9 ms·

The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind

179 points by anarbadalov 2y ago

tamaharbor 2y ago
Just before my mom died recently, she told me that my dad (died in 1997) had finally come to take her home. I am OK with that.
ImHereToVote 2y ago
I often notice these demented moments before I fall asleep. Completely nonsensical thoughts like the argument from bear bicyclist study when you need to turnkey.
- croisillon 2y ago
  at the beginning of the night i regularly have this strain of thought: "oh shit i'm still not sleeping? but i was just planning a vacation on the moon, i must be sleeping"
  - aradox66 2y ago
    "I'm still awake" can become a kind of assumption that survives falling asleep
- aszantu 2y ago
  Sleep writing is funny Put a piece of paper under the hand with a pencil, write down thoughts until you're gone, read in the morning - profit
  - aszantu 2y ago
    hehe, those who tried it, what did you get out of it?
- MadcapJake 2y ago
  Salvador Dali would hold an object like a spoon in his hand while sitting in front of his canvas and fall asleep. This would cause him to drop the spoon waking him back up and then he would draw what he saw.
- atiffany 2y ago
  Hypnagogia is the name of this state between sleep and wakefulness - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  In my youth I'd keep friends on the phone entirely too long, and sometimes fall asleep while talking. (How my friends tolerated me I'll never know...) Occasionally I'd realize I was saying something ridiculous and catch myself. Most times, though, they'd ask me for clarification about whatever crazy-sounding thing I said and I'd snap back to wakefulness (briefly). I wish I had recordings of some of those things I said. They left my mind almost immediately (to the point that I couldn't respond to questions asked directly after whatever I'd said). It would be entertaining to know what I was saying. (I didn't ask friends at the time and, at >30 years ago, I doubt any of them remember.) I read to my daughter before bed. She drifts off sometimes when I'm reading "boring" stuff (at her request) and says fun things. I keep notes and ask her about it later. I enjoy the window into her mind.
- siavosh 2y ago
  I think these thoughts are happening all the time we just don't normally notice them. During the transition to sleep, some parts of our thinking mind start shutting off and the filter cracks and that's what we notice sometimes, if we remember.
  - ImHereToVote 2y ago
    It might be the latent space hidden in the deep parts of our brain.
- waltbosz 2y ago
  I've always had difficulty falling asleep and I often notice when I enter this state and I get excited because it means I'm about to fall asleep. I'm excited because the frustration of still being awake is over. Also, sometimes when I wake up I have a few minutes where nonsense ideas seem perfectly reasonable. Or it will feel like a complete loss of inhabitation.
  - derwiki 2y ago
    I similarly get excited, but regularly so excited that it wakes me back up.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rpaddock 2y ago
About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14. I asked him "Who are you talking to?" and got a rather rude response, not like him, "My mother" in a tone you give a five year old "go away kid you are bothering me". The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) is worth checking out if you have interest. I've never had a NDE, however I've spent a lot of time in their library in Durham North Carolina. https://iands.org https://iands.org
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14. Anecdotally, my grandad did the same thing a day before he died. Except he was talking to his best friend who's been dead a long time.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- hibikir 2y ago
  We don't even need to be all that close to death for this, just suffer sufficient brain damage. I have a family member that had enough mini strokes that, whenever they have something like an urinary infection, they disassociate from reality and start talking to dead people, and they understand reality as if they were children. It's how we detect infections, as the hallucinations come in pretty early. A course of antibiotics, and they are their normal elderly selves, remembering little of the previous week
  - pipes 2y ago
    Well this is a holy shit moment for me. My grand mother was having really strange hallucinations, like explaining how she was talking to people on TV and the neighbours came round and joined in too. I had never heard about the infection thing before. It was really upsetting my mum and no health care professional ever suggested it might be infections. This was ten years ago and she's dead now, but I wish I'd known then. It sounds very similar to your experience, they'd just randomly come and disappear after a while.
sys32768 2y ago
My mom passed recently. She battled Alzheimer's for 15 years, then passed five days after breaking her hip, even though she was singing and goofing around the day of the break. She was only 77. A month prior to this, she had begun to sometimes stay in her bed often half the day, lying awake looking up at the ceiling with the most joyous look of peace in her eyes, as if seeing something or someone very special, often whispering as if in dialogue. This went on for hours sometimes. I was incredibly moved at the time, but there were otherwise no indicators she was near death, so I filed it away as some new development in the progression of her disease. I now take great comfort knowing this is not uncommon among people who are soon to die, especially since she was unable to communicate the day she died.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  My great-grandma talked to several children that she miscarried when young.
namshe 2y ago
In some traditions it's not a hallucination taking place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo
- krapp 2y ago
  In some traditions it isn't interpreted as a hallucination taking place. But in reality, it is always a hallucination taking place, because the supernatural isn't real.
  - ChrisClark 2y ago
    It isn't?
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Unless you somehow possess the ultimate, complete and provably correct description of reality (which is, of course, an oxymoron), or direct access to the underlying territory (which would mean, of course, you are high), everything is a model, and a model is essentially just an interpretation.
