Dreaming Beyond Death
From "Dreaming Beyond Death" by Kelly Bulkeley
Dreaming and Dying
We are all going to die someday. Some of us will die very soon, others not for many years, but we all share the common fate of moving toward an eventual, inescapable ending. The awareness of our mortality makes us human—no other species has the paradoxical curse and blessing of knowing of its own ultimate demise. Even though our conscious attention is usually focused on the busy activities of daily life (all the more so in the hyperstimulating, death-denying culture of modern America), mortality remains a permanent concern within the nonconscious dimensions of our minds. We always know we are going to die, but we do not always know we know; that is, we banish the thought from consciousness, we studiously avoid references to it, we forget it. This is why the discovery that you have a terminal illness can be such a painful and overwhelming experience: you are suddenly forced to confront consciously what the unconscious parts of your mind have been anxiously pondering from the earliest days of your childhood.
Dreams offer a vivid illustration of our lifelong awareness of death, giving voice to the unconscious fears, wishes, and desires that surround the brute fact of human finitude. Death is a remarkably prominent feature of historical and cross-cultural dream content, appearing in a wide variety of forms all over the world, and it remains a frequently recurring element in people’s dreams today. Indeed, the unconscious nexus between dreaming and death is so strong that no theory of dreams, whether psychoanalytic, neuroscientific, or cognitive psychological, can be considered adequate if it fails to take this connection into account.
Seen from the perspective of the terminally ill, all dreams are pre-death dreams. All dreams, in more or less subtle ways, are searching meditations on the finitude of human life. Throughout our lives we are unconsciously preparing ourselves for death, and one of the functions of dreaming is precisely to create the meanings that will help us face the end with courage and understanding. We can learn much about this meaning-making process by exploring the basic themes and patterns in people’s dreams across the life span, from childhood through old age. Knowing more about the fundamentals of human dream experience will provide a helpful context for our more focused discussion in later chapters on pre-death dream themes.
Across the Life Span
Dream researchers cannot say for sure when exactly children start dreaming. Some argue that the ability to dream depends on the sophisticated cognitive functions that do not develop until the ages of three or four, meaning that no true dreams are possible before then. Other researchers argue that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—the stage of sleep during which most dreams happen—begins while a human fetus is still in the womb, and thus genuine dreaming does occur in the earliest periods of life even though children do not yet have the linguistic ability to describe their experiences.9
The mysteries of dreaming at the beginning of life thus foreshadow the mysteries of dreaming at the end of life.
What researchers do know is that many children experience frightening nightmares at a very early age, and many of these nightmares revolve around the threat of death. In the most primordial of these bad dreams, the child is thrust into a “chasing” scenario in which a malevolent antagonist is aggressively and relentlessly pursuing the young dreamer, who flees in terror. The sense of vulnerability and helplessness in such dreams is excruciating, and many people remember these intense experiences for the rest of their lives.
By the time of their school years most children have a clear understanding that all living creatures, including themselves, must eventually die. Many children, particularly those living close to nature in nonurban environments, also recognize that death is the precondition for new life. All creatures may die, but all creatures also have the ability to generate new life and thus to contribute to an ongoing process of life that extends beyond the death of the individual creature. When this realization develops in the mind of a child, the stage is set for the emergence of dreams in which death becomes a powerful metaphor for change, transformation, and creativity (all the more so in Christian communities, where the story of Jesus’s resurrection teaches children a similar vision of death leading to new life).
Indeed, growing up itself involves a kind of dying, insofar as each new developmental gain puts a child’s previous sense of selfhood farther and farther into the past. When a child dreams of death, then, it may not necessarily be about anyone’s actual physical death, but rather about the metaphorical death of the child’s own earlier personal identity. Thomas was a fourteen-year-old who suddenly began dreaming constantly about death—about people dying, animals slaughtered, dead bodies covering the ground, over and over again. Thomas’s mother wondered what all these morbid death dreams could mean, since there had been no recent deaths in the family and Thomas’s early teenage life was going pretty well. Indeed, his mother had noticed over the previous several weeks that Thomas had shown a noticeably greater interest in helping with household chores. He was keeping his room clean, doing the dishes, walking his dog twice a day, all without the usual reminders from his mother. She also found a paper in Thomas’s room with a carefully written list of “resolutions” he had made for himself to get his life priorities in order. As Thomas’s mother described this to Kelly, she said she experienced an “Aha!” moment of understanding about the dreams when she realized that Thomas was taking a major step into mature, independent, self-motivated adulthood—and in the process leaving a big part of his responsibility-free childhood behind. In a very real emotional sense, Thomas’s childhood was “dying” and his new adult personality was being “born.” The recurrent dreams of death and dying were accurate metaphorical expressions of what this growth process meant and felt like to Thomas.
