One of the greatest services we can render the dying is to help them open to the gifts of their own dreams. Just as dreams rehearse us for challenges on the roads of life, they prepare us for the journey beyond death. Dreaming, we travel quite naturally beyond the body, into deeper dimensions of reality, and make connections on the other side. By helping someone who is approaching death to open to their dreams, we help them to find their way home, and approach the last stage of physical life with greater courage and clarity, as a time of growth and awakening.

All we need do, to begin with, is to suggest to the dying person that if he or she happens to remember a dream, we would love to hear it, and to cherish the moment of sharing. Open a safe space for dreaming, and beautiful things can happen, as we learn from Katy’s moving experience of helping her father prepare for his death.

To the House of the Dream Ambassador

Katy’s octogenarian father Ed moved into hospice care after a debilitating series of strokes. His doctors thought he would probably succumb to kidney failure within a month. In fact, he survived for another six months, a time of deepening pain and frustration over the failures of the flesh that was nonetheless a period of immense learning and high adventure thanks to his discovery of dreaming. In each of her frequent visits, Katy gently encouraged him to share any dreams he remembered.

In the first dream Ed recounted – six days after moving into the hospice – he discovered that his old clothes were “all twisted up”. He wanted the people caring for him to dress him in new clothes because he was going to take a trip on the Concorde and wanted to look his best.

This short dream – from a former stockbroker not previously accustomed to recalling or sharing dreams – is already a wonderful rehearsal for the big journey. It reflects the collapse of the physical body, and promises an exciting transition – in new garments – to another plane of existence.

As dream sharing became daily practice for Katy’s father, many varied gifts came through. Some of his dreams rehearsed him for physical adjustments he needed to make as his body declined, easing these passages for a proud and once strong man. Dreams of broken plumbing and laying pipes, for example, prepared Ed for the catheterization that was eventually required.

In an intriguing series of dreams, he was excited to find himself doing new work and feeling really good about it – an unlikely scenario, in ordinary reality, for a sick man in his 80s. In one of these dreams, he was working on an “angel machine”. When Katy asked him what that was, he explained, “I’m supposed to comb out the feathers on the angel wings” and giggled like a happy child, full of wonder.

Towards the end, Katy’s father often slipped into waking dreams, moving between the worlds with increasing fluency, learning the art of reentering a sleep dream to gather more insight and energy effortlessly, without any formal instruction.

One of his big dreams seemed to promise a happy landing on the other side and opened a fascinating personal locale in the possible afterlife. He dreamed that on a day of heavy snow, he attended a magnificent banquet in a beautiful mansion. Everyone was dressed to the nines, and an elegant, distinguished man wearing an ambassador’s sash with his dinner jacket showed Ed around and poured him a delicious drink “like white champagne” but beyond anything available in ordinary reality. Delighted by his welcome, Katy’s father had the feeling he would be going back to the mansion of the dream ambassador. On the day he passed, it was snowing heavily for the first time in months, as in the dream.

Through their days and nights of dream sharing, father and daughter deepened their loving connection. Katy confirmed and validated her father’s experiences as he opened to realities beyond the physical, an inspiring example of how we can help each other on the roads of dying (and living). Katy believes that dreaming provided her father with a vehicle in which he could travel to the other side. “He was fearful of leaving this life that he loved so much, but with the dreaming he grasped that there really is a life ‘over there’ that is just as much fun.” His fear of death gave way to a willingness to let go.

The story of Ed’s dreaming does not end with his passing. Within days, he started turning up in the dreams of his loved ones. He appeared to the one family member who had not been able to visit him in the hospice, sat with her under a tree for what seemed like hours, and made her laugh. He returned Katy’s visits in the dreamtime. In Katy’s dreams, he often appeared doing things (like skiing) that he had failed to do, or to master, in the life he had left.

For more on this important theme, please see my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead.