‘Ending Well’ Gatherings on Zoom Third Saturdays ~ Ten in the morning New York time

:		Dreams and Conversations with the Dea​d by Leslie Ellis Nov 2, 2026

​” In his three decades of tending to the dying, he gathered their stories and found something so comforting amidst the loss and fear the end of life can bring — that death is like falling into sleep and dreaming, and that what endures across this existential threshold is love.

Kerr found that in the vast majority of cases he attended, those who were dying naturally tended to sleep and dream more, their dying process a gradually increasing crossover into the dream world. A full 88% of his 57 study patients experienced dreams or visions in the days and weeks prior to their death. Yet they didn’t speak of these experiences as dreams; 99% of these encounters were said to feel vividly real. These patients met and spoke with loved ones who had died as though these were the most natural conversations in the world. Kerr was clear that these were not the hallucinations of delirium brought on by neural decline or medication. These were clear-minded people conversing with the dead.

In the days before death, time spent asleep increases and the dying often want to linger longer in their world of dreams and visions. There is a parallel to the first days and weeks of life when babies spend more time asleep and dreaming than they do awake. The dying are just as vulnerable, their experiences just as liminal. And then they fall asleep for the last time. Kerr said that you can’t die unless you can surrender to sleep. It is as if, in dying, we fully enter into the world of dreaming. ​

​Asleep in the waking world

In some spiritual traditions, wake and dream are reversed, and it is only in dying that we can truly awaken. Andrew Holecek, a lucid dream teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, suggests that waking life may be the state in which we are most spiritually asleep, because we take our experience to be solid and fixed and forget how dreamlike it is. The word Buddha means “the awakened one.” The Tibetan practices of dream yoga and sleep yoga arose largely as a preparation for death, a way “to use the darkness of the night to prepare for the darkness of death.”

Each time we fall asleep, the self we know dissolves and later reassembles, so every night offers a kind of rehearsal. Holecek suggests that how awake we are in our dreams may shape how awake we are when we die. Traditional Buddhist teachings describe the passage after death as unfolding in a dreamlike way. These ideas raise existential questions I don’t know how to answer. But in learning about Kerr’s work, I see a blurring of the line between life and death, often mediated through dreaming.

What crosses the threshold

What crosses the ultimate threshold, in Kerr’s account, is love. He found that the people who appear to the dying are most often those who loved them most purely and unconditionally, sometimes a parent or a child lost decades earlier. In one of his filmed interviews, a woman days from death describes sitting at the kitchen table with her late husband and daughter, laughing and eating together. Very little is said in these encounters, and the dying seldom ask what these visions mean. Kerr’s own conclusion is simply that love endures.

The traffic seems to run in both directions. Many of the bereaved are visited in dreams by those they have lost. In a 2025 study by Joshua Black and colleagues, nearly three quarters of people grieving a partner had dreamed of them in the past month. In the dreams, the deceased most often bring comfort and a sense that their shared bonds can continue. I have had such visitations myself, and that they felt as real and reassuring as Kerr’s patients describe.

Where the veil is thin

Some cultures have never drawn the line between the living and the dead as firmly as we do in Western culture. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), celebrated on November 1 (and though the night to the next day), rests on the belief that during this time, the border between worlds grows thin and the dead return to visit. Families build ofrendas, altars with photographs, candles and the favourite foods of those who have died, and strew paths of orange marigolds to guide them home.

I spent a week in Malinalco during the Day of the Dead and was struck by how festive it all was. I joined a big procession with the entire town, through streets strewn with candles and marigolds, skull-painted faces, children hoisted on shoulders, effigies on tall banners, drumming and music. They were dancing with the dead, celebrating their connection to those they loved and lost. This is the opposite of our tendency in North America, which is to sanitize, medicalize and attempt to deny death. Hispanic cultures honour their dead in such visible, tangible and yes, celebratory ways. On a morning walk by the Malinalco cemetery, festooned with flowers and mementoes, I watched a man pour an entire bottle of tequila over someone’s grave. Here, the dead are kept close, engaged with, not forgotten.

Continuing bonds

It may be that we are thinking about grieving wrong. The death of someone we deeply love isn’t meant to be gotten over. We can still love them, present tense. We can maintain continuing bonds through memories, imagined conversations, shared stories and dreams. In his research, Joshua Black found that this ongoing connection is one of the greatest gifts of visitation dreams. His own dream of a deep, reassuring conversation with his dead father lifted him out of a depression and altered the course of his life.

A sleep and a forgetting

One of Wordsworth’s best-known poems approaches the threshold from the other side, aligning with the Buddhist tradition. In his ode “Intimations of Immortality,” one of my favorite poems, he writes:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And Cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory..”

Wordsworth thinks we are born remembering our glorious origins. And then as everyday life takes over, we forget where we’ve come from and “shades of the prison-house begin to close.” If waking life is a kind of ‘sleep and forgetting’, perhaps death is a ‘waking and remembering’. What I do know from my own experience, and from accounts of those gathered by Kerr and others, is that the line between sleeping and waking, and between living and dying, is not so clear. There is permeability, a crossover zone — times, places and circumstances where the barrier between the living and the dead is thin.

I witnessed this in sitting with my mother-in-law in her final days. Her spiritual practice was a true comfort, so she was peaceful, unafraid to die. In those last days, she seemed to become translucent, not entirely with us. I felt her presence growing less substantial, her eyes opaque, already looking past this world into the next one.

Whether dying is a passage into dreaming or awakening, I can’t say. What feels true for those who hover at the threshold, sit with the dying or have nearly died themselves is that something endures. I’ve had one very close brush with death (a story for another time). At what I thought was the end of my life, once I passed through the fear and the fight, what I felt was the most overwhelming sense of love. This has stayed with me all my life, a comfort in knowing this is what I’ll be met with at the end of my life.

Kerr said, you die how you’ve lived. If you’re lucky, you will love well and die well (and of course not everyone has an easy time of it). We can learn something from the Day of the Dead celebrants, and from conversations with the dying. If you cultivate an ongoing relationship with your dreams, with the night and the dead, you’ll be better prepared for the greatest of all transitions, and you won’t be alone on the journey.

References

Bartlett, S. (Host). The deathbed doctor [Interview with Christopher Kerr]. In The Diary of a CEO [Podcast].

Black, J., Belicki, K., & Emberley-Ralph, J. (2025). The bereavement experience: Dreams and waking experiences of the deceased. Dreaming, 35(2), 184–189. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000291

Holecek, A. (2016). Dream yoga: Illuminating your life through lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep. Sounds True.

Kerr, C., & Mardorossian, C. M. (2020). Death is but a dream: Finding hope and meaning at life’s end. Avery.

Kerr, C. W., Donnelly, J. P., Wright, S. T., Kuszczak, S. M., Banas, A., Grant, P. C., & Luczkiewicz, D. L. (2014). End-of-life dreams and visions: A longitudinal study of hospice patients’ experiences. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 17(3), 296–303.

Wordsworth, W. (1807). Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood. In Poems, in two volumes.