    - krapp 2y ago
      Your argument is that unless one is omniscient and know everything with absolute certainty, one cannot know anything at all with any certainty, and therefore the models of science are no more or less valid than the models of religion. This is about as banal and useless a claim as one can imagine. The model of science is an interpretation of data based on observation and experimentation, with objectively verifiable results. The model of religion is literally just vibes. The rain happens because the man in the sky is angry. If you want to regress further into the solipsist trap and retort that no one can prove objective reality even exists then fine. At some point, to have a conversation, conversants must accept even simply for the sake of argument some minimal set of common axioms. Reality exists. Objective reality exists. Objective reality operates according to understandable rules. Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion. If you can't even get that far then I don't know what to tell you. Go talk to the machine elves living in your walls or something.
BSOhealth 2y ago
I don’t want to trivialize the positive aspects this can have on someone who otherwise might have a sad or challenging death, and to that extent perhaps it’s just an evolved mechanism to make us accept death more gracefully. But if you’ve ever stayed awake for many days or had other hallucinogenic experiences, you’ll know how powerfully thoughts can manifest. And how deep our memory actually goes. Clearly it’s inappropriate to vividly see your memories during waking life, but as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  Please describe what makes one's death a "sad death"
  - 2snakes 2y ago
    Real yoga is possible.
    - wutwutwat 2y ago
      That has what to do with this person saying a death is sad?
      - 2snakes 2y ago
        Bodies and minds can be transcended beyond suffering.
  - BSOhealth 2y ago
    Of course, I’d be happy to! That would be something in contrast to all the fortunate, welcomed, gleeful, and celebrated deaths we hear about frequently in Western news and experience in our own personal lives. Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.
  - MomsAVoxell 2y ago
aradox66 2y ago
"Terminal lucidity" is common and seems to undermine the notion that the physiology of the dying brain necessarily implies impaired function.
- caspper69 2y ago
  My great grandmother, who was 83 or 84 at the time, had had a brain tumor (which was removed once it got to between golf ball and baseball size) and was pretty far along into Alzheimer's as she got got close to her death. For the last several months, she wasn't able to feed or clothe herself, and she was basically immobile. The day she died, she got up, went to her room, made her bed (unthinkable in the state she was in), put on her "Sunday's best" and laid down peacefully in the middle of her bed and passed. Her daughter (my grandmother), was floored. She just said she must have just known it was her time, and that she had a few minutes of lucidity before dying. Whether there's any truth to that I'm not qualified to answer, but if you had seen the state she was in for quite some time prior to that day, her actions would certainly have been surprising to say the least.
  - acegopher 2y ago
    It's more common than you think, and it's called "terminal lucidity": https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/terminal-lucidity https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/terminal-luci...
- w10-1 2y ago
  Terminal lucidity as well as activity may happen when the brain/body realizes it is really losing it, and mounting any and all last reserves of energy, instead of conserving energy for a long healing process. So it's consistent with compromised physiology, when activation can overcome whatever is otherwise stupefying or immobilizing. Something similar happens in some recoveries which then fade. People will come out of a coma briefly and seem fine, and then go back, never to return. Very difficult to study. Also this is quite distinct from what you might have meant: for elderly who have accepted their death, they may experience peace with anything in their experience.
jawns 2y ago
> "Do not contradict, explain away, belittle or argue about what the person claims to have seen or heard," reads a short text that a hospice provides about the dying process. "Just because you cannot see or hear it does not mean it is not real to your loved one. Affirm his or her experience. They are normal and common." Not all hospice or elder-care providers recommend affirming hallucinations. Here's a quote from a nursing home guide that explores the ethical considerations of this practice: > Lying to someone with dementia, often termed “therapeutic lying,” poses a nuanced ethical dilemma. While entering a person’s altered reality can indeed reduce their immediate distress, it’s important to acknowledge that lying is still lying. > Over time, this practice may lead to confusion, especially in moments of clarity, and strain the trust and relationship between the patient and caregiver. > This complexity has led caregivers and professionals to explore alternative communication strategies that honor the truth while providing comfort and reducing agitation. Two such approaches are reflection and redirection. Reflection involves acknowledging the person’s feelings and statements without directly affirming the distorted reality or lying. Redirection gently shifts the conversation or activity towards something positive and engaging without directly contradicting the person’s beliefs.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  While this nursing home guide is interesting, it's important to acknowledge that it sounds like ChatGPT.
- 1659447091 2y ago
  The first example says it's "...about the dying process" The second example is for "...someone with dementia"
tsoukase 2y ago
Delirium, so called the organic psychosis, is the common end result of every diffuse brain dysfunction, so it be chemical toxicity, inflammation, trauma or most commonly senility-dementia. It's caused because of a chemical disturbance of the brain-'soup'. Any psychotic symptom can be manifested, not only visual hallucinations. Antipsychotic therapy has massively varied results
- nabla9 2y ago
  It's common with alcoholics when they start having withdrawal. Easy suggestibility is common. You hold a blank paper in front of someone in delirium and ask them to read what it says and they start reading like there was something there.