While people frequently dream of the impending danger of death, they rarely dream of actually dying. The classic example is the falling dream, in which you tumble over a cliff or out of a plane, hurtling downward faster and faster toward certain death until you suddenly awaken, just a fraction of a second before hitting the ground. Other people may die in our dreams, but we ourselves usually find a way to break out of the dream before succumbing to whatever dire threat we may be facing. On those rare occasions when the dreamer does die within the dream, the physical sensations can be extraordinarily intense, with people describing feelings of their hearts exploding, or blood rushing through their heads, or a floating detachment from their bodies. These unusual qualities mark such dreams as particularly worthy of conscious reflection, with the strong possibility that a profound transformation is occurring in the dreamer’s life.
Strange and unusual elements are often openings into creative insight and meaning making. Research based on collections of thousands of dreams suggests that most dreams do a surprisingly good job of recreating the ordinary conditions of our daily lives. The settings tend to be familiar, the characters known to us, the activities consistent with what we regularly do in waking life. Dreaming is by and large consistent with our interests and concerns in the regular waking world. This makes it all the more noticeable when certain dream elements jump out as being bizarre, improbable, and/or physically impossible. Some researchers argue that such fantastic elements in dream content are simply nonsense, evidence of the defi- cient cognitive abilities of the mind during sleep. Perhaps this is true for some percentage of dream bizarreness, but our experience is that many of the seemingly nonsensical oddities of dreaming turn out, on closer inspection, to be moments of spontaneous creative insight. What at first sight seems absurd and random can be recognized (in the “Aha!” moment) as surprisingly meaningful and relevant.
We will have much more to say about all this later in the book. For now we simply ask that you not dismiss “bizarre” dream elements out of hand, but hold open as a possibility the idea that the very strangest parts of people’s dreams may serve as openings to new knowledge and wisdom.
To appreciate more fully what makes certain dreams strange and unusual, it helps to know what “average” dreaming is like. Enough research has been done over the past half century to provide a rough portrait of the most general features of dream experience, and this provides a useful backdrop for the evaluation of unusual types of dreams.10 On average, men (particularly single men) dream much more about other men than about women. Their dreams contain twice as many male characters as female characters, while women tend to dream equally about male characters and female characters. Women dream more frequently of familiar people, men more of strangers. Indoor settings are more common for women, outdoor settings for men. Neither gender dreams very much about animals or about dead or imaginary characters (all of which occur more often in the dreams of children). Men’s and women’s dreams involve roughly equal proportions of friendly and aggressive interactions with other characters, though men’s dreams have more physical aggression and more sexuality. Women’s dreams have somewhat more emotional content, or at least their dream reports contain more explicit descriptions of their emotions. In both men’s and women’s dreams the emotions tend to be negative (sadness, anger, fear), and in both there are many more misfortunes (accidents, injuries, unforeseen difficulties, etc.) than good fortunes (miracles, lucky discoveries, etc.).
These empirical findings about dream content should not be taken as absolutely fixed or universal. Research in this area is still limited to a very small sample of the general population, and we already know that different cultural and psychological variables can have a huge influence on the specific details of people’s dreams. Clearly, there is no single “right” or “normal” way to dream. But the value of learning about the broader patterns in dream content is this: knowing what is ordinary makes it easier to identify that which is truly extraordinary. Comparing your dreams to the dreams of other people can bring out details you might not otherwise recognize. We will describe several examples of this in later chapters.
The study of dream journals kept by people for many decades has revealed that each individual’s particular constellation of dream patterns is remarkably consistent over time. Each of us has our own set of signature dream themes that recur throughout our lives. From late adolescence through middle age, the basic proportions of dream content remain steady in terms of settings, scenarios, and characters. A striking example of this is a woman with the pseudonym “Dorothea” who provided researchers with her fifty-year dream journal (kept from 1912, when she was twenty-five, to 1963, when she was seventy-six). Study of her dreams found that six basic themes repeated with the same frequency throughout the fifty years, and at least one of these themes (eating or thinking of food, losing an object, being in a small room, being with her mother, going to the toilet, and being late for something) appeared in almost three-quarters of her dreams.11 What this and other studies suggest is that dreams not only mirror the ups and downs of daily life, they also reflect the enduring qualities of our personality and the foundational concerns that shape our way of being in the world.
