You can get there from here: on All Souls' Day we affirm our Christian belief in life after death. But we can only dream about what the afterlife is like.

I CRIED AT THE NEWS of my grandmother's death. She was in her 70s but had not been sick. Her death felt like a terrible mistake. Numbly I called the travel agent and made plans to fly home. But the whole time I kept wishing to wake up from the sadness to discover that the error in the cosmos had been corrected and Grandmam was just fine.

Sometime after the funeral I dreamed I was walking the streets of my hometown. Suddenly I fell through a manhole cover in the sidewalk and found myself in an underground room that smelled just like Grandmam's kitchen--a combination of fresh laundry and wonderful food. There sat my grandmother at her table, looking just as she did the last time I'd seen her alive, her face wreathed with the usual beatific smile and pleased as punch to see me.

"Grandmam," I said, alarmed to find her in this place, "Let me help you out of here." I pointed upward to the manhole cover still ajar overhead and admitting some daylight. But my grandmother smiled indulgently at my lack of understanding. "I'm all right where I am," she told me. "I have my things around me." And she gestured toward a bowl filled with enormous navel oranges exuding the pungent fragrance of citrus.

I awoke still smelling those oranges. They were important because my grandmother always kept a bowl of such fruit on her table and gave us kids an orange apiece when we took leave of her. The oranges were typically so gigantic that we had to receive them with both hands. After that dream I knew my grandmother was indeed fine and that she had said her goodbye to me.

Many of us who have lost loved ones dream about them after their death. Sometimes we may be exchanging words that were left unsaid. Often there are reassurances offered or favors asked. A friend of mine recalls encountering her sister in a dream forest after a long and difficult illness had taken her. Surprised by the meeting, my friend called out to her: "But I heard you had died!" Her sister turned and answered serenely, "I did. But then, all at once, everything got so much better." And slipping through the trees she vanished.

Another friend tells me that after the death of her son, she dreamed of meeting him in a busy airport terminal. She stood in line headed toward one destination and he in another. Calling across to him, she asked where he was going. But her son seemed distracted and confused. "I'm not sure yet, but I don't want to miss my plane!" He turned his attention away from her, and she knew it was important for him not to focus on her needs at this time.

WHAT DO THESE DREAMS MEAN? PSYCHOLOGISTS WILL approach them from one direction and skeptics from another. But for believers it is not out of the question to consider them actual communications from "those who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith." In Jewish tradition souls are deemed capable of revisiting places or people dear to them for 12 months after they depart. Christian teaching has no timetable for the afterlife but acknowledges some general events: personal death, which separates the soul from the body; a period of purification; the general resurrection of the body at the end of time; and final judgment. After that--if "after" has any meaning on the far side of time--is eternity.

Our commemoration of All Souls' Day is an affirmation of the Christian belief in life after death. But it is more than that, because on this day we pray for the dead, an activity that reveals death not as a passive state but an actual process in which we can participate. Although All Souls' Day was added to the church calendar in the 11th century, the inclusion of prayer for the dead in the liturgy is longstanding. As early as the third century, Tertullian mused about an intermediate place of rest between time and eternity. Such a place would be necessary for just about all of us, for only the holiest among us dies entirely at peace with God and is able to come into the divine presence unimpeded. The Eastern church described this intermediate stage as a time of growth; the Roman church preferred terms of purification and purgation. The idea of purgatory as a fiery, punitive place persists as a result.

But this image owes more to art than doctrine. Medieval artists were so enchanted by the creative possibilities in depicting purgatory and hell that those portraits tended to upstage heaven on church doors and in the popular imagination. Because the flames of hell and the fires of purgation were sometimes indistinguishable in artistic renderings, people could be forgiven for thinking that purgatory was the same as hell only shorter in duration.

