Dreams Dying and Deathbed Delirium

Dr. Kerr, who recently gave a talk at TEDxBuffalo about the research, said he was simply advocating that health care providers ask patients open-ended questions about dreams, without fear of recrimination from family and colleagues.

“Often when we sedate them, we are sterilizing them from their own dying process,” he said. “I have done it, and it feels horrible. They’ll say, ‘You robbed me — I was with my wife.’”
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Solace for the Living

In the first dream, a black spider with small eyes came close to her face. Then it turned into a large black truck with a red flatbed, bearing down on her. Terrified, she forced herself awake. In another dream, she had to pass through her laundry room to get to the kitchen. She glanced down and saw about 50 black spiders crawling on the floor. She was so scared! But when she looked closer, she saw they were ladybugs. She felt so happy! “Ladybugs are nice and I knew they weren’t going to hurt me,” she recounted later. “So I made my way to the kitchen.”— Rosemary Shaffer, 78, two months before she died of colon cancer.

The Hospice Buffalo researchers have found that these dreams offer comfort not only for the dying, but for their mourners.

Kathleen Hutton holds fast to the end-of-life dream journals fastidiously kept by her sister, Mrs. Shaffer, a former elementary schoolteacher and principal. Rosemary Shaffer wrote about spiders and trucks, and then the ladybugs. In one dream, she saw flowers at a funeral home, which reminded her of those her daughter painted on handmade scarves. She felt loved and joyful.

“I was glad she could talk about dreams with the hospice people,” Ms. Hutton said. “She knew it was her subconscious working through what she was feeling. She was much more at peace.”

Knowing that has made her own grief more manageable, said Ms. Hutton, who teared up as she clasped the journals during a visit at the hospice’s family lounge.

Several months ago, Mrs. Brennan, the nurse, sat with a distraught husband, whose wife had pancreatic cancer that had spread to the liver. She had been reporting dreams about work, God and familiar people who had died. The patient thought that she would be welcomed in heaven, she said. That God told her she had been a good wife and mother.

“Her husband was angry at God,” Mrs. Brennan said. “I said: ‘But Ann is not. Her dreams aren’t scary to her at all. They are all about validation.’

“He just put his head down and wept.”

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