Significant changes in dream content come with old age, changes that stem from both the weakening physical abilities of many elderly people and their shrinking sphere of social interaction. Their dreams, not surprisingly, become preoccupied with themes of scarcity, confusion, loss of control, and loss of resources.12 Typical dream themes of the elderly include difficulties cooking meals, toilets not working, misplacing familiar objects, and getting lost while driving a car. These recurrent negative dreams, combined with the deteriorating quality of sleep that many seniors experience, can lead to a diminished interest in dreaming and a consequent decrease in dream recall. What’s the point of paying attention to dreams if all they do is remind you of depressing, insoluble problems you already know about?
We do not advocate reflection on dreams as a cure-all for everyone, but we want to emphasize strongly that an endof- life diminution of dreaming is not a necessary fate—good sleep quality and a healthy relationship with the dreaming imagination are always possible. Sleep medicine has made enormous advances in recent years, and simple lifestyle practices (such as regular modest exercise, outdoor activity, and continued intellectual stimulation) have reliably beneficial effects on the length and restfulness of a night’s sleep (for more on this, see William Dement’s The Promise of Sleep13).
The dreams of the elderly, even if they come less frequently and have more disturbing content, are still valuable expressions of their creative imaginations, opening a window into the deepest realms of their psyches and offering helpful in- sights into the challenges of their waking lives. Caregivers play a crucial role in providing companionship for the elderly and the terminally ill as they try to make sense of their dreams, and one of our primary hopes in this book is to encourage caregivers in all contexts to include reflection on dreams as one element in their overall approach. If you can help others experience more restful sleep and a livelier awareness of their dreams, you will have done much for them, no matter what else ails them or how much time they have left to live.
Let us widen our focus now and consider the pre-death dream experiences of people in other places and times. Here too we find many, many dreams that give people new existential insight into dying, death, and that which lies beyond death. This is particularly true in relation to the phenomenon of “visitation dreams.” Striking, emotionally intense dreams in which a recently deceased loved one returns to provide guidance, reassurance, and/or warning have been reported throughout history in cultures all over the world. The remarkable crosscultural frequency of visitation dreams is one of the strongest findings of anthropological dream research, and it points once again to the primal connection between dreaming and death.
But visitation dreams do not occur often. In fact, they seem to be quite rare, accounting for perhaps one percent of all dreams.14 What makes visitation dreams so memorable is an unusual intensity and vividness that sharply distinguishes them from the majority of other dreaming experiences. People often speak of a visitation dream as feeling “realer than real,” and when the dreamers awaken these electrifying feelings carry over into waking awareness, remaining surprisingly strong and easy to recollect many years later.
Here is a contemporary example that highlights the experi- ential power of visitation dreams, their role in the process of mourning, and the profound religious questions they raise.
Kim was a thirty-two-year-old teacher from Oregon who went with a group of friends to the hospital to visit their old college roommate Keith.15 Keith had been stricken with cancer and was near death. Kim was overwhelmed by the horrifying sight of her good friend lying in the hospital’s intensive care unit, heavily sedated and hooked up to a variety of lifesupport machines. From his hospital bed Keith was able to hear Kim and the others when they spoke to him, but he could respond to them only through a machine that beeped at each reaction. After they left the hospital Kim realized with a stab of regret that she had forgotten to hold Keith’s hand one last time. She had been so overcome with emotion that she never physically touched him. A week later Keith died, and that night Kim had a dream:
I am lying in my bed when I see Keith at my bedside and feel the warmth of his skin as he slowly reaches for my hand. He stands close to me and holds my hand gently yet firmly for a long time. This feeling of his hand against mine is so real, too real to be a dream. In addition to the warmth of his flesh, I feel the firmness and thickness of his hand and the wrinkles that form on his palm and fingers as he holds my hand. (I almost opened my eyes to see if Keith were in fact standing by me, for I had never experienced in dreams feelings that felt so real.) Neither of us speak, nor is there any sound in the dream, and the atmosphere is that of tranquility.
