S2E25: What We See Before We Die | Talk Tracks

In this episode of Talk Tracks, Ky Dickens sits down with hospice physician and researcher Dr. Christopher Kerr, whose groundbreaking work has documented the vivid, often life-affirming dreams and visions reported by patients in their final days. Drawing from studies involving over 1,500 patients, Dr. Kerr reveals a striking pattern: as death approaches, many individuals begin to experience deeply immersive encounters, often with loved ones who have passed. He explains that these are not fragmented dreams or signs of confusion, but coherent, meaningful experiences marked by clarity, emotional resolution, and a profound absence of fear. What if the end of life is not defined by fear or loss, but by a return to the people, memories, and moments that shaped us most? ------ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call—subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.supercast.com. http://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to The Talk Tracks. I'm Kai Dickens and today we have an incredible guest that you were briefly introduced to in season two. His name is Dr. Christopher Kerr and he's the Chief Medical Officer at the Center for Hospice and Pallet of Medicine in Buffalo, New York. He's known for pioneering rigorous research and doing some landmark studies on the vivid, often meaningful dreams and visions reported by patients in their final days. By conducting research through nine studies and over 1,500 patients, he found that patients at the end of their life often go through the same emotional arc. And what I love about Dr. Kerr is that instead of dismissing or disregarding what the patients were experiencing, he leaned in and conducted groundbreaking research. So, welcome, Dr. Kerr. We're thrilled to have you.

• 0:45Ky Dickens?

  Hi, everyone. I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to The Talk Tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers, and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today but won't for long. Before we begin, I just want to quickly note that this episode is also on YouTube, where you can see visuals of the patients featured, captured by the hospice staff and researchers. And though this episode is great just as an audio version, seeing these individuals in the midst of their experience just adds another layer that's incredibly powerful. So, just wanted to note that.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:56Ky Dickens?

  Why don't we start just by you introducing yourself? You know, what were you trained in? How did you start your career? What's your name? Where do you live?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Sure. My name is Christopher Kerr. I have a medical degree as well as a PhD in neurobiology. I'm the chief executive officer and the chief medical officer at hospice and palliative care at Buffalo.

• 2:17Ky Dickens?

  And how many patients are there right now?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  We care for about 1,200 patients a day.

• 2:21Ky Dickens?

  And how many surveys or studies have you done and even published?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  We have numerous studies in the area of hospice and palliative medicine, kind of everything from drug studies to programmatic studies. We have nine studies that look at specifically the subjective experiences such as dreams and visions at the end of life.

• 2:40Ky Dickens?

  And how many patients did you collect data on eventually?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Well, probably in total, in families and patients, we're near 1,500.

• 2:48Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  But dying is a process. So what we did is we did it every day because it's a changing picture. And we wanted to know, just like the nurses were able to predict, were there changes in these experiences as people got closer to death?

• 3:03Ky Dickens?

  For those people out there who maybe don't even know what hospice means, can you explain what hospice means?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Sure. Hospice is first a philosophy, which is really whole person centered care. It's also, for many places, it's a place, but it's also a Medicare benefit. And that's how most people are coming to program. And it's meant for those folks who have a prognosis of six months or left to live.

• 3:28Ky Dickens?

  Okay.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29Ky Dickens?

  So someone goes into hospice, there are six months or less left to live?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Oh, probabilities, yeah.

• 3:33Ky Dickens?

  Were there people of all ages? I mean, hospice isn't just for older people, right?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  It's not, no. We're unique in that we have a pediatric program, but that's unusual. It's mostly older people, but it's a full gamut.

• 3:44Ky Dickens?

  Oh, gosh. That's just so heartbreaking to even think of a pediatric hospice.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Ky Dickens?

  Your career and where you are now and what you've seen and experienced is so probably remarkable and so different from where you started. So when you started all of this, what were your beliefs around death, around dying, around hospice?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, none good. Probably for personal reasons. My father had died when I was 12. And I think that sort of trauma, it was hard. I had an aversion to even talking about dying. I had a very bad reaction at his death. And as I've said, you know, medical school is a safe place to be if you have a death aversion. You're trying to defeat death and when you can't defeat it, you almost deny it. So, yeah, I was uncomfortable with it.

• 4:33Ky Dickens?

  That's, I'm sorry about your father, by the way. That's really hard when you're young. And so, did you have any beliefs even about like the afterlife? Or did you grow up within like a faith system or not?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  No, I actually, if anything, I'm from the polar end where I'm not only discomforted by it, but I'm freaked out by it. Just to be honest with you, like if some, if I was walking down the road and they said there was a free reading, I'd probably cross the street and walk the other way.

• 4:59Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just don't have a disposition.

• 5:02Ky Dickens?

  So, anything about death or the other side?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:05Ky Dickens?

  Freaks you out?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:07Ky Dickens?

  Or you have an aversion toward it, which?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:09Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:10Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  I mean, that was then.

• 5:13Ky Dickens?

  That was then. So, what started to change for you?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Oh, so what happened when I got to hospice, it was a Saturday and we have a 10-bed inpatient unit there. And I was completely out of my element. I had no training on how to care for the dying and, or how just to be present, right? That that was therapeutic. And it was immediately apparent to me that my colleagues in nursing and social work and spiritual care were much more capable than I was. They were capable because I was used to, from my training, looking at the objective patient. So, things that were measurable, observable. And they were much more attuned to what the person was actually experiencing.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So, my view of death was the visible suffering of it and the lessening of it physically. And with no sense that there was a subjective element to it. And that's what they were so attuned to.

• 6:11Ky Dickens?

  And when you say subjective element, what do you mean by that?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  That the patient was having an experience. So there was the view from my side, but there was the view from the bed. So the dying had another dimensionality to it that I had no recognition of.

• 6:25Ky Dickens?

  And would the support staff that was tuned more into this, would they talk about this with you?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a matter of fact, it's part of the lore. They just knew. And what actually happened was there was this pivotal moment when it was during the AIDS epidemic and I had a young man who was dying. And I did the doctor thing, which was thought that I could give him more time by giving him fluids and antibiotics. And one of the nurses just says, no, he's dying. And I said, how? Do you know this? He said, well, he's seen his mother. And so they were so attuned to the patient that it was just baked into their practice clinically that they had this awareness they could prognosticate based on what the patient was experiencing. And of course, the patient died.

