"We need to treat the patient, not only the disease; overall quality of life at the end of life is important,” says Pei C. Grant, director of research at Hospice Buffalo. She and her colleagues suggest that families and practitioners talk about dreams with patients—who are often excited to share their dreams when asked about them. Doing so allows patients to review their life, process feelings about death and come to terms with past experiences. “Just being there and listening—that's really what the patient wants,” Grant says. Acknowledging the personal significance of these end-of-life experiences may help patients and families through the difficult transition from dying to death.
For the full article on Vivid Dreams Comfort the Dying please visit:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vivid-dreams-comfort-the-dying/
Dreams are not only supportive at the end of life, they help us process trauma and unfinished business at any time in life. Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. The precise experiences we have in our dreams may not be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. Our dream stories work with the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This mechanism fulfills an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation, the part of sleep in which we are dreaming, is increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short, dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories. Working with dreams can enhance their already healing effect.
Recent research points to the value of paying attention to our dreams. In her article "Vivid Dreams Comfort the Dying", Emma Badgery reports on a study done at a the Hospice & Palliative Care in which patients were asked daily about dreams and visions. She noted that dreams "bring about a sense of peace, a change is perspective or acceptance of death, suggesting that medical professionals should recognize dreams and visions as a positive part of the dying process." Not only did dreams give these patients a support in preparation for death, it helped them revisit and often heal distressing life experiences and trauma.
For more information about Dream Work and Embodied Imagination, click here or contact me.