I See Dead People - Visitations by the Deceased

Have you ever had a dream so vivid it felt like your loved one was really there — even if they’ve been gone for years? Is it grief? Memory? Something deeper? Join us for a grounded, open conversation about life, death, and the strange space in between — because in the end, every day is a gift. https://bit.ly/436rcn8

In this episode of Everyone Dies, we explore the surprising number of people — over half of Americans — who say they’ve connected with a dead family member, whether in dreams, gut feelings, or even quiet conversations. We’ll also look at what science has to say about strange brain activity that kicks in after the heart stops, and what it might mean for consciousness at the end of life, such as near-death awareness.

 #EveryoneDiesPodcast #Afterlife #Grief #NearDeathExperience #DreamVisitations #Podcast #LifeAfterDeath #EveryoneDies #DeathandDying 

In this Episode:

• 04:57 - Oregon and Hazelnut Pumpkin Bread
• 05:27 - "How Do You Mourn the End of a Friendship?" Damon Young, Washington Post Magazine
• 10:31 -  How Common is it to Experience a Connection with a Dead Relative/Friend? 
• 13:10 - Near-Death Awareness Before Death; Other Interactions with Dead Relatives
• 16:25 - Experiences of People Who Clinically Died and Were Resuscitated
• 20:11 - Discussion - Your Own Experiences?
• 23:41 - "The Eyes of Grief" by Bobbie Isabel, Medium
• 25:15 - Outro

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:57 Road Trip to Oregon and Hazelnut Pumpkin Bread
• 5:27 "How Do You Mourn the End of a Friendship?" by Damon Young, Washington Post Magazine
• 10:31 How Common is it to Experience a Connection with a Dead Relative/Friend?
• 13:10 Near-Death Awareness Before Death; Other Interactions with Dead Relatives
• 16:25 Experiences of People Who Clinically Died and Were Resuscitated
• 20:11 Discussion - Your Own Experiences?
• 23:41 "The Eyes of Grief" by Bobbie Isabel - A Halloween-Themed Love Poem
• 25:15 Outro

Transcript

Have you ever had a dream so vivid it felt like your loved one was really there, even if they had been dead for years? In this episode of Everyone Dies, we explore the surprising number of people, over half of Americans, who say they've connected with a dead family member, whether in dreams, gut feelings, or even quiet conversations. Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies and Happy Halloween. I hope it's as spooky and sugar-filled as your heart desires.

This week's topic is what happens in the moments right before and right after death. Cutting-edge neuroscience reveals that our brains may surge with activity in our final seconds. Could this explain the near-death visions people report? Charlie also reports on a research study finding that millions of Americans say they've felt the presence of dead loved ones, in dreams, conversations, or unexplained sensations.

This episode bridges science and the unknown to ask the big questions, is it all in our brains, or is there something more? So, lock your doors, light a candle, and settle in for our Halloween Day podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. Our discussion about after-death consciousness is in the second half, so you can just fast forward to this week's topic if you dare. I'm Arianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner.

I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast. We are both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions.

And remember, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. In the first half, we have an essay about grief, After Friendship Ends by Damon Young, and our recipe of the week.

In the second half, Charlie has a piece about near-death awareness, and in the third half, I have a Halloween-themed love poem by Bobby Isabel. So happy Halloween, Charles. Yes, happy Halloween, Marianne.

Do you need your inhaler? I don't know, maybe as a treat instead of candy, maybe I'll go trick-or-treating and someone will throw in an inhaler in my little pumpkin head. Are you going to dress up or go to a party or cruise the streets? We'll know you do that every Friday night. No, but you know, I do have to run out and do errands.

So throughout the day, I mean, I will see, you know, people on the subway and just walking around in costume. So that's always fun. And also, of course, tonight is the annual Halloween parade.

Just talk about imagination. People just come up with the most amazing costumes, um, all sorts, from scary to sensuous to, yeah, everything is really, really nuts. So yeah, I'm not going to, at one time, I went to the parade.

You have to stand in line for hours, and it was fun, you know, to do it one time. But yeah, the same with New Year's Eve. Um, there's no way in hell I go down there for New Year's Eve, but I, yeah.