When Kim awoke, the touch of Keith was still in her hand. She had not believed it was possible to have such intensely realistic physical sensations without actually holding another person’s hand in her own. Kim was generally a skeptic regard- ing supernatural phenomena, and her work as a high school biology teacher gave her a strong appreciation for reason and science. Although she did not think her dream proved that ghosts or spirits really exist, she admitted that she had never had such an experience before, and she even hesitated to call it a dream because it was so uniquely realistic. She felt that somehow or other Keith really had come back, and he was trying to help ease her regrets about that last sad visit in the hospital. In the dream their positions are reversed—now Kim is the one lying motionless in bed, and Keith is standing beside her. Then he does what Kim wished she had done: he reaches for her hand and takes it in his own for a final, wordless goodbye.
It would be easy to explain away such dreams as mere Freudian wish-fulfillments, idle fantasies that offer a brief but comforting escape from the painful reality of a loved one’s death. But such a dismissive view ignores the extraordinary and long-lasting emotional impact of such dreams and fails to appreciate their crucial role in the process of recentering oneself following a terrible loss. The enduring value of dreams like Kim’s is precisely in the way they remind people of the ambiguous reality of death—the loved one is dead and physically gone, but something of the emotional relationship with that person remains alive and vividly present. Visitation dreams do not deny death so much as transcend it, providing experiential evidence of human connections that extend beyond the end of mortal life.
Given that so many people who experience visitation dreams insist on their hyperrealistic qualities, the question naturally arises as to whether or not these dreams are generated by more than the ordinary workings of the human brainmind system and perhaps involve actual encounters with the souls of deceased loved ones. For a vast majority of the world’s historical cultures, the answer to that question has been yes. For the aboriginal bands of Australia and the South Pacific, the tribal communities of Africa, the native peoples of North and South America, and the ancient civilizations of China, India, Egypt, and Greece, dreams have always been regarded as a primary means of maintaining contact with the spirits of the dead. Although these cultures have very different philosophical and spiritual worldviews, they share a fundamental belief that when we sleep, a part of ourselves (soul, spirit, ethereal self, etc.) is free to perceive other realities, travel to otherworldly realms, and gain important knowledge and wisdom. Death, in this perspective, is the final and permanent release of that part of ourselves, a sleep from which one never awakens, a dream that never ends.
This is why so many cultures have developed elaborate teachings to prepare a person for that final release. In ancient Egypt people who were about to die received a set of spells, prayers, and magical incantations (what we now collectively refer to as The Egyptian Book of the Dead). The spells were intended to provide the dying person with a practical guide for their journey to the afterlife, with warnings about potential obstacles, techniques to ward off evil spirits, and promises of assistance from the gods. Very similar to this is the Tibetan Buddhist text Bardo Thödol, generally translated as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It too was (and still is) used to guide people in their passage from this life to the next, although the Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about this process are very different from the Egyptian. While the Egyptians sought to share a blissful afterlife with the gods in the Field of Reeds, Tibetan Buddhists believe that death leads to a fantastic realm of dream and vision, from which one goes either to rebirth as a new living (and suffering) creature, or to ultimate release and enlightenment. To help people achieve spiritual liberation and escape another painful cycle of bodily existence, the Bardo Thödol is traditionally read aloud to dying people so they can better recognize the strange new disembodied realities they will soon experience, and better resist the fearful desire to remain attached to the material world.
Different worldviews, but a similar approach to caregiving for the dying: ancient Egyptians, Tibetan Buddhists, and many other cultural traditions have developed powerful teachings to prepare people for that which lies beyond death, and paying close attention to dreams throughout one’s life has always been an integral part of that preparation process. When the eighth-century b.c.e. Greek poet Hesiod wrote that death, sleep, and “the whole tribe of dreams” are brothers born of the goddess Night, he was expressing a fundamental human insight that dreaming is the closest thing to death we experience in this life.16
This is a good time to say something about the relationship between the subject of our book, pre-death dreams, and neardeath experiences (NDEs). The writings of Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, and others have highlighted certain recurrent qualities and themes in the experiences of people whose respiration, heartbeat, and other vital signs temporarily stopped and who thus can be said to have “died” and come back to life. According to a sizable number of studies, NDE reports commonly include feelings of relaxation, peacefulness, and separation from one’s body, along with visions of tunnels, bright lights, and numinous guiding figures. The intensity of NDEs often change people’s lives in radical ways, leading to less fear of human mortality and a greater spiritual appreciation for each present moment of this earthly life.