• 7:13Ky Dickens?

  And what were some of the things that they were experiencing that must have sounded very woo to you?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Well, the backdrop of the story was I seen my father do this when he was 12, when I was 12.

• 7:25Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so what did your father die from?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  He was a surgeon and he died of lung cancer at 42 and never smoked. And the last time I saw him, he was playing with the buttons on my shirt, timing we had to get ready to go on a plane because we'd go fishing in northern Canada every year. So I hadn't spoken of it. You know, I knew intuitively that whether he was was a good place and I was with him. But it was something that I didn't live in that thought ever, really. And then I go to hospice and of course, all these patients are doing this. And the staff there just knew it and they could understand it and they knew it was soothing for the patient and their loved one and they could prognosticate off of it.

• 8:09Ky Dickens?

  Wow. And so for listeners who maybe don't know what prognosticate means.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Predict time of death. So they were so attuned to the rhythms and flows and the increasing frequency of this as people got closer to death, they were queuing off of it. Again, it's the idea that instead of looking at organs and functions, they were looking at the totality of what the patient was experiencing and presenting as. So they were much more plugged in.

• 8:33Ky Dickens?

  And, okay, so, and, and I've, you know, obviously, I'm very familiar with your book and your work, but for someone who is like, wait, what were they prognosticating off of? What were some of the things happening for the patient that

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:45Ky Dickens?

  in these rooms or that would have felt like common between many patients?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So dying in and of itself is progressive sleep. And what they were noticing was that the patients were having these dreams or visions that were very, very vivid, that they kind of had this foot in two worlds, and that these kind of events were increasing as people got closer to death. And the content would change. The closer they were going towards death, the more likely they were to see the deceased. And these are beyond real. They're overwhelmingly comforting. And it's always been talked about across cultures and throughout history. So there's nothing that we've done as new. It's just shining a light on something that's been known and kind of lost in our Western world.

• 9:31Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. What I think is so remarkable about your story and what I love about it is that you kind of took a science mind. You thought, you noticed this was happening. And tell me what happened next, because you really, like, almost codified and got metadata around this type of thing.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so what happened was, again, I didn't understand it. You know, I could come up all the reasons for what it wasn't. But ultimately, it was, I got to a point where just I learned to have reference for it. So where it came from, what it was, I didn't get. But I knew that it was so comforting for the patient. And there were so much reunion and being put back together that it mattered clinically. So, shoot ahead, I have, now I'm working there full time, and I have regularly, I have students and young doctors, and I'm trying to teach them this. And we live in an evidence-based time, and, you know, the

• 10:29Speaker 02

  science of medicine has outstripped its art. And so the young people would say, well, there's no evidence for it. And I would say it's always been discussed, but it's not put in a medical frame. So out of frustration, I started to do the research. Basically, if there's no evidence, I'll get you evidence. So that's what we did.

• 10:48Ky Dickens?

  So just to recap this story, because I think it's so remarkable. I want to make sure I have it right. So you were working with medical students and trying to teach them more about the death and dying process. You would explain that there are these interesting things that happen that can't be codified by EEG or, you know, brain scans or heart, whatever, all the things. And at that point, they were like, there was no evidence for the fact that I've seen people. And you decided, okay, then I'm going to get evidence.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:15Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so then what happened next?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  So what happened next, I barked on the study. I went to the university. They declined me the first time for approval because the idea is we sterilize dying. You can't bug the dying patients. Meanwhile, they're lonely and looking up at a white ceiling. But eventually I got it through and we designed a study and we did a number of things, I think, pretty well. One of the medical rebuttals is these are confused patients, right? And they were delirious. And we knew that wasn't true. They actually had heightened acuity. They were fully aware. They had greater insight. It was quite the opposite. But what we did is we took patients who came into this unit and we gave them the questionnaire every day until death. And they had to be screened every day. So you couldn't be confused.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  There had to be a witness, all of these sorts of things. And we had a menu list, you know? Are you having these experiences? Are you awake or are you sleeping? Realism on a one to 10 scale, how realistic is it? We had a menu item set, what you could choose from. Are you seeing pets, traveling, you know, friends, family, at work, whatever? And then we would follow them right to the end. And then we started to film patients because I always knew the rebuttal would be they're feeble minded, deoxygenated, medicated, demented and whatnot. And so we started to film patients.

• 12:39Ky Dickens?

  When someone watches those, the film, what do they see?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  They see a number of things. First of all, these people are cognitively intact. Again, they're remarkably insightful and articulate. What's noticeable is the absolute absence of fear. I was really taken aback by that. And they're very disclosing about what they're experiencing.

• 13:01Ky Dickens?

  Unbelievable. Okay, so you collected data for over 1,500 patients.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:05Ky Dickens?

  So what patterns did you find?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  The patterns were remarkable at the end of life.

• 13:17Ky Dickens?

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• 14:27Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Almost 90% of people reported having a singular event. It's probably higher, but we had to take out people once they got confused. So let's say nine out of 10 people. First of all, one of the things that's very interesting is that we don't have the right nomenclature. We say dreams, but people are emphatic that these aren't dream experiences, these were happenings. Overwhelmingly comforting, well into the 80%. What was really interesting is the frequency of these increased as patients were getting closer to death. And there was a content shift. The closer they got to dying, the more likely they were to see people who they've known and they've lost. And interestingly, those seeing that on content was the most comforting.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  So you take it together, there's this built-in mechanism. As you're getting closer to death, you're having increasing subjective, intense and overwhelmingly comforting experiences, and you're more likely to be seeing people who you've loved and lost.

• 15:57Ky Dickens?

  And you said that 80% of the experiences were comforting. I'm curious about the 20% that...

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the ones that weren't?