So yeah, I did New Year's, I did New Year's Eve once, and I said, okay, I can now say I've done it. Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of people and, but you know, and it was crowded, but it was, you know, okay. And then what amazed me, though, is that the ball dropped, and like, it felt like everyone just disappeared.

Yes. Like it just, like, emptied out. It was like, geez, that was fast.

People come and go so fast around here. They do. They do.

So, speaking of coming and going. So our travels this week took us to Oregon, the first state to legalize medical aid in dying, and is also known for Nike, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Pinot Noir, craft beer, and the great outdoors. But the Beaver State is also known for its hazelnuts, and our recipe for hazelnut pumpkin bread is to die for, making it a great addition to your next funeral lunch.

Bon Appetit. Today, we have an edited essay titled, How Do You Mourn the End of a Friendship by Damon Young, contributing columnist to the Washington Post magazine. Grieving Dust is almost the same dynamic as grieving the end of a romantic relationship.

The hard parts are a bit harder, actually, especially if you want to be together. Especially, especially if you still want to be together, but they chose to be with someone else. But then sometimes it just stops itself.

One day you wake up and it's just gone. It's weird like that. It works like an inverted hurricane.

If you can withstand the eye of the storm, you'll have sun in your eyes soon. And if you need help on how to deal, or maybe just some community to feel less alone, there are movies and songs and paintings and plays all about that type of heartbreak. But what happens when you lose a friend you loved, and maybe still love? The person's not gone.

They're still alive and presumably well, but the relationship? Dead. What are the mechanics of grief there? The construction of that question makes it feel rhetorical, like I plan to spend the rest of the essay building toward a prediscovered epiphany. But no, this is a plea.

None of the best practice pathways for grieving seem to work very well here. It's not like the finality of death where you have no choice but to move on. Or the equilibrium shift in the end of a romance where things mostly end because one person in it has decided to free themselves of it.

But while most romantic relationships are sexually monogamous, or rather exist under the veneer of monogamy, there's no governing the number of friendships you're able to have. Sometimes friendships are cleared and refreshed so that a person could spend more time with newer, better, for them, friends. But mostly you can keep both the old and the new.

It's optimal even to have a healthy mix of people from different stages of your life. Some will take up more space than others. But space shifts, and there can be room for everyone.

Which means that when a person decides to end a friendship with you, they've decided that even the smallest bit of you on the peripheries of their life is too much for them. It is the cleanest form of rejection. The rejection also unlocks a new level of vulnerability, but not the type of vulnerable you might have been with them.

It's different. It's like, I don't know, it's like you showed them the you-est possible and then decided after seeing it that life is better without you in it. Which just makes you scared about what they saw.

You can't see what they saw. You can't have that perspective. But you know what they did after they saw you.

What they saw, for whatever reason, scared them away from you. How can that not scare you too? Maybe it's not all about you though. Maybe they still love you.

Maybe you just represent for them a time and place that makes them feel less like life and more like death. Maybe it was for your own good to protect both of you from what might happen when you fuse together. Maybe it has nothing to do with you.

You know, sometimes the process of writing about a lack of clarity on a situation has a way of clarifying things for me. I think the mechanics of writing, for me, can be a landscaping service, removing the weeds and debris out of my brain. But with this, with learning how to mourn the end of a friendship, I'm no closer to an answer than when I began writing.

I was hoping I'd figure it out by now. Was sure I would actually. I was wrong.

Please go to our webpage this week for our recipe and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask for your financial support. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone.

You can donate at www.everyonedies.org, that's e-v-e-r-y, the number one, dies.org, or on our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Charlie? Thanks, Marianne. This brings us to our second half.

Cable News Network journalist Ashley Williams reports that the connections people experience with their loved ones don't necessarily end after death. That many Americans say they've interacted with deceased family members in dreams. This from a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Just over half of 5,079 surveyed American adults, 53%, reported having been visited by a dead relative in dreams or, quote, some other form, close quote. 44% of respondents said they've experienced at least one of the following three encounters in the past year. Feeling a dead relative's presence, telling a late family member about their lives, or having a deceased relative communicate with them.