Controversy surrounds this subject, however, as some of the researchers have claimed their findings are scientific proof of life after death. This bold assertion has been rejected by skeptics who question the validity of NDE reports, which are impossible to verify and which are liable to all manner of revisions, modifications, and alterations so they fit better with the (often unconscious) expectations of the researchers. The people who have actually had NDEs, however, insist that they have truly gained a glimpse across the threshold of mortality, and that those skeptics who stubbornly refuse to believe their reports are clinging to an outmoded materialism that fears death rather than embracing it as a new mode of existence.
As interesting and important as this debate may be, our interests in this book will lead us in a very different direction. We do not want to prove anything about the afterlife, one way or the other. We do not want to argue over research methodologies, nor do we care to join in the hyperbole and name calling that unfortunately pervades the debate over NDEs. Our goals are much more limited, and more pragmatic. We are focusing on the here-and-now experience of the dying person, and we want to provide the dying person and his or her caregivers with good practical knowledge about the dreams, visions, and other revelatory phenomena that often occur in the final stage of life. The NDE literature offers several intriguing parallels to pre-death dreams, and we will mention some of them in the coming chapters. But, in our view, the differences between NDEs and pre-death dreams are equally significant. NDEs do not, by definition, happen to people who die, while the dreams we are discussing in this book do; the outcome of the experience is thus very different. NDEs occur very rarely, have little or no narrative content, and last but a brief moment. Pre-death dreams, by contrast, are a fairly regular occurrence among terminally ill people, are often filled with richly detailed narrative content, and can recur over the course of several nights.
Our view of NDEs and their relationship to pre-death dreams has been influenced by Carol Zaleski and her book Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. Zaleski explores the historical roots of NDEs and finds that what Moody, Ring, and other modern researchers are describing bears a striking resemblance to medieval Christian portrayals of the afterlife and what happens when a person dies. Without judging the reality of any of these experiences, Zaleski shows that modern NDE research is carrying on a visionary tradition that reaches back through many centuries of Western civilization. We greatly appreciate Zaleski’s emphasis on historical self-awareness, her careful attention to the multiple dimensions of meaning (physical, psychological, cultural, mythic) in NDEs, and her openness to the religious energies they generate. To the extent that NDEs and pre-death dreams overlap, we want to bring these qualities of Zaleski’s work to our more practically oriented discussion of caregiving for the dying.
Religion and/or Spirituality
Another overheated debate we wish to avoid concerns the precise distinction between religion and spirituality. Since our goal is to provide resources for dying people and their caregivers in the widest variety of contexts, we deliberately speak in terms that do not presuppose a particular faith, creed, or philosophy. At the same time, we have found as a matter of research and professional experience that a very high percentage of pre-death dreams call forth what are best described as religious and/or spiritual energies. We will continue to use these terms, then, even though there remains much scholarly disagreement about their proper denotation. We take them as roughly synonymous, both referring to the recognition and experience of powers that transcend our control and yet have a formative influence on, and discernible presence within, human life. Religion refers to a relatively more social appreciation of those powers, and spirituality to a relatively more individual engagement with them.
These are rough-and-ready definitions, but they will suffice for our purposes. The key point is that if we want to understand the dreams of the terminally ill, we must find some way to talk about the profoundly mysterious feelings, images, and energies that emerge within them. The world’s religious traditions have developed languages to speak of such things, and we will continue to use those languages as long as they remain helpful.
With that in mind, let us consider two historical accounts of visitation dreams, one from the East and one from the West, and see how the religious and spiritual dimensions of meaning play out.
A Chinese Buddhist text from Yuan times (1279–1368 c.e.) tells of a lay believer named Wang Chiu-lien, who was a devout meditator seeking enlightenment in the Pure Land tradition. At night he dreamed of the Buddha, but always in the form of a sculpture, not as the living Buddha. He finally went to a monk and told him about these dreams. “This is easy to deal with,” said the monk. “When you think of your late father, can you hold his usual comportment?”
Wang Chiu-lien answered yes, and the monk said, “Can you see him in your dreams in such a way that he is no different from when he was living?”
“There is no difference.”
Satisfied, the monk said, “The Buddha in himself has no appearance. The appearance is manifested only in conformity with the way of things. From now on you should think of your late father as Amitabha [the Buddha]. Little by little, imagine that there are white streaks of light in between his brows, that his face is as of real gold, and that he sits on a lotus-flower. You can even imagine that his body grows larger and larger. Then your late father is himself the living Buddha.”