- w10-1 2y ago
  That's true, and very helpful for family members to understand. They're also often in a suggestible state. But it's not just full-on delirium; as others have noted, in the elderly even infections can trigger wishful escapades (even as the elderly fail to mount much fever). And the question remains: how to help the person (delirious or not), particularly when drugs are not effective (and you don't want to drug them into a stupor). It seems unhelpful to agitate them by arguing with them, even if the reality principle is normally the saner option. Do you "go with it"? My take is that it does help to respond so they know you're there, and really helps to rub feet or back, because body sensation is grounding. But mostly notice how driven you feel to help, or to get involved with managing other helpers, and be very patient with that. Telling the family it's enough for them to be there is often the best thing.
- cf100clunk 2y ago
  The title of this discussion thread reminded me of this: ''I have a tumour that's growing in my brain stem and it's pressing on collections of neurons that make me feel elated. I'm lucky. Half an inch over and maybe I'd be depressed about it all. But actually I feel fine. And when I die, when it kills me, those same neurons are gonna fail. And in failing, they're gonna put on my own private light show and I'm gonna fade into the light until I'm all gone and everything's just whiteness and silence.'' -- Robert, a psychologist facing his end days in UK TV drama Afterlife, series 2, episode 7, 2006. I copied that passage down years ago because I hope some day if I need help remaining stoic it will be there if I am aware. If not, they can find it in my collected notes. It goes well with the late film reviewer Roger Ebert's piece, ''I do not fear death'': https://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/ https://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/
cm2012 2y ago
My wife can be psychotic at times (in the medical meaning) and trying to argue against the delusions is useless, you just have to reflect and redirect.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ge96 2y ago
Oh man Brainstorm had a trippy scene about this
dr_dshiv 2y ago
My father, at one point, imagined himself on a Greek island. “Ouzo!” He’d offer from his hospital bed. He was an avid fisherman and his last words were, distinctly, “Big fish.” Yet, he was mostly unconscious for his last day. I spent time talking with him as he slept, massaging his hands and feet. Later we had a party for him and played music. Around 10 at night he began to die (the breathing changes). At the very end he opened his eyes, looked at my mother, sister and me, and passed. It was a beautiful death.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. We should all be so lucky.
  - rufugee 2y ago
    Agreed. Thank you. My day was made better by reading this.
- nfRfqX5n 2y ago
  I will be going through this very soon. Thanks for sharing
- grazing_fields 2y ago
  I wish my dad could have had the same experience. My parents were in denial the whole last few months, so he ended up passing away basically by himself in another state, with a relative whom he didn't like by his side. He had a similar experience of waking one last time and looking around, then passing. Such a terrible shame he didn't see any of his immediate family.
- boredemployee 2y ago
  Had a really similar experience with my dad, the only difference was that he was calling for his mom (that passed away many many years before) in the language of the country he was born. It was a really touching thing that I'll never forget.
- ljf 2y ago
jvanderbot 2y ago
I wish there was a place I could share the experience of my father's death. This doesn't seem to be it, though I appreciate everyone's story. Is there such a place?
- JosephK 2y ago
  Share it here. I want to hear it.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    It's not a very happy story. My father passed away in 2023. Our last discussion was in the parking lot of his apartment, discussing whether or not the milk in my car might spoil if I leave it there while I come up to visit for a bit. Later, he died walking his dog with my mom, though the ER "resuscitated" him. What I feel the worst about is the time between his heart attack and death, 4 days later. In that time the doctors reanimated him, like a zombie. They were able to elicit physical reactions by yelling his name, and poking him, I guess to make my mother feel better that he might still be there. Eventually, I noticed blood in his urine bag, ad the nurse looked at me weird when I noticed, and that night he died from a massive aneurysm. I missed his passing because my phone was on silent mode so I missed everyone's calls. I was watching the finale of Succession, and pressed "volume up" until it was max, but some time in the last few years Android decided that action shouldn't increase ringer volume. I am sad to have not been there. He now has a tree in my back yard, and I think about him often. He was a gregarious, brave, unabashed person who found the most joy in being a playground monitor.. and I'm lucky to have known him. But there's never enough time or enough reasons to make time, and no closure to be had in his death.
hexator 2y ago
Reminds me of the death-rattles from the Stormlight Archive series.
tasty_freeze 2y ago
Even in the best of cases, our perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions are often dramatically flawed. Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products ... and what comes out is often going to be gibberish, as the remaining working parts of the mind attempts to construct a coherent narrative from the broken fragments of sensory input and failing memories. I got interested in consciousness 35 years ago or so when I read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Although the various people depicted in the stories had some physical deficit due to a trauma of some kind, it vividly demonstrated how we rationalize our way through the world more than we reason our way through it. Our conscious mind is much more of a facade than we typically imagine. When people say, "Well, LLMs are just generating token N+1 from the previous N tokens, they really aren't thinking", I counter with this: we have been having this discussion -- are you at all aware of the stream of words coming out of your mouth, or are you hearing them the same time that I am? Yes, sometimes we have deliberate thought where we rehearse different lines of reasoning before uttering something, but 98% of the time we are spewing just like LLMs do. And when we do engage in deliberate thought, each of those trial sentences again just appears without consideration; we are simply post-hoc picking the one that feels best.