Another typical error is the thought that purgatory is a halfway house between salvation and damnation, and that a soul could go either way if eternity comes on before one's debt is paid. This is theologically unsound: A soul in purgatory has already made a choice for God and cannot be lost. Cosmic geography technically locates purgatory between earth and heaven--or as one theologian put it, between death and heaven. At the end of time there is no going back to the old creation, so one must move forward to the new one.

BUT ALL OF TillS TALK LEADS TO A MORE FUNDAMENTAL error: speaking of cosmic realities as if they were temporal ones. Outside of life there is no time and space. So words like before and after, up and down, or here and there are all equally misleading. Theologians prefer terms like state or condition in reference to afterlife territories.

We can also think of the afterlife in terms of self-knowledge. Without the body and the obvious limitations in perception that it imposes, we come into possession of the truth about ourselves. Some of us recognize that God's way of love and mercy has no meaning for us, and we reject it--as we always have done. Others, perhaps less commonly, have so completely identified with God's loving compassion all along that they are translated instantly into the divine presence and joy. The third group, which we can imagine is the largest, chose God's way but followed it imperfectly. After release from mortal blinders, we perceive our incompatibility with God's perfect love. We need to prepare, as a lover prepares to receive the beloved.

Scholars suggest this preparation may be instantaneous or may coincide with the moment of death--there is honestly no way to know until we experience it ourselves. Certainly the old-fashioned way of speaking about "years served" is not applicable. From time to time I still hear a preacher mark out in decades or centuries how long one might spend in purgatory for this offense or that. This is a case of trespassing on a metaphor, an attempt to screw down divine realities into manageable formulas. Whenever someone tells you quite precisely how God works, suspicion is the right response.

CHRISTIAN AFTERLIFE IS OFTEN COMPARED, INACCURATELY, to reincarnation. Isn't it just a matter of working through your karma in the next phase? Christians have been careful to distinguish between these two versions of what happens after death. Afterlife is in no way an extension or repetition of historical existence but a translation into a new dimension altogether. Whatever afterlife is, it isn't to be confused with what we know now.

Jesus had several collisions with the reality of death before his own. He raised from the dead a young girl, a widow's son, and his own friend Lazarus. We aren't told from which state they were interrupted to return to their families. We don't know if this is what they would have wanted. Jesus told only one story about life after death, the parable of Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Lazarus seems to attain this comfortable position immediately after death, just as the rich man is rapidly consigned to flames. Neither, we can presume, had any further choices to make or work to do. Lazarus suffered his purgation at the rich man's gates. The wealthy man had already had his heaven.

The other support we have for instantaneous assignment in the afterlife is the story of Jesus and the repentant man on the cross. When the criminal defends Jesus' innocence and asks to be remembered "in your kingdom," Jesus promises, "Today you will be with me in paradise." There is no nuance here, nothing to guess about. When Jesus promises paradise today, believers can take him at his word.

The late theologian Karl Rahner wrote that our greatest privilege is to fashion the life we have into the death we want. Death is eternal isolation from love or eternal communion with love, and we are free to approach either destiny. Since most of us who choose communion still act in selfish isolation at times, a backdoor route to our hearts' desire is welcome.

A man told me the story of his lather's death after a hard life of contradictions. Later the man dreamed of encountering his father in his boyhood home in front of a small wooden table. On the table were square pieces of paper with writing on them. "Pray with me here," his father urged him. Upon waking, the son went straight to his father's house to look for such a table, but there was none.

Not long after, the man went to the city on business and entered an unfamiliar church at midday. In the corner of the church he saw it at once: a small alcove full of flickering candles and a small wooden table strewn with pieces of paper covered in prayers. Weeping, he knelt down and wrote a prayer for his father and left it on the table.

We all have access to a prayer table like this, a eucharistic table of reunion, a place where the communion of saints gathers from here to heaven. On the feast of All Souls and every day, we can meet our loved ones here.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to the New Testament and the soon-to-be-published Invitation to the Old Testament, both from ACTA Publications.