Dreaming Beyond Death – When the Time Comes To Pop

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., and the Reverend Patricia Bulkley.  Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions.  Beacon Press, 2005.

“I am sailing again at night in uncharted waters and the old sense of adventure comes back.  I feel the tingle of excitement again, of pushing through the waves in the vast, dark, empty sea but knowing somehow I am right on course.”

This is the dream of a retired sea captain, in his mid-80s and dying of bone cancer.  It appears in the opening pages of this remarkable, inspirational book, a collaboration of Presbyterian minister and hospice counselor Patricia (“Tish”) Bulkley and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley.  The book has been around for a while, but I was drawn to it only recently because–though I’m still in my 70s and feel pretty healthy–recent bloodwork has revealed to me a latent condition which, if nothing else gets me over the next ten years or so, may indeed be what carries me off into that “vast, dark, empty sea” awaiting us all.

Not the voice of doom, exactly, but a wake-up call.  The kind of thing that gets you to thinking.

For the old captain, his dream was transformative, turning his fear and despair at his approaching death into a serene and perhaps even joyful expectancy.  That is a lot to ask of a dream.  But, say the authors (mother and son, despite their different spellings of the family name), it’s a gift, perhaps more common than we know, brought to us by our dreaming selves in the days or hours before death.  Our task and opportunity is to be aware of the possibility and reality of such dreams.  To recognize them as the powerful and benign religious experiences they are.

Not that they’re a guarantee that there’s anything beyond death.  The authors are very clear on this point.  Pre-death dreams are not the equivalent of near-death experiences, which can and have been invoked–whether legitimately or not, the authors refuse to take a stand–as foretastes of an Other Side.  But religion, with which our dreams are bound up, can do more than dangle before us a promise of immortality.  It can ease our acceptance of mortality.

The experiencing of such dreams goes back very far in human history.  Socrates is supposed to have dreamed, three nights before his execution, of “a gloriously beautiful woman dressed in white robes” who spoke to him in the language of the Iliad: “Socrates, to the pleasant land of Phthia on the third day thou shalt come.”  Some 600 years later, in 203 CE, a Christian woman named Perpetua kept a record of the dreams that came to her as she waited in prison for her martyr’s death.  In one of them, “I saw an immense garden, and in it a grey-haired man sat in shepherd’s garb … milking sheep. … He raised his head, looked at me, and said: ‘I am glad you have come, my child.’  He called me over to him and gave me, as it were, a mouthful of the milk he was drawing; and I took it into my cupped hands and consumed it.”

She awoke “with the taste of something sweet in my mouth.”

Of all the dreams in this book, the one that affected me most powerfully was that of a boy named Scott, a high school sophomore who discovered suddenly that he had a brain tumor and only a couple of weeks to live.  He sorrowed over his coming death.  He sorrowed, above all, that he would never get his driver’s license, with all that that means to a teenage boy.

And then he dreamed.

He dreamed of a schoolmate, a popular senior in his high school named Ryan who a few months before had been killed in an automobile accident.  He dreamed that “Ryan was alive again, sitting in a red convertible, offering Scott a ride.  Happily, Scott said yes.  He got in the car, and away they drove.”

To which the Bulk(e)leys comment: just as the dying sailor “envisioned death as a journey across the infinite sea, Scott’s dream imagines death as a liberating ride on the open road.”  In consequence, Scott found himself with “a new view of death, and he told Tish he actually felt excited at where the journey was going to take him.”

This is all very heartening; but, I am bound to object, all very false.  Reading about the sailor, about Socrates, about Scott, I couldn’t help but remember Freud’s maxim that dreams are wish fulfillments.  What reality forbids us, our dreams allow.

Whether there’s a life after death, we don’t know; our current scientific paradigm seems to declare it impossible.  This we do know: our whole being is programmed to resist death, to ward it off by any means possible.  When resistance fails, when reality offers only despair–how heartbreakingly human, how pathetic it is that our dreams step in with comforting fantasy.  With a deceitful assurance that death isn’t really death.

As it happens, the authors have gotten there before me.  They’ve anticipated this objection and responded to it.

It’s the old William James test for religious teachings–not of their truth, which is unknowable, but their effects.  “By their fruits ye shall know them.”  Do these glowing images of the Beyond offer a flight from the living reality of dying–I know that sounds paradoxical, but it’s true, while you’re dying you’re still alive–or a superior way of coping with it?  The answer seems clear.

Again and again, the dying are brought by their dreams to accept death with serenity, with confidence, with hope.  Emerging from the catatonic depression in which they’d been sunk, and remaining truly alive until their very last moment.  Not fleeing their reality, but accepting and embracing it.

And it seems to me there is hope, even when you’re dying, even–or perhaps especially–when you accept that there is nothing beyond.  This hope is that you can transcend your ego and its demand to perpetuate itself, to let yourself sink into the stream of existence that was flowing long before your ego made itself known, and will keep flowing long after the ego is gone.  Like one of the myriad bubbles cast up by a brook, floating upon the running waters, destined after a few seconds to pop.  A catastrophe for the bubble, but to the brook–only part of its enduring life.

I’ve earlier written on this blog, that for me this is what spirituality is: taking on the point of view of the brook, transcending my own bubble-hood.

When the time comes for me to pop, as my body has recently reminded me it will, it may be my dreams that will make this possible.  I will pray to have them.