I have one experience to share with you indicating that animals play an important part of whatever this “afterlife” is (if there is one, and yes, my wife believes in one).

I went to Vancover, Washington, to lecture at the International Hospice Association. My host picked me up at the airport. I was discussing with her my theories that there are distinctive “signs” to true spiritual experiences, including a sense of being vividly real, a sense of some other reality superimposed over this one, and being unlike any other ordinary thoughts and dreams.

She told me that my theory didn’t fit her experience. She said, “just last night, I had a vivid dream of a dog coming to me, with a ball in its mouth. It was a golden retriever. It was barking at me, and wanting me to know that Travis was all right”. This was just as you described, but it doesn’t have any meaning for me at all.
It was just a silly dream.

At the conference, I met with a group of grieving parents. One mother was especially troubled and felt unable to grieve. She had reluctantly come to the conference and didn’t believe in spiritual experiences or anything at all. She said that her son loved her, and yet he had not contacted her and this simply made her bitter and more angry.

I told her that nothing in life is 100%. I apologized to her for implying that most or all grieving parents have spiritual visions.
After all I said, as I was driven here from the airport, my host told me of a vividly real dream that fits my criteria for being spiritual, and yet it wasn’t. And I recounted her dream.

She turned white and started sobbing. “That’s my son Travis, and his dog who also died”, she told me.