"When you need to know, you will know."

​These were my mother’s words spoken thirty years ago in answer to a dream I had two months after my father’s death.
In the dream my father had returned, telling me what he had found beyond death; honoring a promise he made the year before.
The reason the dream was so powerful was because my father and I both agreed that if there was nothing beyond death it would not be possible for him to return.
In the dream he gave me a list of specific insights. However, I awoke from the dream unable to recall any of them no matter how hard I tried.
After two weeks of frustration, I told my mother of the dream. Without hesitation or acknowledgement of my frustration she dismissed it all with “When you need to know, you will know.” We never spoke of it again.
The dream and what it stands for are just as haunting today as when I awoke in the early morning hours over thirty years ago.
When I was seven, my father and I stood together looking up at millions of stars in the night sky; something we had done many times. Each time he would say, “I wonder if somewhere out there, there are those looking back, wondering if we are here.”
On this particular night, an oval-shaped light appeared low in the southern sky just above the horizon and moved methodically in an arc to disappear in the southwest, followed by several more of the same size moving at the same speed.
My father, mesmerized, stood silently in the dark searching the sky for a long period after they were out of sight. The year was 1947.
From time to time throughout his life my father and I would speak of that night and his question about the possibility of life other than our own.
My father did not believe in a closed system. He held out hope for endless possibilities. It was a wonderful gift he left me. This, I need to know.