1:54am May 8, 2014

The recurring dreams of my own death have stopped.

I’ve been having them several times a month for years.  The steroid treatment for adrenal insufficiency seems to have stopped them.

I died in so many ways in those dreams.  It always felt physically absolutely realistic.  I felt the sensations involved in my body failing in a wide range of ways, and it felt just as real as being awake.  I was always surprised upon waking, to find myself awake and alive.

My favorite death dream was one where I was back at the house in the redwoods, living there with my parents.  I got sicker and sicker and I realized I was dying.  My parents were extremely upset.  But they laid me out in the front yard on my back, so I could look up into the trees as I died.  And I was happy, because that was my last wish, to see the redwoods, to be with them as I left this life.  I was in a lot of pain, and there was a lot of nausea.  But at that point all I cared about was the redwoods, not the body that was clearly failing me.

Another time, I had gone through a number of procedures in the hospital, and they weren’t working.  I had some kind of lung disease.  I kept passing out because I couldn’t get enough oxygen. Again, the physical sensations were absolutely realistic.  Including this perpetual feeling of not having enough air no matter how much I breathed.  Eventually, they went out to find my family, because they knew I was dying and they wanted to give us a chance to say goodbye.  They left me in the room alone, or perhaps with one nurse standing by the doorway, I don’t remember which.  And then I started dying, and I realized that I was going to die before my family got there.  And sure enough, I could just barely see them in the hallway outside my door before I died.

That’s just the two examples that stick in my head.  I’ve had so many dreams with so many scenarios for my own death, that I’ve lost track.  I think this was my mind’s way of preparing me for all the possibilities when I did die, since I was at that point on a path towards imminent death.  Now that I’m not headed down that path anymore (as much as anyone can not be on the road to death, anyway), I don’t get all the dreams about death.

Some of the dreams were beautiful.  Some of them were terrifying.  Some of them were sad.  Many of them were a mixture:  Beautiful and sad, sad and terrifying.  All of them had a stark realism that doesn’t normally exist in my dreams.

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