There is a people of the South Pacific who say that there are as many afterlife situations as there are human imaginations. They may be right. What we encounter on the Other Side is conditioned by our desires, our courage and our imagination (or lack of imagination). These things are too important for us to rely on hand-me-down versions or other people’s opinions. We need first-hand knowledge. We get that through contact with the deceased, which is an entirely natural phenomenon, and through our ability to travel in the realms where the departed are at home. We do that quite spontaneously, in night dreams. We can learn to embark on conscious exploration to learn the geographies of the afterlife.

Dreaming is practice for immortality, perhaps the best we have available. Why? Because dreaming is traveling. We journey effortlessly beyond body and brain, into realms beyond the fields we know in ordinary life. We travel to territories in which the dead are at home. In this way we gain first-hand knowledge of the roads and conditions of the afterlife.

In dreams, we also receive visitations from the dead. They come for all the reasons we may contact each other in ordinary life, and then some. They come for healing and forgiveness. They come for an update on family affairs. They come with warnings and information. They come because they are trying to understand the fuller story of the life they recently ended, in order to make choices about new life options.

Sometimes the deceased need help and information from us, because they are lost of confused. Sometimes they can serve as family counselors and everyday angels for us. Tremendous numbers of people who are living in the afterworld are seeking to communicate with the living, and dreaming is their main medium. Across the ages, dream encounters with the departed have been the primary reason why humans believe in the survival of soul or consciousness after death.