• 16:03Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got that completely wrong. We assumed that discomforting meant negative, had a negative connotation. And actually, those were the most profound, because those were the transformational ones. You know, we've all been harmed for having lived. There's regret, there's loss, and that often gets addressed.

• 16:25Ky Dickens?

  How so?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  In really interesting ways. Whatever that lesion is, somehow you die as you live. And it's this, these experiences don't deny death, right? They almost transcend it. But they validate life, but you die as you live. You know, it's not all butterflies and rainbows, and it's honest, but you're given some form of grace. You know, the war veteran who has survivor's guilt is reunited with his comrades, and they tell him, "We're coming for you." There's a great example on film of a man who's in his 40s, and he had head and neck cancer, he had an open wound, and he breaks down in the film because he thinks he's being stabbed by the people who harmed him.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  They were jigging the knife. You know, trying to cut, cut out, you know, my neck where my cancer was at.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Stop, stop trying to fight, you know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you know, trying to fight this guy off. That's scary. It's scary to me. I'm not a bad individual, man. Well, I don't cross a lot of people in my life, you know, and I need help. I need help, you know, I don't, I don't want to live my life

• 17:48Speaker 03

  being all this society walking, have to look over my back, man.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  He's one of these guys who'd never had a reckoning in his life, come to terms with, said he was sorry. And that forced him to ask for his daughter and he apologized really for the first time.

• 18:05Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And said how much he loved her. She ended up staying with him. He was able to sleep and he passed. Just again, the idea that that in these moments and in these experiences, subjectively, it allows you to come to terms with sometimes difficult things, but they're transformative. And it's just fascinating. You live your whole life with some sort of lesion, regret, or a loss, or a sorrow, and then it comes back to you and you're kind of made whole again. And that's how he died, coming to terms with, with his honest self and with those he loved. And it's remarkable because you can think of it, like the one where, but you know, he, he had severe crippling PTSD for

• 18:49Speaker 02

  sixty plus years. There was no therapy that was going to help him, no medication. There was something in him that could heal, but it took reaching this point.

• 19:01Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  I'm at Fort Devens up in Massachusetts where they were forming this company that we're going to oversee, a new company. And the guys are all young. They're like, I remember them and I'm old. And I'm trying to tell them, guys, I've been here, I've done this, I'm not going to do it again. And they're arguing with me. I'm packing goods.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  And I'm setting him for some reason up high.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  He's talking about travel, which is common. If you've had a pivotal event, especially if it brought you close to mortality, you often go there.

• 19:36Ky Dickens?

  Like what?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Such as war. So he goes there, but of course he goes to his deceased wife.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  She always wears a beautiful light blue. It could be a suit, it could be a gown, it could be a dress, but it's always light blue. And a couple of times she's gave me the little beauty pageant wave.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And it's always the case. It's vivid, there's nothing said, everything's understood.

• 20:00Ky Dickens?

  Here we would call that telepathy.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  And you call that telepathy, yeah. No, it's very true. He just feels love and it's tangible to him and that's how he died, reconnected with his war buddies and with his wife.

• 20:15Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so you start gathering data and then what happened next? Because I know that you ended up on the TED stage, how did that happen?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Oh, and this is really an interesting story. All of our work was meant for a medical audience and we published, but there was crickets. So I did this TED Talk and it seeks out to major media and it goes around the world, still going around the world today. And it's just telling because there's a disconnect on these issues between the people who are providing care and their level of interest. And yet, the people who are receiving care are curious outside of medicine, who are very much interested in these sort of things.

• 20:55Ky Dickens?

  I think that is so interesting. So you had a lot of the data that you had, you know, gathered over the, for years of all these different studies. You had some luck getting them published in journals, but it wasn't like the, you know, major media outlets were necessarily picking up on it.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  No, no interest, no phone calls.

• 21:11Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Ky Dickens?

  But then when it was presented on TED, like it went viral, people were very interested in what you had to say. And which shows that I think the public is so deeply interested in thoughtful conversations around.

• 21:28Ky Dickens?

  All this stuff, you know?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Well, they don't want, they don't want the doctor's death.

• 21:32Ky Dickens?

  What do you mean by that?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  They don't want a medicalized death. They don't want their parents and grandparents' death in hospital or nursing home. They want a death in which they have a say. They want a more humanized experience.

• 21:50Ky Dickens?

  So what were the major points of your TED Talk that you think were resonating with people?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  You know, imagine you're at the end of your life. Imagine your greatest love, your greatest loss, and your greatest joy. You know, a birth of a child, a loss of a parent. What if those things came back to you at the end? And the other thing is so many people have experienced these things, but it's never been validated. These are really profound moments in people's life when they've been at the death of a parent. And they've witnessed this, but nobody's translated it or validated. So there's often an assumption that this was them confused or drugged. So it's putting that piece together, I think, just allows for context in a conversation that doesn't, otherwise might not exist.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Have you had any of these experiences in your personal life? Have you witnessed it?

• 22:43Ky Dickens?

  I was with my grandmother when she died.

• 22:48Ky Dickens?

  But no, it was just peaceful. I mean, you know, she just, you know, kind of, and it was the moment we were all looking away. You know, like, we were all, like, sitting there, and I was playing music, and we were all around the bed and just, you know, constant, constant, constant. And there was like, I didn't, when it was getting really close, I didn't want to look at my phone. And like, the 10 seconds that, like, my brother ran to get a coat, my mom was doing something. And I was looking at my phone, and I think it was purposeful. I think she was like, I'm out now. No one's looking at me. I don't want all that, you know? As far as people maybe at the bedside of a loved one as they're passing, do they ever experience the vision with them or see something with them?

• 23:20Speaker 02

  There's people who are doing this, this sort of work, looking at that. I haven't experienced that, and it may be my being close-minded. But, but there certainly are people who talk about, now, we have done dreams of bereavement. You know, people who are bereaved having dreams of their loved one. But yeah. I don't personally see that.

• 23:39Ky Dickens?

  And for you personally, after seeing this and kind of studying it, do you think, what do you think explains this? I mean, do you think they are hallucinations or dreams, or do you think it's something different?

