A repository of patient dreams, told at the end of life
Patients at the end of life share their dreams with the clinicians they trust. The Dream Bank gathers those dreams - carefully anonymized - so that together they can tell us something no single telling can.
As palliative care providers, we try to connect deeply - to reach past the disease to the person living inside it. What deeper connection could there be than meeting a patient in their most radically subjective experience? A dream is exactly that: an experience no one else can have, offered to us freely, at the bedside.
Near the end of life, patients dream - of boats waiting at the shore, of rooms made ready, of people who came before. These dreams are not symptoms to be managed. They are the illness experience from the inside, and patients share them with the clinicians they trust.
But a dream heard by one clinician and never written down is a story lost. Collected carefully and anonymized, hundreds of these dreams become something larger: a record of how meaning, comfort, and fear actually appear at the end of life - and an invitation to the next conversation at the next bedside.
Clinicians collecting dreams is subversive: not as a technique but as a stance.
01 - Ask
Next time the moment feels right, ask: "Some people find they dream differently when they are ill. Have you?" You do not need a script. The stance matters more than the technique.
02 - Listen
Let the patient tell it in their own words, at their own pace. You are not interpreting. You are witnessing - and, if they are willing, remembering.
03 - Record
With the patient's permission, contribute the dream here - stripped of every identifying detail. Your account joins a growing archive that clinicians, chaplains, and researchers can learn from.
Write the dream as close to the patient's own words as you can remember. What matters is the texture, not the diagnosis.
The contribution form opens in a new tab. Every dream is reviewed by the Dream Bank team before it enters the archive.