- Lammy 2y ago
  > Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products I think the enjoyable thing about recreational drugs is the way they alter the normally-imperceptible boundaries between body/mind/Self. It provides an opportunity to understand what each of those things really are and what each contributes to my sense of being. I don't see these examples as all too different even if they are failure modes :)
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    So what did you understand that you did not know before? Many people make the "opportunity to understand" claim, but I'm yet to hear anything meaningful coming out. Are you familiar with this joke: A guy decides to do drugs and keeps a notepad nearby to write down any profound revelations he has while high. The next morning he checks the notepad and finds he only wrote one thing: "The water is wet."
incanus77 2y ago
My dad had a fall and suffered a pretty bad brain injury a few years ago. He has since fully recovered aside from more frequent short-term memory loss, but during his multi-week hospital stay, many aspects of his personality, maturity, and abilities changed, almost to the point of extreme dementia. More relevant to this story, one incident I remember clearly was that he started talking about taking care of "him" and changing his diaper. Finally we got around to the fact that he was talking about his first nephew, who was born when my dad was quite young in the 1950s. My dad helped my aunt and grandma take care of him and it was his first exposure to caring for a child. All of those people are 30+ years out of existence now, so it was quite a flashback.
rglover 2y ago
Semi-related: not delirium, but if you haven't come across it, check out the "Everywhere at the end of time" series of albums. The music is written to track the timeline of dementia progressing [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc
- Fr0styMatt88 2y ago
  I was introduced to those albums through this haunting Doom playthrough, highly recommend: https://youtu.be/MwgytHBu4sg https://youtu.be/MwgytHBu4sg
raincom 2y ago
During final days before my grand mother's death, she was able to recall her childhood memories, asking her sons to bring her brother. Before that, she had some kind of memory loss. Anyway, here, we need some sort of neurological explanation: Childhood memories stay in the lower part of the brain, as I read it somewhere (probably Oliver Sacks'); the neurological basis of many memory loss is on top layers of brain, that's why sometimes people recall vividly of their childhood memories, even playing piano despite with dementia.
every 2y ago
My wife and I experienced this when my father died. We visited him hours before his death. He looked up at my wife, smiled and said "Mother, you came!" For the next while she sat beside him, rubbed his brow and engaged in small talk as his mother. When he fell asleep we left. He died during the night...
- Boogie_Man 2y ago
  Simply out of curiosity, does your wife bear even a slight resemblance to your grandmother when she was younger?
  - every 2y ago
    Mama Sally died when I was an infant but I have a studio photo of her. Parasol, large flowered bonnet and full length skirt. All very Edwardian from the early 1900's. As for the features, I look far more like her than my wife. Perhaps the trigger was my wife was a comforting female. She did quite a nice job of being a doting mother soothing an ailing 100 year old child...
optimalsolver 2y ago
I recommend this article on the kinds of things people actually say on their deathbeds: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-people-communicate-before-death/580303/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-pe... It usually doesn't make any kind of discernable sense. Probably the saddest example: >They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!”
steele 2y ago
Wish it wasn't happening to Apartheid Clyde
pugworthy 2y ago
When my sister was dying of cancer, she reached a point where she wasn’t speaking. So not exactly last words, but I remember holding her hand and she would give me two squeezes. I would like to think it was her ‘saying’ “Love you” or “Thank you” perhaps? I’d give her 3 back to say, “Love you too.”
yannis 2y ago
I had a NDE two years ago. I had a lucid experience, saw someone (looking like a pastor) telling me "Do not be afraid, the same way you had to be born to experience this world, we need to die to experience the other world", I then woke up. I am not religious. It did leave a strong impression on me and think about it often.
- qwertyuiop_ 2y ago
  Wow just wow ! Your comment has given me a new perspective on fear of death. Are you able to share what caused NDE ?
  - yannis 2y ago
    I had a heart attack while visiting a hospital for a check-up, so got lucky. Eventually had a stent inserted.
NaOH 2y ago
Peter Fenwick died in November 2024. The NY Times obituary last month described him as "a neuropsychiatrist who studied near-death experiences." I took note of his book, which I hope to read: The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences. In addition to his obituary, the Times published readers sharing their near-death experiences. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/science/near-death-experiences.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/science/near-death-experi... https://archive.is/cKBDL https://archive.is/cKBDL
matthest 2y ago
Many researchers consider death bed visioning (when the dying sees a loved one in their waning moments) as not a hallucination, definitionally speaking. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/magazine/deathbed-visions-research.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/magazine/deathbed-visions... Doesn't mean they're necessarily saying it's real (or not real for that matter), just that it doesn't fall under the strict definition of a hallucination.
childintime 2y ago
The hypothesis that consciousness arises from the brain has been proven unlikely (if not outright wrong) a long time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44. So maybe not go with the delirium hypothesis so easily.