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Oh, they're absolutely not hallucinations. And if you see any of our videos, these people aren't hallucinating. I mean, they sound like you and I, right? So, and again, they're screened for that. So before they do a questionnaire or participate in a study, we do a thing to make sure they're not delirious. We follow their meds, we check their labs. I mean, that was par for the course. So not, no hallucinations. Dreams, absolutely not. They will say, I don't dream, I don't recall my dreams if I'm having them. But they, in content and quality, they don't, they don't resemble dreams. So they're not metaphorical. They're not full of symbolism. They're not fantastical. They're none of those things. And the most important thing is they don't require interpretation.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, and I've never had a patient say to me, doctor, what do you think this means? And if you think about it, that's just, right? I mean, they're coming to the end of their life. They don't need to do work like that. And if you're nine years old and you're seeing the parent you lost when you were a child, and they're in front of you, you don't need an interpretation.

• 24:53Ky Dickens?

  So, and then backing up a little bit, how often are these experiences happening with the eyes open?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Well, that's really interesting. We've never quite understood that because they're, they're absolutely the patients you walk in, they're looking right through you. And they'll have a foot in two worlds. Some of them will say, oh, don't sit there, someone's sitting, you're just sat on so and so. That's less common, but it happens quite a bit. The reporting of it doesn't match what we see, and we're not so sure if they're not lucid dreaming. So, in other words, so again, dying is progressive sleep, you're in and out of sleep, and the sleep architecture changes. I imagine dream's architecture changes as well. It certainly happens, though, they have their eyes open. You know, it's about 50, 30, and then the rest is both.

• 25:43Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. And you said that as people get closer to death, they start to see loved ones or people that really are meaningful to them. Earlier in the process, what does it seem that they're seeing?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Well, travel's big.

• 25:54Ky Dickens?

  Travel, like they're going somewhere?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, or the metaphor too, going to travel and packing. I've seen every mode of travel, canoes, planes.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  What's funny is they don't get the correlation that this is suggesting something. Seeing pets are very, very common. Jeannie and Michelle, this is a fascinating case. So this is a young, young lady, teenager who's dying.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  My cousin's dog that passed away.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  What was the dog's name?

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Moose, I see.

• 26:31Speaker 05

  Baby, that was my grandma's dog. They said she passed away.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  She creates a world where all these deceased animals are there. And what's fascinating is she puts herself in a castle.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  In a castle.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Really? Is it beautiful?

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  It's huge.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Describe it for me, are there other people there?

• 26:57Speaker 05

  No.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Okay, is it warm?

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  She describes light and warmth coming through. She put a pool in there so she can play and all these animals are going around. That's how she left, she died days later. These are immersive experiences. It's not like looking at a photograph. You're in them. You're immersed in all senses with them. There's exchange. They focus more on the living upstream. And then as they get closer, it's deceased, but not just anybody. And that's a really fascinating thing. It tends to focus on a select few of people who loved and secured them. So that might be one parent, but not another. We've seen people with three husbands, they really loved the second, the second one appears. But it's often one parent, not the other.

• 27:44Ky Dickens?

  Interesting, I wonder why that is?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, again, it's this idea there's some sort of final justice. And it, it, there's not a focus on the negative at all. You just, you, I think whatever helped form you best and most and, you know, and that requires to be loved unconditionally, that's what's there. And time and distance go away, right? This is a great video. This is Florence, five days from dying.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  It's very hard to pinpoint because they were so real. In all these years, my husband's been dead and my daughter. We were like sitting at the table, laughing. I could see their faces. I could tell in the little clothes. We were laughing, we were talking, we were eating. It was like a regular Sunday dinner night.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  That's wonderful.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  It is. And then Monday night, the same thing happened. But the same identical thing. We're laughing, we're talking, we're having a little.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  How did it make you feel?

• 28:54Speaker 06

  I woke up Monday morning and I went, was that real? And I said, I suppose you know.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Somewhere in all of this is our notion of time seems to go away when they're at the end. Again, that they're just, they just have to, they have to be in front of them, that it's in the present for them. What they feel was, was that it's happening again. And she even marvels at that, that it's just like it always was. She said, they're just there. What's lovely is I asked her in this interview, are you worried about dying? And she says, oh, no. She says, you know, if I quit swearing, I'll be okay, kind of thing. So that's Florence.

• 29:41Ky Dickens?

  And do you think they are originating in the brain? Or do you think it's responding, like they're, they're somewhere else? Like, you know what I mean? Like, do you think, how do you explain it?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  I can't. And you know what? Where I'm at is I've given up trying to understand and I'm okay not knowing. Again, it just comes back to having reverence and I, I actually am, the older I get, I'm kind of more okay with the idea of not knowing. And I think there's something special in the fact that something awaits us. And that's a vantage point. Dying is a vantage point we have no idea of. And your perceptions and perspectives are going to change and it's okay.

• 30:23Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. What's really sad for me, thinking about this, is for people who die a sudden death probably don't have this experience. Maybe they do. I mean, I guess, who knows?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  What did George Floyd say when his hair was being squished out of his lungs?

• 30:36Ky Dickens?

  He's going for his mom.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Expression, "light fat, flash before my eyes." Yeah.

• 30:42Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. Yeah. Right. And his mom had passed, right?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:47Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, you're right. That is such a, because that was the thing that like, you know? And I remember I was reading an interview with a World War II nurse, and she was explaining, she's like, you know, walking through the battlefield as people are like dying, like, she's like, it's so many grown, strong men reaching out for their mom. I don't know why it's making me cry, but it's so sweet, you know, because it's like, it's this universal experience. It's always been there.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and, you know, personally, those are the ones that move me because you're, and this doesn't, the telling of it doesn't get across the impact, but imagine you're standing at the bedside of a 95-year-old.

• 31:24Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  And he lost his mother when he was five. And he's, he's actually one of our patients. And he can smell her perfume, hear her voice, say, "I love you." And so, everything evaporates in between, and it's tangible. And it gives, my sense of it is that they're never gone. They're always there for you, and proximate to you. And in this way, it's probably the biggest takeaway from these experiences, is that just as we're, our earthly bodies are fading, something in our mind, soul, spirit, puts us back together.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  By putting us back to those who most were instrumental in defining and shaping who we were. And so, to see elders, you know, and it could be, and the detail, the remembrance of it's fascinating. They recall things that weren't otherwise accessible to them, the name of the dog when they were a child. The detail is incredible.