The Pew Research survey included responses from Americans of all religious backgrounds, including Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims. The results showed that moderately religious people, measured partly by how often they attend religious services and whether they said they prayed daily, were more likely to have experienced interactions with dead relatives. This is partly because some of the most traditionally religious groups and some of the least religious people, like atheists, are less likely to report interactions with deceased family members.

When it comes to religion, about half or more of Catholic members, 58% of the historically black Protestant tradition, 56%, and mainline Protestants, 52%, say they have had at least one of these three experiences in the last year, significantly more than the 35% of evangelical Protestants who say the same, according to researchers Patricia Tevington and Manolo Corici. Women, 41%, were also more likely than men, 27%, to report recently feeling the presence of a dead relative. The survey's yes-no questionnaire didn't ask for explanations about the nature of these encounters from respondents.

Because of this, the researchers wrote that they don't know whether people view these experiences as mysterious or supernatural, or whether they see them as having natural or scientific causes, or some of both. The pages of Live Science state that the surges of activity in the dying human brain could hint at fleeting conscious experiences. An increase in activity in dying brains might be associated with last-minute conscious experiences, but scientists don't know for sure.

Stephanie Pappas of Live Science reports that in their last minutes of life, some people's brains generate a surge of surprisingly organized-looking electrical activity that may reflect consciousness, although scientists aren't entirely sure. According to new research in the journal PNAS, this surge can sometimes occur after a person's breathing stops, but before the brain stops functioning. The activity pattern is somewhat similar to what is seen when people are awake or in dreamlike states, leading to speculation that perhaps these electrical surges reflect the otherworldly experiences reported by people who've had close brushes with death.

A sense of looking at the body from the outside, a tunnel and white light, or a sense of reliving important memories. Some people who are brought back from the brink of death report seeing or hearing unexplained things during resuscitation or when they seem to be unconscious. The reason for these near-death experiences is unknown, and it's not clear if they're even specific to death.

Neuroscientist Jimbo Pajorjan and her colleagues measured electrical activities in the brains of rats that they euthanized via cardiac arrest. They found that for about 30 seconds after the heart stopped, the brain showed a surge in what are called gamma waves. Gamma waves correspond with conscious experience, but don't necessarily prove that someone is conscious.

As Everyone Dies reported in a previous podcast, a group of doctors happened to be monitoring the brain of an 87-year-old man with an electroencephalogram, EEG, which detects electrical activity on the surface of the brain. When the man unexpectedly died, similar to Pajorjan's rats, the man's brain showed a surge in gamma activity in the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped. Some people may experience something like near-death experiences in these moments, according to neurologist Dr. Daniel Conteselli, but we may never know for sure.

And again, these experiences may not be unique to death. Regardless, many Americans report interacting with dead relatives in dreams or other ways, which tells us what? That somebody died and came back to life? Remember that around half of U.S. adults say they've been visited by a dead family member in a dream or some other form, and that a substantial share says they've had interactions with dead relatives in the past 12 months, meaning they felt the presence of a dead relative. People who've clinically died and been resuscitated are revealing that they felt and saw moments after their death.

So writes Victoria Lumanos of BuzzFeed. She states something everyone faces in life, regardless of class, culture, or creed, is death. And despite its inevitability, the experience of death and what happens after still remain unknown to us.

People who've died and been resuscitated were asked, what was your experience? Did you see bright lights? Nothing? Do you remember anything about it? In response, here are a few descriptions from people who described how they died and what their experience was like. One, a very warm blackness. It wasn't cold or scary, but very calm and serene.

It was the best nap I've ever had. Five out of five stars. I'm not in a hurry to do it again, but certainly not scared to die when the time comes.

Now, the heart surgery I had after being resuscitated, that was painful and awful. Two, my husband was on life support in a coma. He was not expected to make it and had to be brought back multiple times.

I was by his side, beyond distraught. He was by far the sickest person in the ICU, too sick to transfer to another hospital. Other people who had family in the ICU rallied around to support me as it really didn't look hopeful for him.