179 points by anarbadalov 2y ago

Just before my mom died recently, she told me that my dad (died in 1997) had finally come to take her home. I am OK with that.

ImHereToVote 2y ago

I often notice these demented moments before I fall asleep. Completely nonsensical thoughts like the argument from bear bicyclist study when you need to turnkey.

croisillon 2y ago
at the beginning of the night i regularly have this strain of thought: "oh shit i'm still not sleeping? but i was just planning a vacation on the moon, i must be sleeping"
- aradox66 2y ago
  "I'm still awake" can become a kind of assumption that survives falling asleep
aszantu 2y ago
Sleep writing is funny Put a piece of paper under the hand with a pencil, write down thoughts until you're gone, read in the morning - profit
- aszantu 2y ago
  hehe, those who tried it, what did you get out of it?
MadcapJake 2y ago
Salvador Dali would hold an object like a spoon in his hand while sitting in front of his canvas and fall asleep. This would cause him to drop the spoon waking him back up and then he would draw what he saw.
atiffany 2y ago
Hypnagogia is the name of this state between sleep and wakefulness - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
EvanAnderson 2y ago
In my youth I'd keep friends on the phone entirely too long, and sometimes fall asleep while talking. (How my friends tolerated me I'll never know...) Occasionally I'd realize I was saying something ridiculous and catch myself. Most times, though, they'd ask me for clarification about whatever crazy-sounding thing I said and I'd snap back to wakefulness (briefly). I wish I had recordings of some of those things I said. They left my mind almost immediately (to the point that I couldn't respond to questions asked directly after whatever I'd said). It would be entertaining to know what I was saying. (I didn't ask friends at the time and, at >30 years ago, I doubt any of them remember.) I read to my daughter before bed. She drifts off sometimes when I'm reading "boring" stuff (at her request) and says fun things. I keep notes and ask her about it later. I enjoy the window into her mind.
siavosh 2y ago
I think these thoughts are happening all the time we just don't normally notice them. During the transition to sleep, some parts of our thinking mind start shutting off and the filter cracks and that's what we notice sometimes, if we remember.
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  It might be the latent space hidden in the deep parts of our brain.
waltbosz 2y ago
I've always had difficulty falling asleep and I often notice when I enter this state and I get excited because it means I'm about to fall asleep. I'm excited because the frustration of still being awake is over. Also, sometimes when I wake up I have a few minutes where nonsense ideas seem perfectly reasonable. Or it will feel like a complete loss of inhabitation.
- derwiki 2y ago
  I similarly get excited, but regularly so excited that it wakes me back up.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rpaddock 2y ago

About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14. I asked him "Who are you talking to?" and got a rather rude response, not like him, "My mother" in a tone you give a five year old "go away kid you are bothering me". The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) is worth checking out if you have interest. I've never had a NDE, however I've spent a lot of time in their library in Durham North Carolina. https://iands.org https://iands.org

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>About eight hours before my father died he was having a conversation with his unseen mother, who died when he was 14. Anecdotally, my grandad did the same thing a day before he died. Except he was talking to his best friend who's been dead a long time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hibikir 2y ago
We don't even need to be all that close to death for this, just suffer sufficient brain damage. I have a family member that had enough mini strokes that, whenever they have something like an urinary infection, they disassociate from reality and start talking to dead people, and they understand reality as if they were children. It's how we detect infections, as the hallucinations come in pretty early. A course of antibiotics, and they are their normal elderly selves, remembering little of the previous week
- pipes 2y ago
  Well this is a holy shit moment for me. My grand mother was having really strange hallucinations, like explaining how she was talking to people on TV and the neighbours came round and joined in too. I had never heard about the infection thing before. It was really upsetting my mum and no health care professional ever suggested it might be infections. This was ten years ago and she's dead now, but I wish I'd known then. It sounds very similar to your experience, they'd just randomly come and disappear after a while.

sys32768 2y ago

My mom passed recently. She battled Alzheimer's for 15 years, then passed five days after breaking her hip, even though she was singing and goofing around the day of the break. She was only 77. A month prior to this, she had begun to sometimes stay in her bed often half the day, lying awake looking up at the ceiling with the most joyous look of peace in her eyes, as if seeing something or someone very special, often whispering as if in dialogue. This went on for hours sometimes. I was incredibly moved at the time, but there were otherwise no indicators she was near death, so I filed it away as some new development in the progression of her disease. I now take great comfort knowing this is not uncommon among people who are soon to die, especially since she was unable to communicate the day she died.

inglor_cz 2y ago
My great-grandma talked to several children that she miscarried when young.

namshe 2y ago

In some traditions it's not a hallucination taking place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo

krapp 2y ago
In some traditions it isn't interpreted as a hallucination taking place. But in reality, it is always a hallucination taking place, because the supernatural isn't real.
- ChrisClark 2y ago
  It isn't?
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Unless you somehow possess the ultimate, complete and provably correct description of reality (which is, of course, an oxymoron), or direct access to the underlying territory (which would mean, of course, you are high), everything is a model, and a model is essentially just an interpretation.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Your argument is that unless one is omniscient and know everything with absolute certainty, one cannot know anything at all with any certainty, and therefore the models of science are no more or less valid than the models of religion. This is about as banal and useless a claim as one can imagine. The model of science is an interpretation of data based on observation and experimentation, with objectively verifiable results. The model of religion is literally just vibes. The rain happens because the man in the sky is angry. If you want to regress further into the solipsist trap and retort that no one can prove objective reality even exists then fine. At some point, to have a conversation, conversants must accept even simply for the sake of argument some minimal set of common axioms. Reality exists. Objective reality exists. Objective reality operates according to understandable rules. Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion. If you can't even get that far then I don't know what to tell you. Go talk to the machine elves living in your walls or something.