• 32:34Ky Dickens?

  I love that. Yeah, because so often you forget memories before the age of seven, you know, it's very common. Even older, you forget. So you're saying that they might remember something that had been long forgotten.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, it's more common than not.

• 32:56Ky Dickens?

  For people that might be really looking for an evidence-based moment, has there ever been a situation where someone says something from talking to this other space, these other people in this other place or dimension, or wherever they are, that comes back, you know, when they are lucid and talking, that turns to be quite evidential and interesting because someone in the room didn't know? For instance, maybe they saw someone who'd passed on that someone in the room didn't know.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Oh, I see. A reveal that somebody...

• 33:24Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, a reveal in some way.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Actually, I have a really interesting patient right now. Her name's Shirley, and she's 83. Her parents didn't want her at birth, and she was raised by a grandmother. So often, families will say, "I learned more about my dying parent in this last phase because all this stuff comes out," right? And when her eyes are closed at night, she's singing these nursery rhymes in Lithuanian. And her daughter Debbie didn't know her mother knew any Lithuanian. She didn't know the grandmother was Lithuanian, and that's where it came from. So the recollections there, I mean, you can unlock memories in all sorts of ways, right? Music does it. You're driving down the road, you hear an old song, you remember that high school dance or whatever.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I think that this period of dying, that journey kind of spiritually rekindles recall. And it may be the basis for terminal lucidity. Have you heard of that?

• 34:22Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Where all of a sudden, things come. They're learning things that they didn't otherwise know. That are coming. Basically, that person becomes recontextualized in an earlier time, right? And they're having detailed memories that weren't otherwise known or expressed. The filters are gone. They're so immersed in this realism that's virtual, it can't help but be shared. So imagine you didn't know that your mother's mother didn't want her and hadn't died, and that she actually knew Lithuanian. All of these details come out. Sometimes it's remarkable because it's one of these things, it's odd things that can separate people at the bedside or can bring them closer.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  So I had a patient not long ago who returned to their native language, and they're speaking Polish. And the daughter is sitting in the corner room with her hands on her lap, completely freaked out, um, what's happened to my mother? And, you know, normalize it for her, give her permission. Next day you come in, she's at the bedside and she's furiously taking notes and she's learning about all of her mother's childhood friends, the pets she had, the grandparents she didn't know. So there's lots of revelations that way.

• 35:35Ky Dickens?

  That's pretty remarkable, because so you, so you've like heard, you know, or documented the person dying, recalling memories, languages, information about their ancestors that they, they didn't know, or that the family didn't know, and then the living daughter or son might go investigate it to find out it's true, is that?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, well, it is, yeah, it is true.

• 35:56Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:57Ky Dickens?

  Unbelievable.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Next is a video of Jennifer.

• 35:59Speaker 07

  So this is the one and only picture that exists of Patrick and I that was snapped by my niece at a wedding.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Jennifer's a fascinating story. She's talking about her significant other, Patrick, and what's unique about this story is it really highlights a couple of features that, that, one, these clearly aren't dreams. You don't wake up from your dreams and act, right? So he dreams that he ate spaghetti with his grandma Dolores. But it's not a recall. It was a happening in the sense that he feels full from having eaten.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  So, again, it goes beyond realism to actually experiential.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  Patrick didn't cook with, with one single exception of making his grandmother's sauce, which he did, I want to say about every four, six, eight weeks through the entire 16 years I knew him. Patrick was the only member of his family that knows how to make the sauce. And for all the years I knew him, he insisted something was missing. Fast forward to, this would be the Sunday before he passed. He woke up in the morning, he believed, he made sauce.

• 37:19Speaker 07

  With his grandmother, the night before, said he could smell it, he could still taste it, he was full from it. And she showed him, after all these years, what he had done wrong, which is, the very last step before you take it off the burner, was to add a teaspoon of sugar.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  And that's how he left. He left full. He left surrounded by the love of his grandmother, who he had known since birth, right? He left without fear. And again, it's, you know, God didn't come down from the heavens and tell him, here's the answer. It took his grandmother coming back and telling him the ingredients to a spaghetti sauce recipe, because that's what actually, that was him.

• 38:07Ky Dickens?

  When they made the spaghetti sauce and added the sugar, was he like, yes, this is it?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bingo. Isn't that cool?

• 38:13Ky Dickens?

  So cool.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Again, these are so unique in that they typically aren't great epiphanies, they're not great reveals, they're not these religious proclamations. It's about everyday life. It's highly symbolic of having lived and mattered. And it ultimately goes down to our relationships, and it ultimately goes down to love. And it doesn't matter whether the person's dead or alive, this goes across and between lives. So there's this weave, you know, in that sense, there's this collective consciousness that doesn't seem to evaporate or lessen over time or in illness. It actually heightens as we're leaving. And he's a great example of that.

• 38:57Ky Dickens?

  Wow. In your studies, did you also do research and do these surveys for younger patients or the pediatric patients who were dying? And how is their experience different from those of the elder people who are dying?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we couldn't include them in our formal studies for university approval reasons, but we've absolutely documented, we published case series, and they're in the book, and we filmed them. And children do this differently, and like some of our cognitively different patients, they do it in some ways better or in richer ways. There's less filter, right? Fascinating thing about these experiences for children is they self-inform them. So one of the concerns was a lot, several of these were my patients, is, you know, how do you get them to a point of understanding? And they seem to to know intuitively.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  And just like so many of the adults that have these, whatever, again, whatever concerns you seems to be addressed. So we have one young lady who was raised by a single mom and who is she and how is she going to be without? And then in her dream, she sees her mother's friend who had passed in her mother's room.

• 40:09Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  So.

• 40:10Ky Dickens?

  Hold on, I want to make sure I get that right. So the a young girl was sitting with her single mom and her and how how old is the girl?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Thirteen.

