full all senses you know it's like i can smell my mother's perfume that kind of

00:22:52.140 thing and same is true with the animals there's this idea of reuniting with something that was really

00:22:58.540 formative and impactful to them so a lot of oftentimes these visions are very positive right

00:23:04.040 they people have them and they they feel a sense of integration there it gives them comfort but you've

00:23:09.560 had patients who have negative experiences with these visions and dreams any examples come to mind there

00:23:16.220 yeah you know about 12 to 15 percent of people have pretty traumatic if not discomforting kind of

00:23:23.760 experiences and and and what you know probably the best example his name was duane and he was a super

00:23:30.520 jovial guy despite the fact he was in his 40s and he had spent most of his life in prison he had had

00:23:36.960 neck cancer so he'd open wounds on his neck and he's talking to us and we're asking about these dreams and

00:23:42.460 first he starts joking you know they're all sexual then all of a sudden he starts to shake and cry and

00:23:47.180 this is all on film and he reveals that what he's experiencing is the people who he's harmed in

00:23:54.240 his life and he had seriously harmed some people mostly in self-defense he says we're stabbing him

00:24:00.320 where his uh open wounds were and again you know not denying death these events and they're they're

00:24:09.560 they're not obscuring the actual life that the person led but what happened was and this is so true of

00:24:15.940 these negative more negative discomforting ones is they're often the most transformational

00:24:19.860 and he wakes up and he asked to speak to a daughter and we got a hold of her brought her in

00:24:28.580 and for the first time he came to some kind of reckoning and he apologized for who he was and said that he

00:24:37.760 loved her very very much and this happened in the hallway and they wouldn't let go of one another

00:24:43.140 and then after that he slept again you know sued healed put back together in some way and that's

00:24:54.620 what i think is so interesting is these these negative ones actually aren't and don't end up

00:24:58.900 feeling that way at least to me forgiveness is real accounting for things is real being released

00:25:05.160 from obligations is real and uh so so although they're they're negative they end up being very meaningful

00:25:11.880 you have a chapter on children which is you know always the saddest thing to happen when a child

00:25:17.800 dies and for a child they might not know anyone who died right the grandparents might still be alive

00:25:24.360 so when you have children going through this process what do they dream or have visions of

00:25:29.100 children do this remarkably well and i'm actually an adult doctor by training so i'm have this kind of

00:25:37.040 discomfort and recoil around ill children but it's a long story but i was kind of forced to participate

00:25:42.820 over the years and now i'm very involved with overseeing children's care and you know a couple

00:25:49.680 of things that are i think are fascinating one is that you know that these experiences are so self-informing

00:25:56.500 you know the idea that we're going to either deny somebody the reality of their own dying processes

00:26:02.680 you know the joke is on us because these experiences even in very demented patients often become

00:26:08.720 informing and that's true with children children figure this out and in very interesting ways so

00:26:14.820 yeah they often won't know an adult who has died but inevitably they know a pet an animal that has may

00:26:21.160 not be theirs could be their neighbors their grandparents and they'll come back to them and the meaning

00:26:26.720 tends to be the same and again these children several of them are on film and interestingly on

00:26:33.780 the film they two of them say the same thing which is basically the presence of this dog that i lost or

00:26:39.240 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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The Art of Manliness - March 14, 2022

The Dreams That Precede Death

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