BSOhealth 2y ago

I don’t want to trivialize the positive aspects this can have on someone who otherwise might have a sad or challenging death, and to that extent perhaps it’s just an evolved mechanism to make us accept death more gracefully. But if you’ve ever stayed awake for many days or had other hallucinogenic experiences, you’ll know how powerfully thoughts can manifest. And how deep our memory actually goes. Clearly it’s inappropriate to vividly see your memories during waking life, but as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.

wutwutwat 2y ago
Please describe what makes one's death a "sad death"
- 2snakes 2y ago
  Real yoga is possible.
  - wutwutwat 2y ago
    That has what to do with this person saying a death is sad?
    - 2snakes 2y ago
      Bodies and minds can be transcended beyond suffering.
- BSOhealth 2y ago
  Of course, I’d be happy to! That would be something in contrast to all the fortunate, welcomed, gleeful, and celebrated deaths we hear about frequently in Western news and experience in our own personal lives. Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.
- MomsAVoxell 2y ago

aradox66 2y ago

"Terminal lucidity" is common and seems to undermine the notion that the physiology of the dying brain necessarily implies impaired function.

caspper69 2y ago
My great grandmother, who was 83 or 84 at the time, had had a brain tumor (which was removed once it got to between golf ball and baseball size) and was pretty far along into Alzheimer's as she got got close to her death. For the last several months, she wasn't able to feed or clothe herself, and she was basically immobile. The day she died, she got up, went to her room, made her bed (unthinkable in the state she was in), put on her "Sunday's best" and laid down peacefully in the middle of her bed and passed. Her daughter (my grandmother), was floored. She just said she must have just known it was her time, and that she had a few minutes of lucidity before dying. Whether there's any truth to that I'm not qualified to answer, but if you had seen the state she was in for quite some time prior to that day, her actions would certainly have been surprising to say the least.
- acegopher 2y ago
  It's more common than you think, and it's called "terminal lucidity": https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/terminal-lucidity https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/terminal-luci...
w10-1 2y ago
Terminal lucidity as well as activity may happen when the brain/body realizes it is really losing it, and mounting any and all last reserves of energy, instead of conserving energy for a long healing process. So it's consistent with compromised physiology, when activation can overcome whatever is otherwise stupefying or immobilizing. Something similar happens in some recoveries which then fade. People will come out of a coma briefly and seem fine, and then go back, never to return. Very difficult to study. Also this is quite distinct from what you might have meant: for elderly who have accepted their death, they may experience peace with anything in their experience.

jawns 2y ago

> "Do not contradict, explain away, belittle or argue about what the person claims to have seen or heard," reads a short text that a hospice provides about the dying process. "Just because you cannot see or hear it does not mean it is not real to your loved one. Affirm his or her experience. They are normal and common." Not all hospice or elder-care providers recommend affirming hallucinations. Here's a quote from a nursing home guide that explores the ethical considerations of this practice: > Lying to someone with dementia, often termed “therapeutic lying,” poses a nuanced ethical dilemma. While entering a person’s altered reality can indeed reduce their immediate distress, it’s important to acknowledge that lying is still lying. > Over time, this practice may lead to confusion, especially in moments of clarity, and strain the trust and relationship between the patient and caregiver. > This complexity has led caregivers and professionals to explore alternative communication strategies that honor the truth while providing comfort and reducing agitation. Two such approaches are reflection and redirection. Reflection involves acknowledging the person’s feelings and statements without directly affirming the distorted reality or lying. Redirection gently shifts the conversation or activity towards something positive and engaging without directly contradicting the person’s beliefs.

jjmarr 2y ago
While this nursing home guide is interesting, it's important to acknowledge that it sounds like ChatGPT.
1659447091 2y ago
The first example says it's "...about the dying process" The second example is for "...someone with dementia"

tsoukase 2y ago

Delirium, so called the organic psychosis, is the common end result of every diffuse brain dysfunction, so it be chemical toxicity, inflammation, trauma or most commonly senility-dementia. It's caused because of a chemical disturbance of the brain-'soup'. Any psychotic symptom can be manifested, not only visual hallucinations. Antipsychotic therapy has massively varied results