• 40:16Ky Dickens?

  Thirteen and her mom is dying.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  No, she's dying.

• 40:19Ky Dickens?

  Oh, the girl's dying.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Young girl's dying and first her dog Shadow comes to her. And she says, it means I am loved and I'm not alone and he had passed. And then she's worried about what is life without her mother? And then she sees her mother, her mother's friend who had passed away in her mother's room playing with her curtains.

• 40:42Ky Dickens?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And the fascinating thing was she kept that, like so many of the kids, she kept that from telling her mother, not wanting to upset her mother.

• 40:50Ky Dickens?

  Oh, my gosh. Ah, oh, my gosh. And then to any of them see anyone else, like either people they don't know that maybe someone else has, you know, pull the pieces and put it together for them?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  People they don't know is is relatively uncommon and earlier on. So we've gone upstream. Like we we didn't know when did this begin?

• 41:09Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  So we started to go months and months. We spent two years going up. And it kind of makes sense, right? When you imagine your first diagnosed and you worry about practical issues. Bills, finances, lawyers, whatever. As you get through that journey of illness and acceptance and dying. You obviously focus on what matters most and it's let go of those sorts of of things. And the people who are of less significance, they drift off and the living drift off. So we've actually tracked the content in terms of when the living are there and when they fall off. And it's kind of within that two week period before death.

• 41:48Ky Dickens?

  Wow. So the people that are alive and are on the bed or whatever kind of start to fall off in terms of this person's perception or even engagement?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Oh, completely. Yeah. And and people will wake up from it and their preference is to be where they were, right?

• 42:02Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  They want to go back to to that.

• 42:05Ky Dickens?

  When people say that, oh, I want to go back to be with my sister or someone who's passed on that they were just with. Do they ever explain where they are? I mean, is it like a place that they knew together? Like their childhood home, or does it feel like they're in a different place altogether?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  No, it's always seems to be a bit of familiar. So it's not like near death in that they're not out of their body. Right? They don't have that experience. They don't see themselves dead, none of that stuff. They're just in the presence, like a lot of them, they're, some of our most beautiful videos, they're just sitting around their kitchen table. It's always bothered me that they're sitting there with dead people and that's just okay. Again, the most striking thing in all of our videos is the absence of fear. But no, they're not anywhere special. They're just in, they're amongst the familiar. Whatever puts them back together best is where they go.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  That could be a childhood home, for example, but it's about the familiar.

• 43:05Ky Dickens?

  What do you think that means about consciousness though? Cause it does, it just makes it feel like time is irrelevant.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  That's the thing that blows me away. And that took me a long time because again, I didn't want to, I wasn't trying to figure that piece of it out. But it just dawns on you, you know, you're sitting there with somebody, you know, in their ninth decade and they can recall stuff. And it will freak out the family, that part that they can remember all of this with such clarity. You know, I, I had somebody who was in her eighties and she was, her father was loving and her mother wasn't. And she had this life outside of her home with the father. He was a mailman. He was very affectionate, expressive. And so he would meet him in the mail route.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  And they would go hand in hand together through the neighborhood. And think of this, Chris, 70 something years earlier, and she's recounting conversations and gossip with each neighbor she's going along. So there's something about recall, something is rekindled in memory. That is in opposition to what should be a failing mind. So there's something accessible at a spiritual level that's hard to explain.

• 44:24Ky Dickens?

  Do they ever experience in the vision of religious figure or something like that? Like, how common is that type of experience?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Terms of religion, we struggled with this and others have found the same thing. Religion's actually far less common.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I remember we first had this results and I worked with a woman who's super Catholic. And she said, I said, I'm sorry, there just, it's not a lot of symbolism. And she said, what's it about? I said, well, love and forgiveness. And she goes, duh. So it's, the idea is that it's consistent with the tenets of faith. There's a hospice chaplain named Carrie Egan, and she writes this beautiful piece that this is not incongruent to faith at all. She says, you know, if, if we believe God is love, and we think that's real, then we first learn about God. We learn about love in our first and last classroom of love is our family.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  So that's where we go.

• 45:24Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. To ask, like, these experiences happen universally, right? Whether race, creed, religion.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  There's no distinction between, even a sinner's or get to, to feel something at the end. There doesn't seem to be any predictive value to it at all.

• 45:45Ky Dickens?

  That's wonderful. I mean, it is, that's wonderful. So regardless of like, whether you're the most faithful devout, you know, Catholic, or Jew, or Muslim, or completely atheist, these experiences happen regardless.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we really have looked at that. Yeah. And one of the things we were wondering was whether, that we're looking at is whether your spiritual beliefs are either enhanced by this, your religious conviction was either enhanced, or informed, or changed. And it's still, we're not seeing anything, though.

• 46:19Ky Dickens?

  So, so it's universal.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's ultimately, you know, when medicine fails and you're dying, nature takes over and takes its rightful place. And dying becomes what it's always been, which is a human experience. That has dimensions beyond the physical, right? There's profound spirituality. And there's seen and unseen. And it's universal.

• 46:49Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. Are there any like particular cases that really stand out that are just like, ah, gets you in your heart, or really stops you in your tracks?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, obviously, the children reach you in a different way because they're there have a level of sophistication that you can't even imagine.

• 47:06Ky Dickens?

  What do you mean by that, though? For the children, they have a different level of sophistication?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  I think the skepticism and the scrutiny and coupled with their honesty and transparency, out of the mouths of babes kind of thing, is more of a direct window into what can be experienced.

• 47:23Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  And they have such a unique vantage point. And at the same time, they're not grieved, they're not, they don't have the same anticipatory grief because they don't understand mortality. They're just living in that moment with this kind of renewed faith for that day. And they're somehow full of love still. Is just, is just, you know, is, on one hand, it's beyond your imagination to think of a child's death, but it's also so restorative to think that they're still full, full of life and of love. I think those are probably the most meaningful for me.

• 48:03Ky Dickens?

