As we more and more move our personal and professional lives online and into video conference rooms, we may question our capacity for intimacy, connection, and making meaning of our lives, our work, our interactions, our relationships, our individual and shared experiences through screen images and speaker sound.

Those of us whose work is in service, and in compassionate accompaniment especially, may wonder how we may be able to accompany without the essential component of being physically present with our patients and clients. Much like in dreamwork, many of us rely on a felt sense—an embodied sense of recognition of something as true or right—and intuition as we are guiding others through their process.

It would be challenging for us caregivers to do our job without this visceral compass, assumed to be elicited by physical presence and proximity. So, some of us may wonder, or even worry, whether we will have access to this embodied experience while in remote, camera-to-screen presence with others, often from a great physical distance.

There is no apparent physical distance greater than that which comes with death. And so, today I will share with you one of many true stories from my experience that put this perception and assumption of disconnection due to physical distance to the test.

This is one story about dreams, death, and the eternal now.

Some months ago, I met a patient dying of cancer with whom I would work through to his end of life. We spent the next five days navigating together through the dense and the material into the symbolic, imaginal, dreamlike, often otherworldly quality and atmosphere that is part of the dying process for patient and caregivers alike. It is a quality and atmosphere from and to and between inbreath and outbreath, asleep and awake, embodiment and disincarnation, between living and dying. It is both physical and etherial, and it brings with it a shared experience of intense sensations, profound emotions, revelatory insights, inspired thoughts, impeccable gut instinct, and a heightened sixth sense and intuition.

Every experience accompanying the dying is a unique learning experience that I am so grateful for and which expands my perception of what is possible in this space and time of life, death, new life, and beyond life. It also brings the opportunity and responsibility of holding surviving family and loved ones in their process of loss, grief, meaning making, and of transforming their relationship, their intimacy and connection with their deceased, all which is yet another unique learning experience that I deeply appreciate and value.

Several weeks ago, I had a visitation dream—a vivid, intensely present, real-feeling dream with a person who is dead in waking life—with this patient, whom I will call Frank:

Frank and I are in a hospital’s emergency room. It is an open hall with many beds without partitions. Frank is healthy and full of vitality and we are working together at the hospital, accompanying those who are sick and intubated, and whom no one can visit. We have permission to stay with the patients. Frank and I share a small bed on which we sit, among all the occupied beds. The night nurse does her round, which includes her administering headphones and audio devices to each patient, whether they are conscious or not. Frank is overjoyed and remarks this is his favorite book, which he loves to hear read to him out loud. The nurse hands each of us headphones and device, and announces “The Alchemist, and The Magician.” She explains that listening to stories helps us drift into a good sleep.

I awoke from this dream with a very good feeling, that of working together to accompany ill and dying patients, especially at this time when so many patients are dying alone in hospitals, and I liked the idea of having an audiobook program for them.

I didn’t work on the dream, as with visitation dreams I am just happy to have the experience without going deeper into it. Because I do like to honor my dreams even if I don’t work on them thoroughly, I thought, maybe I will read that book, The Alchemist.

I was moved to share this dream and experience with my patient’s daughter, with whom I regularly check in. She said:

“What? That’s crazy! When I was with him [about two months before we met you] I was supposed to sit down and read out loud to him The Alchemist. We never got around to it because we got into a lot of fights and I left early. But I had pulled the book off the bookshelf to sit down and read it to him. He just wanted to have someone read to him, so he could listen to this book. I actually took his copy of the book when going through his things in his apartment in January. I thought, this book has a memory for me now, something we had talked about. We talked about that book several times. So that dream is very interesting for a couple of reasons. Maybe it will be a good time to sit and read that book. Wow!”

I had goosebumps for what felt like a really long time, and I continue to get goosebumps when I share the story. I had no way of consciously knowing anything about this book. Yet whatever messages this dream and this book bring to support our individual and shared meaning making, sense of intimacy and connection, continue to expand and deepen.

I share this story because there are several elements that prove to me our immense capacity for connection beyond space and time, beyond life and death. The meaningful connections in this story—beyond even the support of contemporary video conferencing technology—happened between someone who is dead and someone who is northern United States of America, through someone dreaming in central México.

This type of story is not unusual in my experience with death and dreams, not unusual in my conversations with colleagues in the field of end of life, not unusual in our weekly Death Café conversations.

Jeremy Taylor often said that struggling to remember our dreams could be the same as trying to remember a life we have already left, that what we remember of our dreams is the closest experience we can have to the afterlife, as before and after dissolve and we enter the eternal now. In this timeless, spaceless experience, there is nothing and everything; it is the place of all possibility, it is the oneness we cannot fathom but of which we have glimpses when we choose to stop believing everything that makes us assume a powerful connection cannot be felt beyond space and time.

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