nabla9 2y ago
It's common with alcoholics when they start having withdrawal. Easy suggestibility is common. You hold a blank paper in front of someone in delirium and ask them to read what it says and they start reading like there was something there.
w10-1 2y ago
That's true, and very helpful for family members to understand. They're also often in a suggestible state. But it's not just full-on delirium; as others have noted, in the elderly even infections can trigger wishful escapades (even as the elderly fail to mount much fever). And the question remains: how to help the person (delirious or not), particularly when drugs are not effective (and you don't want to drug them into a stupor). It seems unhelpful to agitate them by arguing with them, even if the reality principle is normally the saner option. Do you "go with it"? My take is that it does help to respond so they know you're there, and really helps to rub feet or back, because body sensation is grounding. But mostly notice how driven you feel to help, or to get involved with managing other helpers, and be very patient with that. Telling the family it's enough for them to be there is often the best thing.
cf100clunk 2y ago
The title of this discussion thread reminded me of this: ''I have a tumour that's growing in my brain stem and it's pressing on collections of neurons that make me feel elated. I'm lucky. Half an inch over and maybe I'd be depressed about it all. But actually I feel fine. And when I die, when it kills me, those same neurons are gonna fail. And in failing, they're gonna put on my own private light show and I'm gonna fade into the light until I'm all gone and everything's just whiteness and silence.'' -- Robert, a psychologist facing his end days in UK TV drama Afterlife, series 2, episode 7, 2006. I copied that passage down years ago because I hope some day if I need help remaining stoic it will be there if I am aware. If not, they can find it in my collected notes. It goes well with the late film reviewer Roger Ebert's piece, ''I do not fear death'': https://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/ https://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/

cm2012 2y ago

My wife can be psychotic at times (in the medical meaning) and trying to argue against the delusions is useless, you just have to reflect and redirect.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ge96 2y ago

Oh man Brainstorm had a trippy scene about this

dr_dshiv 2y ago

My father, at one point, imagined himself on a Greek island. “Ouzo!” He’d offer from his hospital bed. He was an avid fisherman and his last words were, distinctly, “Big fish.” Yet, he was mostly unconscious for his last day. I spent time talking with him as he slept, massaging his hands and feet. Later we had a party for him and played music. Around 10 at night he began to die (the breathing changes). At the very end he opened his eyes, looked at my mother, sister and me, and passed. It was a beautiful death.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this. We should all be so lucky.
- rufugee 2y ago
  Agreed. Thank you. My day was made better by reading this.
nfRfqX5n 2y ago
I will be going through this very soon. Thanks for sharing
grazing_fields 2y ago
I wish my dad could have had the same experience. My parents were in denial the whole last few months, so he ended up passing away basically by himself in another state, with a relative whom he didn't like by his side. He had a similar experience of waking one last time and looking around, then passing. Such a terrible shame he didn't see any of his immediate family.
boredemployee 2y ago
Had a really similar experience with my dad, the only difference was that he was calling for his mom (that passed away many many years before) in the language of the country he was born. It was a really touching thing that I'll never forget.
ljf 2y ago

jvanderbot 2y ago

I wish there was a place I could share the experience of my father's death. This doesn't seem to be it, though I appreciate everyone's story. Is there such a place?

JosephK 2y ago
Share it here. I want to hear it.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  It's not a very happy story. My father passed away in 2023. Our last discussion was in the parking lot of his apartment, discussing whether or not the milk in my car might spoil if I leave it there while I come up to visit for a bit. Later, he died walking his dog with my mom, though the ER "resuscitated" him. What I feel the worst about is the time between his heart attack and death, 4 days later. In that time the doctors reanimated him, like a zombie. They were able to elicit physical reactions by yelling his name, and poking him, I guess to make my mother feel better that he might still be there. Eventually, I noticed blood in his urine bag, ad the nurse looked at me weird when I noticed, and that night he died from a massive aneurysm. I missed his passing because my phone was on silent mode so I missed everyone's calls. I was watching the finale of Succession, and pressed "volume up" until it was max, but some time in the last few years Android decided that action shouldn't increase ringer volume. I am sad to have not been there. He now has a tree in my back yard, and I think about him often. He was a gregarious, brave, unabashed person who found the most joy in being a playground monitor.. and I'm lucky to have known him. But there's never enough time or enough reasons to make time, and no closure to be had in his death.

hexator 2y ago

Reminds me of the death-rattles from the Stormlight Archive series.

tasty_freeze 2y ago

Even in the best of cases, our perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions are often dramatically flawed. Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products ... and what comes out is often going to be gibberish, as the remaining working parts of the mind attempts to construct a coherent narrative from the broken fragments of sensory input and failing memories. I got interested in consciousness 35 years ago or so when I read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Although the various people depicted in the stories had some physical deficit due to a trauma of some kind, it vividly demonstrated how we rationalize our way through the world more than we reason our way through it. Our conscious mind is much more of a facade than we typically imagine. When people say, "Well, LLMs are just generating token N+1 from the previous N tokens, they really aren't thinking", I counter with this: we have been having this discussion -- are you at all aware of the stream of words coming out of your mouth, or are you hearing them the same time that I am? Yes, sometimes we have deliberate thought where we rehearse different lines of reasoning before uttering something, but 98% of the time we are spewing just like LLMs do. And when we do engage in deliberate thought, each of those trial sentences again just appears without consideration; we are simply post-hoc picking the one that feels best.