  I know you've talked about people really engaging with seeing, talking to people who, you know, we, the people in the room can't see. Is it always really peaceful or can it be disruptive and scary?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  The disruptive ones are, tend to be, they're more delirium. So the delirium is never a good experience and it's very common at the end of life. It's actually the symptom we see as much of as physical pain, so kind of disorganized thinking. And those are horrific and people can kind of vacillate back and forth. Pure distressing dreams without any inherent value are not something that we're seeing in this category.

• 48:40Ky Dickens?

  And how often, I've, you know, I mean, my brother's actually told me about this, who works in hospice care, that sometimes he'll see people reaching out, reaching up. What is that and how often is that

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Hippocrates described it.

• 48:52Ky Dickens?

  Who did?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine.

• 48:55Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's again, this is this thing of nothing new but lost. So describe the whole experiences. Basically, you're dreaming virtually and you don't dream. You're lying on a beach and waters going by. You're, you're, there's something in front of you, so you reach and you pick. That's very common.

• 49:16Ky Dickens?

  And do people ever describe what they're reaching and picking for?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that tends to be more delirium. And basically, when you normally dream, you actually have no body tone. And when you, that becomes uncoupled, you're delirious. So you're actually in your dream. So that's when people fly out of bed, they want things off, they reach and they pick.

• 49:34Ky Dickens?

  Okay. And is there any difference in, in what you see occurring with people who have dementia? Who, who might be like going out of their mind or body possibly more? Or people on the spectrum? Have you noticed any differences in how these experiences?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  No, I, I think it's probably the thing that pisses me off the most is that we, medicine has this way of putting a currency, particularly in dementia, where we talk about them and number them by deficit. That's how we communicate as doctor to doctor.

• 50:10Ky Dickens?

  What do you mean by that?

• 50:11Speaker 02

  We label them understandably so that they're quantified, their loss of cognitive function. Their, their, their scores of severity of loss. And what that does by, by focusing on who they aren't, it misses who they are. And people with dementia still have personal histories and emotional paths. And that gets blocked out if you're only talking about what they can't do. And I mean, I don't make to me, to make them childlike, but I, there is similarities in the fact that I think they're disinhibited in a way to experience things very clearly. I think that they can do this in a more immersive sense.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  So a great video of a woman who is dying and you're expecting escalating psychogenic distress. And more and more, her daughter tells a story beautifully. She's having this great life because every time she closes her eyes, she's with her deceased husband, Gary. To the point, they're very close to her dying day. The daughter gets a call, she's trying to get out of the nursing home because she's trying to get to her wedding day. So you'll often see them do it in very rich ways that transforms them, not just, and again, these, these aren't memories, but as, as much they are, become experiences for them.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  I had somebody with Down syndrome who had ovarian cancer and a big belly from a siting. And she was always very maternal and carried around dolls, talked to dolls, and this became her baby. And she lived her dying as though she was in, in pregnancy.

• 51:54Ky Dickens?

  Oh my gosh, wow.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:09Ky Dickens?

  If you were to explain now to students, having gathered all this research, you know, new people coming in to work in hospice, what would you say? What would you say that they, someone must know about death and dying?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  I would first tell you what medicine isn't equipped to do, which is medicine, you know, the art of medicine is obscured by its science and that our organ system approached and our transactional approach to care actually is, is a poor fit for dying, which is life closure.

• 52:44Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  And that we aren't in that space to deal with the totality of what a dying person is going through. So unless you're willing to step out of that traditional or contemporary role and first accept yourself that you're not curative, but you can be a comforter.

• 53:06Ky Dickens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  And to be a comforter, you better be, better attuned to what, not what you see, but what the patient is experiencing.

• 53:13Ky Dickens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  And once you enter that conversation, then you can be of help.

• 53:19Ky Dickens?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  I think we've asked the superficial questions and we asked them in a way that

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Was a rebuttal to a skeptical medical community. I think we're getting better at asking better, deeper questions. So we proved it happens, we proved they're not confused, we covered the thematics of them. I think understanding the spiritual dimensions of this at a deeper level becomes very, very important.

• 53:52Ky Dickens?

  And do you think our scientific model, or even like instruments, if you will, are even equipped to explain or study consciousness at the end of life right now?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I don't. But I think we can get to a better level of understanding by gathering inputs, particularly from the psychedelic world.

• 54:12Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Which basically is showing what happens organically by using an exogenous kind of drug or plant earlier and upstream. It's, it's, the parallels are remarkable, right? I think they see themselves again as outside of themselves, as something larger. They experience something at a sensory level that's beautiful and wondrous.

• 54:37Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  But I think what's wonderful is the fear dissipates.

• 54:42Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  And that happens naturally. And I love the idea of taking an upstream in illness where you can change the experience of dying earlier. So that all that kind of psychogenic existential pain could be addressed.

• 55:00Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Is, is just magnificent. There's a whole world. And I think, again, it's similar to the end of life experiences that it's in us.

• 55:09Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  It's, it's just tinkering in a way that, that brings it to surface. It's wonderful.

• 55:15Ky Dickens?

  Has there been any research on psychedelics given to people dying? Maybe a year out? And, and what's that experience like for those people?

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Oh, it's unbelievable. There's a, it's part of a film, a documentary with Lynette Walworth, who's worth talking to. What she did was she worked with indigenous in Australia and the Amazon. And she came across my work and she phoned me and she said, you've discovered nothing new. I go, yeah. And she goes, these people have language for it. And then what she did was she brought shamans into the care model in a palliative care patients and had them give the psychedelics in hand in hand with a psychiatrist who starts out skeptical and ends up having his eyes opened.

• 56:04Ky Dickens?

  What were the people saying on psychedelics that were in palliative care?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it just that they recognize that they're not really gone, but they're a part of something larger, that it's peaceful, and they almost become structurally changed. The fear goes, the sorrow goes, the sense of loss goes. They just come out, there's something transcendent about it, and they're enlightened while dying.

• 56:29Ky Dickens?

  It's so frustrating that this happens to people so often, like right at the end of death, and we don't realize it when we need it sometimes when we're living, right?

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Well, and that's what I would like to see, because we're catching people just towards the end.

