#259 From the Archives: More Real than Real: Dreams, Visions and Healing Experiences at the End of Life (Originally aired March 2022) Dr Christopher Kerr

I love the, the book is titled, the book is called Death Is But a Dream, but you really in the book go on to say these aren't really dreams.

These are really, you call them end-of-life experiences.

Yeah.

Things that people have happen to them that are kind of unexplainable by medical science.

Well, the, the, the, yeah, and I, and I actually f- um, uh, resisted the idea of that title and, and still do because if we're to listen to our patients, they're going out of their way to tell us they're not dreams.

So we don't have another nomenclature and reference point, so that's what we use.

But the statements we most commonly hear is, "No, you don't understand.

I don't normally dream," or, "This wasn't like a dream." And, um, i- i- i- i- when we measured realism in our studies, it was 10 out of 10, so these feel more virtual.

Um, and they're n- they're, they're n- they don't go to places where they're working out, you know, Freudian conflicts or deep-laden meanings, and they're not asking for interpretation.

So these are very different from dreams in a lot of ways.

But so what happened is I ca- I came to this recognition that these were obviously significant and, and, and we should have reverence for them.

And then I was trying to teach- Um, medical students and residents, of course we live in an evidence-based time, and they would say there's no evidence.

Of course there's an abundance of evidence, but it's largely in the humanities, um, you know, religion.

It's always been talked about throughout time and cultures across the world.

Um, the evidence we had on the medical side of the equation tended to be more case studies or anecdotal reportings, and they didn't control for enough variables like is this patient confused.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so what we did was we started our first study, and it's kind of funny.

The study sat on a table, the design, for probably 10 years.

I thought nobody would be interested in it until a young fellow said, "You're crazy.

This is really interesting." So we proceeded with the study, and were shocked because it, it, it, it received essentially zero responses from the medical community, but then it started to go around the world.

We ended up on the front of The New York Times.

Um, it ended up in India, China, you name it, and it spread.

And, and, and that says several things.

One, there's this clear gap between how the regard for these experiences from the providers of care on the clinical medical side versus the recipient or those who are caring for the dying, what they're actually experiencing.

Um, so there was this, this, this need to put the, to validate these phenomena, but put it in a caregiving context or framework that at least gave it meaning or regard.