Don’t expect to. A reference is just a marker to a “place and time”. They’re usually otherwise empty values that are “guaranteed” to be unique. Now, sometimes they are coopted by the vm to refer to “something” but by and large they aren’t references like references in the JVM.
For example, let me send a call to another process. When the response comes back, it should somehow refer to the initial call, so that this response isn’t structurally confused for a callback for some other call (that maybe got dropped and thus orphaned). The thing that the call sends, which should be packaged with the response, so that it can be can referred back to correctly is a reference.