• 56:42Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  And it would be nice to see them upstream.

• 56:46Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:47Ky Dickens?

  Absolutely. I mean, it is, it's just, it's such a comforting thought, I think, for a lot of people. And I think there's an epidemic of loneliness. It's plaguing this country, especially men. And you think of that feeling that people have of, I'm alone, I'm alone, no one loves me, I'm unlovable. And then you get this moment, weeks or days or months before you die, where you're like, wait, I'm not alone.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:13Ky Dickens?

  And I just wish that could happen for people earlier.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Well, and you, and you look at the futility of so much of the drug therapy, and the fact that you can establish some sort of neuroplasticity with the use of these medicines. And the, I think it's fascinating, there's nothing new here, right? It's always been. Yeah, we're missing a therapeutic opportunity. There's a, there's a rapid proliferation of work. We'll be starting work on ketamine. We've seen it with ketamine. We've used ketamine for years for pain, and those people come out completely different. So, yeah, it's a great opportunity. But I just think it's fascinating that it aligns with our work, right?

• 57:51Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So with all that in mind, I guess, like a few more questions, first being with the work on. Happening around psychedelics and just, I feel like the whole world seeming a little bit more open to topics like this and conversations around this type of stuff than they were even five, 10 years ago. Do you find like families walking in more open to this, more willing to talk about it, or even patients, or the scientific community? Like, where do you see shifts and where don't you see shifts?

• 58:20Speaker 02

  I don't see shifts in the medical community, right? Which is, and these aren't bad people, but the, the interaction with the patient is in a value-based system is reduced to its most efficient moment. 15-minute pauses, right? Spot welding and flybys.

• 58:37Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  So they've extinguished any hope for a broader kind of interface. So I don't see it happening in medicine. There's no billable codes for talking about people like this, right? It only grew out of hospice because they create, the expectation is you take the time, the time taken is the time needed.

• 58:56Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  So it's a completely different model. I could never have done this in mainstream medicine. So I don't see, and again, I think we are so self-enamored with technology and science that we've lost the other side of medicine. So I don't see it happening. And I've got data on this with our young doctors, our medical students. You ask them what's important, you ask an old person what's important, and they're oppositional. So I just think, I don't see it coming there, unfortunately. I think it comes from larger public.

• 59:27Ky Dickens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Who again, want a different, they want to have a say, and they're looking for something, and they're demanding now. I mean, the doc, it's not longer a patriarchal doctor who they're going to listen to. They're going to claim that's going to put a stake in the ground, and this is what I want. Whether it's death cafes, whether it's made, whether it's hospice care, it's basically a pull away from a traditional medical-based model. And they're, they're going to, they're going to do the right thing. They're going to invent different things like psychedelics and experiment.

• 1:00:03Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  They're taking control of the conversation around dying.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Our problem is we get so much NDE stuff and it's just so different.

• 1:00:12Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  And it should be different, right? This isn't a trial run.

• 1:00:14Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  They're not going back.

• 1:00:16Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  And so there isn't, they're not given work.

• 1:00:20Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  They don't have questions that need answered.

• 1:00:23Ky Dickens?

  Right.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  So it's just really cool. And that makes sense, given where they are.

• 1:00:27Ky Dickens?

  Yes. And now for you, after being opposed to death, terrified of it, didn't want to talk about it, adverse to anything to do with it. What's your, how do you feel about death now?

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Well, I'm also a cancer patient. So I've had to wrestle with this a lot. So I had to switch in a day from doctor looking at this to a very vulnerable, ill person.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Having to think about this. And it's a really weird experience.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  I was fearful of the process of dying, having witnessed so much death. What I see of the dying and my colleagues who work in this space will tell you. We see more affirmation of life than denial of life, right? So we're, we see the best of humanity caring, seeing other people care for their loved ones. So that part of it doesn't frighten me. I'm just as scared as the next guy, but not for self. I'm scared because I have an unfinished life. In the sense, people are dependent on me, particularly one child.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  So it's that pain I feel is not being able to be who I need to be and leaving somebody. It's not the actual process. And, and having gone through illness, you know, you come out the other side. It, it, it's so hard to describe, but you come out.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  I think a better version of who you were than when you went in. In weird and wonderful ways. So I don't, I don't like to regret it, but, so the actual dying process, not fearful.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  It's just, and it's not about me. And we see that, we're actually doing a very interesting study. The thing people get wrong about dying. Is they misunderstand hope and they misunderstand fear. Hope transitions kind of for cure to hope to others. So in our study and in all of our filming, what's fascinating is everyone wanting to contribute. They look like shit. They be drooling, half dressed, hair in the all missing, whatever. And they just want to contribute. So it's this idea of giving for something without secondary gain that is just so magnificent. They just want to, they want the words to matter, right?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  And that never leaves right until the very end of their life. And then fear also seems to dissipate.

• 1:03:10Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  And you watch the videos, I don't have, we don't have any where you see fear.

• 1:03:17Ky Dickens?

  That's so great.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's a better story.

• 1:03:19Ky Dickens?

  Yeah. And have you looked at how other cultures look at this? Or when you presented this research to other cultures, do they say duh? I mean, or, or is it like, you know, is this a universal thing?

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of the best work has been done in other cultures. There's many cultures where this is the way that they maintain their connectivity to their ancestors. Right? The idea that this continuity, we, we are the ones who demarcate death with as a finality. Whereas other cultures viewed as a way to maintain their ancestral connection. So that they don't feel gone from the, there, there isn't that endpoint in the same way we view it. So, yeah, the cultural piece is always there.

• 1:04:00Ky Dickens?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Ky Dickens?

  Well, thank you. I mean, this has been such an enriching conversation, moving and uplifting.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is. It's one of the things people get wrong. They assume that we must be depressed or depressing. If you came into our work environment, you'd be surprised.

• 1:04:16Ky Dickens?

  That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. And if any of you want to explore this further, we've uploaded more videos to the Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass, featuring additional patients describing their end of life visions and experiences in their own words. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy. Technical directing, audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth P. W. And original logo and cover art by Ben Candora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer and host.