Wang Chiu-lien applied this method according to the monk’s instructions, so that whenever he dreamed of his father he told himself, “This is the Buddha.” In time, he dreamed that his father led him to sit on the lotus, where he explained to his son the essence of the Buddhist teachings.17
This story makes explicit and deliberate what is usually implicit and spontaneous in visitation dreams: the valuable role of those who have died in guiding the dreamer toward a closer relationship with religious powers and spiritual truths. The point of the monk’s instructions to Wang Chiu-lien is to encourage him to make an intentional effort to deepen his dreaming engagement with his deceased father as a means of connecting more fully with those powers that transcend ordinary mortal life. This is exactly what religious traditions at their best try to do, namely, to help people cultivate their sense of creative engagement with forces greater than themselves. For all the reasons we have been discussing, visitation dreams have always been a phenomenon of great religious interest, and Buddhism is by no means the only tradition to teach methods of exploring dreams with greater spiritual intentionality. The Native American vision quest, the shamanic journeys of Siberian shamans, the ecstatic trances of African healers, the healing sanctuaries of the Greek god Asclepius, these and many other dream incubation practices can be found in the world’s religions, and they all share the goal of provoking a closer interaction between the dreamers and transcendent spiritual powers. The monk’s comment that the Buddha’s appearance in human awareness is never pure but always “manifested in conformity with the way of things” underscores the variability of people’s conceptualizations of these powers. Your dream of the divine is not necessarily the same as other people’s dreams, but you can be sure that your dream is true, relevant, and appropriate for you and your current life situation.
A second story, from the early Christian context, also highlights the personal specificity of dreaming and the revelatory insights about death that can be gained from close attention to one’s dreams. St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 c.e.), one of the Christian tradition’s most influential theologians, once received a letter from a friend who asked his opinion about dreams and the soul’s existence after death. Augustine replied by describing the dream experience of a man he knew named Gennadius. Gennadius had also been wondering about the afterlife, when he had a dream in which a strange young man showed Gennadius a beautiful city filled with the music of hymns being sung to the saints. The next night Gennadius had a second dream in which the young man reappeared and directly asked Gennadius whether it was in sleep or when awake that he had seen the city. Gennadius answered, “In sleep.”
The young man then said, “You remember it well: it is true that you saw these things in sleep, but I would have you know that even now you are seeing in sleep.” Hearing this, Gennadius was persuaded of its truth, and in reply declared that he believed it. Then the young man went on to ask, “Where is your body now?”
Gennadius answered, “In my bed.”
“Do you know,” the youth asked, “that the eyes in this body of yours are now bound and closed, and at rest, and that with these eyes you are seeing nothing?”
“I know it,” Gennadius answered.
“What, then,” the young man continued, “are the eyes with which you see me?” Unable to discover what to answer to this, Gennadius fell silent.
In this moment of uncertainty and paradox, the youth finally revealed to Gennadius the deeper truth of his experience. “As while you are asleep and lying on your bed these eyes of your body are now unemployed and doing nothing, and yet you have eyes with which you behold me, and enjoy this vision, so, after your death, while your bodily eyes shall be wholly inactive, there shall be in you a life by which you shall still live, and a faculty of perception by which you shall still perceive. Beware, therefore, after this of harboring doubts as to whether the life of man shall continue after death.” Augustine ends his recounting of the story by asking, “By whom was Gennadius taught this but by the merciful, providential care of God?”18
To be sure, the lesson that Augustine draws from Gennadius’s experience is very different from the lesson taught to Wang Chiu-lien by the Buddhist monk. This is an important point—all dreams do not point to a single truth, reality, or divine power. We disagree with claims that all religious and mystical traditions lead to the same realization of pure consciousness, peak experience, absolute unitary being, or any other monolithic, one-size-fits-all state of mind. At least in therealm of dreaming, the revelatory experience is so deeply rooted in the individual’s personal life history and cultural context that it makes no sense to try and extract a “universal core” from it. Gennadius and Wang Chiu-lien both had dreams of great spiritual power, but not necessarily of the same power. Their dreams spoke to where each of them was at that moment, in the rich symbolic language of their different religious traditions, and they each received valuable (though different) insights into the nature of the soul, in this life and beyond.
