Deathbed Visions: What Hospice Research Reveals About Dying

On video, three weeks before he died, a patient named Paul describes something he has been living with for days. He has had roughly fifteen dreams about his late wife. She appears in light blue, sometimes in a suit, sometimes in a gown, and once or twice she has given him a little beauty-pageant wave. He has heard her voice only a handful of times. Hospice physician and neurobiologist Christopher Kerr, who appears in a 2026 episode of The Diary of a CEO, treats Paul's account as data rather than anecdote. Across roughly 1,500 patient interviews and nearly three decades of practice, Kerr says the pattern is common: most dying people have intense dreams or visions, the people in them are usually those who loved them without conditions, and the experiences feel real to the dreamer. He argues that dying is a gradual, peaceful dimming rather than a violent medical event, that priorities collapse toward relationships, and that some people use their final weeks to repair old wounds. This piece works through his findings, the methods behind them, the questions he admits remain open, and what they mean for anyone who will one day sit at a bedside.

Why would a hospice doctor interview people who are about to die?

Kerr did not set out to study deathbed experience. He describes arriving at hospice "completely unprepared to be a doctor of the dying." His explanation for the gap is blunt: "Medical school prepares you really to defeat death, not to care for those who are dying." What changed his thinking was working alongside nurses, who were more attuned to what patients were actually living through. He came to see the patient's perspective as the one that matters, and to see patients as people with "rich emotional and personal lives."

That shift turned into a research program. Kerr says his team deliberately rules out confusion states before counting anything as a meaningful experience. They have also studied whether the suffering of dying produces any post-traumatic growth, looked at the effect of these experiences on children, and examined how they shape bereavement among the people left behind. The method is slow and interview-heavy, and it is built on the premise that what a dying person reports is evidence worth taking seriously.

He also frames the project as a matter of correcting a picture. In his view, the medical model looks at organ failure and disease management, while the patient is living through something far more inward. "Let's look instead what the patients actually experiencing towards the end of their life," is how he puts the aim in the conversation.

What do deathbed visions actually look like?

The headline figure is the one that draws the most attention. Kerr says that "nearly 90% of people start to have very intense dreams or visions as they get closer to death, and it's unlike anything they've ever experienced." The episode's own description puts the share at over 80 percent, so the figure should be read as a strong majority rather than a precise census. The experiences cluster in the final one or two weeks of life, and Kerr says their frequency rises as death approaches. He links this to changes in the body: "Dying is progressive sleep. Your sleep architecture changes, your sleep cycles change." As sleep shifts, people drift into what he calls inner experiences, and reflection and introspection become more prominent.

Two features set these dreams apart from ordinary dreaming, according to Kerr. The first is their realism. The team asks patients to rate how real the experience was on a scale from 0 to 10. "It's always a 10," Kerr says. "So it feels like this actually happened." The second is the absence of dread. "What you'll notice in all these videos that's so striking is the absolute absence of fear," he says. The dreams do not pretend the person is not dying, and the dreamers often struggle to find words for what they have seen. They tend to report that their loved ones seem whole again.

Kerr's team has also measured what brings patients the most comfort. On that scale, seeing the deceased rates above simply being with the living. That result is one reason he argues these visions deserve a place in how clinicians and families understand the process, rather than being dismissed as side effects.

Are these visions memory, delirium, or something more?

This is the most interesting question in the conversation, and Kerr is candid about how his answer has changed. "I would have told you before, when I started doing it, that this was a rekindled memory," he says. "It's like looking at a picture." That was his working assumption, and it is a reasonable one. Memory of a lost parent or spouse is vivid and emotionally loaded.

But the cases he returns to strain that explanation. The first is the richness of detail. He describes a 95-year-old man who lost his mother when he was five, and who, decades later, describes smelling her perfume and hearing her voice. The second is the presence of communication. Kerr notes that these are not still images. "There's communication," he says. "So they're not in still form. This again, not like looking at a picture." That leads him to a cautious position: "There's a couple of features that stand out that suggest there's a lot more of than that, that there's almost this continued consciousness."

Kerr does not claim to have settled whether these experiences are biological, spiritual, or some combination. The conversation moves directly to that question, and he treats it as open. What he is clear about is the methodological point. Visions reported by people who are dying are not automatically explained away by delirium, because the research is designed to check for it.

What do dying people stop caring about?

Another theme that runs through the conversation is a dramatic change in priorities. Kerr says that dying people generally do not dwell on regret in the way outsiders might expect. Asked about it, he responds: "They're not thinking about do they regret something? No. Hell no. No, it's gone." What replaces it is a focus on relationships and on not becoming a burden to the people they love.

Kerr frames this as a kind of stripping away. "Death is this unbelievably truthful place. You're stripped to the bare bones of who you are." He then asks people to think about the best version of themselves, and the answer he describes is not an achievement. "It was never achieving something. It was being a son, it was being a brother, it was being a friend." The career, the status, and the legacy that absorb so much of living fall away. What remains is the quality of connection.

The same logic shapes what Kerr believes families and clinicians should talk about. If the dying are focused on love and on not being a weight, then the most useful conversations are often about presence, not about treatment plans or accomplishments.

Is dying as painful as we assume?

Here Kerr is at his most direct. He names one of the biggest myths outright: "that pain is expected, and that's actually not true." His account is that dying is usually far less painful than people fear. "It's less painful than people think," he says. "Oh gosh, by a mile." He is equally sharp about the silence around the subject: "It's damning how little conversations there are to address that issue."

That silence is part of a larger problem he describes. "After doing this for 30 years, what I've come to understand is we've lost our way with dying. There's such a lack of information, and that void is overwhelmingly felt with fear and mistruths." Much of the dread that surrounds death, in his telling, is not grounded in what dying actually involves. It is filled in by imagination, by media, and by the absence of honest accounts from people who have sat with the process.

This is why the patient-centered work matters so much to him. Video was part of the method for a reason. Kerr explains that the team filmed patients early because they expected a medical audience to carry a picture of dying patients as "either compromised or feeble-minded." Putting the actual people on screen, lucid and speaking for themselves, is a way of correcting that image.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

The episode's broader argument is that human life is defined less by individual accomplishment than by interdependence and love. Kerr's research on post-traumatic growth points in that direction. The episode's summary describes terminal patients who frequently undergo profound psychological transformation and who resolve deep-seated childhood trauma in their final days. Kerr's own framing is that the dying are stripped down to who they are, and that who they are turns out to be defined by the people they loved and were loved by.

For a general reader, the practical takeaways are modest but concrete. Fear of dying is often built on misinformation. Pain is not the default. The visions many people report are not reliably dismissed as confusion. And the conversations that seem to matter most at the end are about relationships rather than achievement. None of this resolves the metaphysical question, which Kerr leaves open, but it changes what a person might prepare for and what they might say.

Where to go from here

• Watch the full episode of The Diary of a CEO featuring Christopher Kerr, which includes the patient videos and his discussion of misconceptions about death.
• Read Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End, the book Kerr describes as aiming to destigmatize the dying process.
• If you are caring for someone who is dying, ask them open questions about what matters to them now, and listen without rushing to correct what they describe.
• Consider talking with your own family, before a crisis, about what you would want the final weeks to look like, including who you would want near you.