As you’re preplanning a Tallahassee cremation, you’re already thinking ahead to the time when you die and what you want to happen after you die. You may also find yourself wondering what dying will be like. Although every death is in some way unique, there are also some common things that happen during the dying process.
One very common occurrence is vivid dreaming about things that are very comforting. While end-of-life dreams and hallucinations are well-documented, many medical professionals have paid little attention to them and have attached little significance to them.
However, hospice medical teams have always felt that dying dreams and hallucinations are very important. At the Palliative Care Institute in Cheektowaga, NY, Buffalo Hospice chief medical officer Christopher Kerr led a research team to conduct an 18-month (January 2011 to July 2012) study on dying dreams and hallucinations.
In this study, the research team did over 450 interviews with 59 patients at Buffalo Hospice. The patient criteria for being in the study was being terminally ill and not having any cognitive impairment.
What Kerr and the team of researchers were looking for as they explored dying dreams and hallucinations was a way to determine how often dying dreams and visions occurred, what the dying dreams and visions were about, and what significance the dying dreams and visions had to the patients.
One insight that the researchers were hoping to gain was whether there was a correlation between the number of dying dreams and visions, their content, and the patients’ proximity to death.
What Kerr and his team found was that as death got closer, the vividness and frequency of dreams and hallucinations increased. The content of the dreams and hallucinations? Meeting up again, often in an earlier time such as war or childhood, with friends and family who had already predeceased them in death.
One of the surprising things that came out of the research were the things that the patients saw or dreamed about that they had never told anyone about. For example, in Kerr’s research group, there was a dying lady who was going through the motions of holding and talking to an baby in her arms. The baby’s name was Danny.
The lady had four children, who were sitting around her bed. None was named Danny. They were mystified by their mother’s behavior. However, when their aunt – their mother’s sister – came to visit, she immediately knew who Danny was. He was the patient’s stillborn first child, whom neither the patient nor her husband ever said anything about to their other four children.
The research that Kerr and his team discovered some interesting things about dying dreams and hallucinations. For example, almost 90% of the patients had at least one dying dream of hallucination. Nearly 100% of the patients believed their dreams or hallucinations were real.
One of the most common themes of the dying dreams and hallucinations was traveling or getting ready to travel. Less than 20% of the dying dreams or hallucinations were disturbing for the patients, while the overwhelming majority – 60% – were comforting and calming (21% were neither disturbing or comforting).
The closer the patients moved toward death, the more frequently they had comforting dreams and visions that included not only deceased loved ones, but also deceased pets.
If you want to know more preplanning a Tallahassee cremation, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.
