What If Deathbed Visions Aren’t Hallucinations at All?

Exploring the possibility that deathbed visions are doorways, not delusions

Aug 14, 2025

When the Dying Start Reaching for the Invisible

If you’ve ever sat beside someone in their final days, you may have seen it.
They turn their head toward the corner of the room, their gaze locking on something you can’t see. Their hand might lift, as if reaching for a face just outside your sight. Sometimes they smile. Sometimes they whisper. Sometimes their eyes widen with recognition, even joy.

If you’ve been there, you know the room changes in that moment.
The air shifts. The noise of machines and conversation fades into the background. Something else, something not in this reality, seems to come closer.

And yet, so often, our first instinct is to lean in and say, There’s nothing there.

What If They’re Not Confused at All?

We’ve been taught to believe that reality is fixed, that there’s a single, shared version of the world, and anything that strays from it is suspect. So when a dying person starts speaking to someone we can’t see, or reaching toward something we can’t touch, we label it “confusion.”

But what if they’re not confused?
What if they’re simply tuned into a frequency we’ve forgotten how to hear?

Think of it like standing in front of a radio. You’ve had it locked on one station your whole life, so you think it’s the only one that exists. But as death approaches, the dial starts to turn. Static rushes in. Other voices, other music begin to bleed through. You don’t recognize it, but they do.

This is what transition often looks like. The dying person is not “losing their grip” on reality; they’re loosening their grip on this one.

And here’s the part that unnerves people: if they can see beyond, even for a moment, it means there might be more to this life than what we’ve been told. It means death is not just an ending but a crossing. And that’s a truth you can’t measure on a monitor or document in a chart.

A Space We’re Taught to Shut Down

As children, we are experts in other worlds.
We speak to people no one else can see. We make friends with the wind and the moon. We slip into daydreams that feel more real than the room we’re in.

And then, little by little, we’re taught to shut it down.

Stop talking to imaginary friends.
Stop staring into space.
Stop believing in things that can’t be measured.

We are trained to trust only what can be proven, cataloged, or dissected under a microscope. We are praised for being “grounded” and “logical,” even if that means cutting ourselves off from the sense of mystery and connection we were born with.

The dying, I believe, are simply remembering what we’ve been taught to forget.

When the body begins to let go, the grip of all that conditioning loosens. The mind that has been trained to focus on to-do lists, bills, and dinner plans starts to wander into the spaces it once knew but has buried. And the heart, no longer tethered to the constant noise of the living world, begins to recognize the pull of something familiar.

This isn’t “slipping away” in a disoriented sense. It’s slipping back into a way of perceiving that has always been there, waiting.

If you’ve ever woken from a dream so vivid it felt more real than waking life, you’ve touched the edge of this space. The dying live in that edge for days, sometimes weeks.

This Is Not a New Idea

Across time and culture, deathbed visions have been recognized as something more than confusion.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo Thödol describes the dying encountering guides, landscapes, and visions that help the soul navigate its passage. Monks are trained to read the dying through these stages, speaking aloud to reassure and orient them.

In Victorian England, spiritualist newspapers regularly printed accounts of people calling out to deceased loved ones moments before they died, so common that families would note these visions as part of the natural dying process.

In many Indigenous traditions across North America, visions near death are seen as visits from ancestors, spirit animals, or guiding forces. Family members might even sit quietly, listening for who is “coming to walk them home.”

In ancient Rome and Greece, philosophers wrote of dreams and visions before death as signs of the soul separating from the body. They debated not whether these experiences were real, but what they revealed about the nature of existence.

Even in sacred religious texts, visions at the threshold of death are recorded and honored. In the Old Testament, Jacob spoke final blessings to his sons before “being gathered to his people,” a phrase often understood as a conscious awareness of reunion after death. In the New Testament, Stephen, moments before being stoned, declared he saw “heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” The Qur’an, too, describes the angels meeting the souls of the righteous with peace and welcome, guiding them toward the next world.

These accounts span continents, centuries, and belief systems, yet the core is the same: the dying see, feel, and speak with those beyond our current reach. And those who witness it are often changed.

What Science Says, and What It Can’t Measure

Dr. Christopher Kerr, a hospice physician and researcher, has spent years studying what he calls “end-of-life dreams and visions.” His findings are fascinating: these experiences are often vivid, coherent, and emotionally meaningful. In his book Death is But a Dream, he shares several real-life accounts of these visions.

They are not random. They’re not chaotic. In fact, they often reduce fear and bring comfort. People see parents, siblings, spouses, or even beloved pets who have died. They speak of travel, reunions, and homecomings.

Medicine can offer partial explanations, such as oxygen deprivation, medication effects, and changes in brain chemistry, and, yes, these can shape perception. Yet, they don’t account for the remarkable consistency of these visions across cultures, languages, and times in history.

Science can tell you what the brain is doing. It cannot tell you why a man in New York and a woman in rural India, dying a century apart, both report seeing a parent who has been gone for decades standing at the foot of their bed.

Meeting Them in the Middle

Meeting someone in their deathbed vision requires us to surrender our need to be “right” about what’s real.

It’s not easy. Everything in our culture trains us to correct, to fix, to pull people back into the same reality we share. But in the final stretch of life, forcing someone to return to our version of the world is not compassion.

When we meet them in the middle, something extraordinary happens.

A man who has been restless for days suddenly rests after you ask who he’s talking to, and he answers, “My brother, he’s come to walk me home.”
A woman who has been whispering about her train ticket for hours smiles when you say, “Tell me where it’s taking you.”
A father, eyes bright and fixed on the ceiling, sighs with relief when you respond, “Yes, I see the light too.”

These are not empty reassurances. You are entering their reality with respect, the way you might step quietly into someone’s place of worship.

And when you do, you might feel it too. The shift in the air, the sense of presence, the quiet certainty that you are standing on the threshold of something vast.

Meeting them in the middle is not about pretending. It’s about honoring the possibility that they are seeing what is actually there, and trusting that, for a moment, they can take us with them.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether these visions are “real” in the way we’ve been taught to define reality. Maybe the question is whether we’re willing to let the dying show us something we’ve forgotten how to see.

We spend our whole lives gripping tightly to what we know: the rules, the logic, the proof. But at the threshold of life and death, those rules no longer have meaning. At the threshold, love and recognition matter more than numbers on a monitor.

If we can stop resisting what we don’t understand, we might discover that these visions aren’t the mind collapsing. They’re the soul widening its view. And if we let ourselves stand beside them long enough, watching their gaze fix on something just beyond our reach, we might feel it too. That quiet pull toward whatever waits in the corner of the room.

Love today,

Heather 🌸

A Question for You

If someone you love began speaking of a journey, would you try to stop them, or would you ask where they were going?