You could sit inside a church and become imbued amidst the spiritual surroundings and religious symbolism.
You could visit the graveyard where your loved one is buried or whose ashes are contained in an urn therein or thereby.
You could go to a special place you both shared, in a park or on a beach, a piece of hallowed ground where you could remember and commune.
Or you could simply stay home and talk to those you have lost. You could talk about your day, you could ask question that you forgot to ask when they were alive. You could chatter away all day long.
But you will never get a reply.
As you never will in the church or the cemetery or that special place.
There is one place, however, where communication — not just communion — is possible.
The subconscious strata of dreams teems with the dead. They actually have shape and form and do in fact talk. Not in the usual audible sense. Their words are not heard beyond your subconscious. It is like watching a movie on television with the sound turned off and the captions on. The words are there, if not spoken out loud, clearly understandable.
You are, within the muted surreal reality of your dream, having a conversation with your lost loved one.
You are walking along a street in New York City with your son and you hear yourself say to him, “When was the last time you saw her?” And you hear him say to you, “I think she’s dead.”
The dream ends abruptly and you wake up with a start, but you remember walking with him on that New York street and having that conversation.
You are looking for your wife in a Miami highrise, an apartment building or a hospital, it doesn’t matter, all you know is you have to find her, but you’ve forgotten what floor she’s on. You get in the elevator and press a floor, any floor, and when you get out on that floor you walk along the corridor calling out her name and then you see her in bed in the corridor and you say to her, “Thank God I found you. I forgot what floor you were on.” And you hear her say to you, “Everything will be all right now.”
The dream fades away, but when you wake up you remember seeing her in that bed and you remember what you said to her and what she said to you and it was an actual conversation and you were together, and this, by God, is communicating with the dead.
I’ll refrain from quoting Shakespeare, but the question then becomes, when you die, do the dreams die or do they move to a different level of subconsciousness, an other- or ultra-consciousness? A state of mind or soul that exists on a supernatural wave length not currently known to man?
That is to say, the dreams we experience as earthly beings are but a primitive foreshadowing of what’s to come.