And my pain was obvious. One family in particular helped me a lot. The grandfather of that family had had surgery on his foot, but it had gone wrong.

They ended up amputating his foot, which then got infected. He ended up dying. But even after he died, his daughter stayed in the ICU to help me.

When my husband finally woke up, he told me he had been walking the halls with some guy who was missing his foot. That guy told him it wasn't time to go yet and his daughter would wait with me until my husband woke up, but that he had to wake up soon. Three, I was killed in a head-on with a semi-truck.

Reality turned into vibration and I was sucked out of the back of my skull. I found myself in a void, completely comfortable and at peace, knowing full well I was dead. I went through a bit of a life review where a lot of things flashed through my mind.

Afterwards, I saw the light. However, the light was actually my phone on the floor of my truck, as that's what my eyes were seeing from my slumped over corpse. I then had a thought that I wanted to get back to the phone to say goodbye to my wife and kids.

And I had that thought. I was pulled back into my body. I'm an atheist, so this whole experience was a bit of a mindfuck for me.

I expected nothingness upon death, which is exactly what I got, but I was still unexpectedly conscious. Either way, I've been in pain for eight years straight now for having pulled through. I'll just embrace death next time.

Marianne, any contacts from dear family members or any thoughts on this? Well, I always have pretty vivid dreams and my family, deceased family, comes and visits, I wouldn't say regularly, but a few times a year. And I guess, I don't know, maybe my brain is missing them and I might not consciously know it, but they'll show up in my dreams to say hi. I think that consciousness and life and death is more fluid than what we might know or what we might realize.

So, it's always nice to see people come and visit. And generally, they're really nice. So, it's not a problem.

Do you have people come and visit you? Oh, absolutely. Do you? Okay. Yeah.

Old friends, former lovers. Wasn't that her name, the girlfriend who died? Ah, Debbie. Debbie! Yeah.

Not as much as before, but there are times when, I don't know, this has picked up recently, where I hear someone say something or I hear a giggle and I don't know, it just pops into my mind, oh, it's Debbie. I don't understand that. I mean, it's nice.

Like, while you're awake, this happens? Whoa. Yeah. And actually, now that I think about it, it's been that with a couple of other people also who have died.

Really? While you're awake? Yeah. One of the, maybe the nicest one after, so, you know, my mother died and then my, my, you know, Michael, my son died like three months after his grandmother's death. A couple of months after that, and Michael, you know, it always talked about going down to, you know, to Mexico, where, of Mexican heritage.

And, you know, we never had the opportunity to go down there. But one time there was, and my mother grew up in, in Mexico in the 1920s. And just one night there was, you know, sleeping and there they were.

My, my mother and, and my son in this little Mexican village. I was not part of the picture, but they were, they were just walking around and just walking around and just, she was like pointing things out to him. And they were just, it was, it was, it was nice.

It was just very comforting for me to see them, to see them together. Yeah. I bet.

Yeah. It was very nice. So there we are.

That's cool. Yeah. For our third half, we have a poem, The Eyes of Grief by Bobby Isabel, and this was published in Medium.

The twinkle in your eye is what first stole my heart. A hint of promise and mystery was blended in the omnid air. With the sun descending, showers of pink and orange, red-like leaves rustling above like the rings around my eyes, as I mourned our patriarch on the eve of Halloween.

You were there. Your eyes followed me through the gate as I made my way home. You carried me through the gloom of a month of muddy winters, the spring morning of our first date on a hill alive with daisies overlooking my father's grave.

Promises of love stained blue like the veins behind my porcelain skin. Your hands warm with life siphoning the chill of my eternity. You remained there.

Your eyes haunt me still, waking me each morning with their piercing gaze. Catching the sparkle of summer's midnight moon. Even now, in the same location we first met, they stare up at me through the river of tears from the face of our child.

At the site where you lay since that fateful October. You'll always be there. Thus spake Zarathustra.

Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. This is Charlie Navarette. When asked what happens when we die, actress and Marianne lookalike Jamie Lee Curtis said, we die.

And I'm Marianne Matzo. Remember, death ends a life. It does not end a relationship.

And we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift. You have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies, or by other members is solely at your own risk.