Another feature to note in Gennadius’s dream is the quality of self-awareness within the dream state itself, often referred to as dream lucidity. Augustine’s account is one of the earliest mentions of lucid dreaming in the Western tradition. In the Upanishads of ancient India (sixth century b.c.e.), selfawareness within dreaming is mentioned and affirmed as a state of consciousness that opens the way to new vistas of existential knowledge. Tibetan Buddhists have developed meditation practices that aim, in coordination with the Bardo Thödol, to cultivate dream lucidity as a way of preparing for what will happen after death. In contemporary American society only a small percentage of people report being self-aware in their dreams, and psychological researchers are divided about what, if anything, lucid dreaming means in terms of brain-mind functioning.
Once again, there is no one right path in the world of dreaming. Some people regularly experience lucid dreams and find them to be tremendous sources of spiritual discovery. Other people never have a lucid dream with that kind of impact, but still have incredibly powerful dreams that transform their understanding of themselves and the world. What happened to Gennadius—a full-blown state of self-awareness, allowing for profound reflection on the true nature of the soul —is one of the many strange potentials of dreaming, a rare but striking aberration from ordinary dreaming that leads to a deeper spiritual sensitivity. The pre-death dreams we discuss in this book often involve unusual shifts, expansions, and intensifications of self-awareness, and we recommend paying particular attention to them as possible indicators of a new development in the dreamer’s preparation for dying.
A final point about Augustine’s description of Gennadius’s dream: we have here a major Christian theologian (some would say the most decisive and authoritative figure in the early church) who is explicitly saying that at least some dreams come from God. This is important to remember because many Christians today are taught to avoid dreams as potentially sinful temptations sent by the Devil. While it is true that several passages from the Bible emphasize the ephemerality of dreams and their potential to deceive people, many other passages highlight the positive power of dreams to provide divine guidance, reassurance, and warning.19 Indeed, the Bible never once mentions demons or the Devil as tempting people in their dreams. That belief is a later addition to the Christian tradition, and it has unfortunately led to an automatic hostility toward dreaming among several Christian communities (particularly those who identify themselves as religious conservatives or fundamentalists).
We respectfully disagree with that theological perspective. We believe a careful reading of the Bible does not support the beliefs that God’s faithful should ignore dreams and that dream interpretation is a sin. If there is any general message about dreams to be drawn from the Bible, it is this: dreams are one of the ways that God’s spirit enters people’s lives. Although a dream may initially appear strange or frightening, a person who has faith, a discerning judgment, and perhaps the help of an experienced interpreter, can eventually grasp its meaning. St. Augustine understood this all the way back in 400 c.e. , and many contemporary Christians today do as well. The writings of Morton Kelsey, John Sanford, Louis Savary and Patricia Bern, Wallace and Jean Clift, James Hall, Jeremy Taylor, and numerous others testify to the continuing vitality of dreaming and dream interpretation in the contemporary Christian tradition.20
Your Life as a Dreamer
The close connection between sleep, dreaming, and death is the stuff of myth and mysticism. According to the world’s religious traditions, through this doorway lie otherworldly realms of divine mystery, where liberated souls make wonderful journeys of discovery and revelation.
On a more personal scale, the sleep-dreaming-death nexus provides each of us with a valuable source of insight into our own individual feelings, beliefs, hopes, and desires surrounding the inevitability of death. This is our first major piece of practical advice: reflect back over your life as a dreamer— think of your most memorable dreams, the dreams that made you happy, that scared you, that puzzled and mystified you. Consider those dreams in terms of the full arc of your life. People who are terminally ill have a precious opportunity to take some time to reflect on their lives as a narrative whole, as a grand story with a beginning, middle, and end. Your dreams have always been a kind of running commentary on that story, mirroring your life’s experiences and weaving them into a meaningful reality, and now at the end of life you are in a position to see that process from a new perspective. We suggest you give special attention to the kinds of dreams we have discussed in this chapter—dreams relating to death, visitation dreams, lucid dreams, and unusually “bizarre” dreams —as particularly potent sources of personal insight and self-understanding.
It is less important to interpret such dreams than simply to be with them. Intellectual analysis has its place, and in the next chapter we will describe some methods to use in reflecting on dreams and discerning their different levels of meaning. But none of that should be taken as a substitute for the deeper process that unfolds as you allow your dreams a welcome place in waking awareness. That’s where the transformational effect of dreaming really begins.
From Dreaming Beyond Death By Kelly Bulkeley. Copyright 2005 by Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkeley. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
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