Lammy 2y ago
> Add on top of that neural atrophy, loss of oxygen, accumulation of senescent cells, poor clearance of waste products I think the enjoyable thing about recreational drugs is the way they alter the normally-imperceptible boundaries between body/mind/Self. It provides an opportunity to understand what each of those things really are and what each contributes to my sense of being. I don't see these examples as all too different even if they are failure modes :)
- lostmsu 2y ago
  So what did you understand that you did not know before? Many people make the "opportunity to understand" claim, but I'm yet to hear anything meaningful coming out. Are you familiar with this joke: A guy decides to do drugs and keeps a notepad nearby to write down any profound revelations he has while high. The next morning he checks the notepad and finds he only wrote one thing: "The water is wet."

incanus77 2y ago

My dad had a fall and suffered a pretty bad brain injury a few years ago. He has since fully recovered aside from more frequent short-term memory loss, but during his multi-week hospital stay, many aspects of his personality, maturity, and abilities changed, almost to the point of extreme dementia. More relevant to this story, one incident I remember clearly was that he started talking about taking care of "him" and changing his diaper. Finally we got around to the fact that he was talking about his first nephew, who was born when my dad was quite young in the 1950s. My dad helped my aunt and grandma take care of him and it was his first exposure to caring for a child. All of those people are 30+ years out of existence now, so it was quite a flashback.

rglover 2y ago

Semi-related: not delirium, but if you haven't come across it, check out the "Everywhere at the end of time" series of albums. The music is written to track the timeline of dementia progressing [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc

Fr0styMatt88 2y ago
I was introduced to those albums through this haunting Doom playthrough, highly recommend: https://youtu.be/MwgytHBu4sg https://youtu.be/MwgytHBu4sg

raincom 2y ago

During final days before my grand mother's death, she was able to recall her childhood memories, asking her sons to bring her brother. Before that, she had some kind of memory loss. Anyway, here, we need some sort of neurological explanation: Childhood memories stay in the lower part of the brain, as I read it somewhere (probably Oliver Sacks'); the neurological basis of many memory loss is on top layers of brain, that's why sometimes people recall vividly of their childhood memories, even playing piano despite with dementia.

every 2y ago

My wife and I experienced this when my father died. We visited him hours before his death. He looked up at my wife, smiled and said "Mother, you came!" For the next while she sat beside him, rubbed his brow and engaged in small talk as his mother. When he fell asleep we left. He died during the night...

Boogie_Man 2y ago
Simply out of curiosity, does your wife bear even a slight resemblance to your grandmother when she was younger?
- every 2y ago
  Mama Sally died when I was an infant but I have a studio photo of her. Parasol, large flowered bonnet and full length skirt. All very Edwardian from the early 1900's. As for the features, I look far more like her than my wife. Perhaps the trigger was my wife was a comforting female. She did quite a nice job of being a doting mother soothing an ailing 100 year old child...

optimalsolver 2y ago

I recommend this article on the kinds of things people actually say on their deathbeds: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-people-communicate-before-death/580303/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/how-do-pe... It usually doesn't make any kind of discernable sense. Probably the saddest example: >They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!”

steele 2y ago

Wish it wasn't happening to Apartheid Clyde

pugworthy 2y ago

When my sister was dying of cancer, she reached a point where she wasn’t speaking. So not exactly last words, but I remember holding her hand and she would give me two squeezes. I would like to think it was her ‘saying’ “Love you” or “Thank you” perhaps? I’d give her 3 back to say, “Love you too.”

yannis 2y ago

I had a NDE two years ago. I had a lucid experience, saw someone (looking like a pastor) telling me "Do not be afraid, the same way you had to be born to experience this world, we need to die to experience the other world", I then woke up. I am not religious. It did leave a strong impression on me and think about it often.

qwertyuiop_ 2y ago
Wow just wow ! Your comment has given me a new perspective on fear of death. Are you able to share what caused NDE ?
- yannis 2y ago
  I had a heart attack while visiting a hospital for a check-up, so got lucky. Eventually had a stent inserted.

NaOH 2y ago

Peter Fenwick died in November 2024. The NY Times obituary last month described him as "a neuropsychiatrist who studied near-death experiences." I took note of his book, which I hope to read: The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences. In addition to his obituary, the Times published readers sharing their near-death experiences. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/science/near-death-experiences.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/science/near-death-experi... https://archive.is/cKBDL https://archive.is/cKBDL

matthest 2y ago

Many researchers consider death bed visioning (when the dying sees a loved one in their waning moments) as not a hallucination, definitionally speaking. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/magazine/deathbed-visions-research.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/magazine/deathbed-visions... Doesn't mean they're necessarily saying it's real (or not real for that matter), just that it doesn't fall under the strict definition of a hallucination.

childintime 2y ago

The hypothesis that consciousness arises from the brain has been proven unlikely (if not outright wrong) a long time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44. So maybe not go with the delirium hypothesis so easily.