how to make phone calls from the land of the dead

First of all - and this is not as obvious as it sounds - there must be someone among the living who might want to talk to you. There are many among them, indeed most, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the dead at all, let alone talk to us. Second, a Nokia will not do; neither Samsung nor Ericsson, Sony nor LG ... what you need is blood. Blood is the medium, blood is the wire, blood the handpiece and blood the service provider. This knowledge is old as Odysseus, older in fact, but it's still news to some. And blood is not easy to come by; you can't get some if you ain't got none, which, for those who are paying attention, takes us back to the first point. Someone has to want to talk, someone has to share your blood or give a little of their own; if these two conditions are fulfilled, there's only one more: you have to get them when they're sleeping or when the barriers are otherwise down. Drunk is good; destroyed by grief; in love; or any kind of extremis of fear, rage, doubt or pain. Guess there's one thing I haven't said but most of us here don't need this to be pointed out: you have to have something to say. This is not a complex thing to grasp: scaring the hell out of the living, though perhaps a little brute in its simplicity, is quite enough to make the connection worthwhile for some. Others among us are more ambitious: we want to be remembered, we want to be missed, we want to be loved. Some of us even hope to put those poor benighted souls to rights. Even, arrogant as it sounds, to show them how to live.