Echo

What was crazy was on Saturday; I had a dream where I moved back to Ann Arbor. My mom and brother came to help me with the move and we went to Meijers (a crazy ass superstore) to buy apartment stuff. My place was in walking distance from the store so I went home early to get things set up. My mom showed up a little bit later. I asked her, “Where’s Michael?” She said she left him at the store to teach him a lesson because he got fixated on CDs and wouldn’t leave when she told him to. I guess I lived close by enough that she figured he would know how to walk there. An hour later, he hadn’t shown up. I was worried so I called him on his cell a few times but he didn’t answer, so we went back to the store to see if he was still there. No one had seen him. I went through the whole store looking for him, starting to panic because I had a gnawing fear that someone with bad intentions had lured him away (he has a tendency to talk to strangers and is really naive). We drove around looking for him, and as night fell, we finally called the cops. With every hour, I was getting more and more scared, because I know that with each passing hour that someone is missing, the chances are exponentially slimmer that they will be found, or more accurately, that they will be found alive. Two days later, it started dawning on me that someone must have taken my brother, and that at this moment, he was probably already dead. I was absolutely devastated.

This dream freaked me out. It was really bugging me the next morning, so as I was heading to pick up Whitney for brunch, I called my mom to tell her about my dream and to tell her to keep an eye on my brother and have a talk with him about strangers. I sometimes call people up and let them know about my dreams if I notice when I’m hitting a period where things from my dreams are showing up right after in waking life, and I have a dream about something big; I figure that it doesn’t hurt to tell people to keep their eyes open. So I call her and I say, “I’m just calling because I had a really bad dream last night where Michael disappeared and I knew he was killed by a stranger.” She says, “Seriously??? I was just worrying about that when you called because I had a nightmare last night where he was kidnapped.”

And then this morning, I had a short dream in between hitting the snooze button where I ran into this random acquaintance at a Starbucks whom I haven’t seen or talked to in over 6 months; I never run into him. In the dream, he gave me news about a project that was disappointing. I went to Starbucks after work, and as I was parking, I remember thinking, “Danny’s in there.” But I figured it was one of the many irrational bursts of thought that flash through my mind in any given moment. I walk into the store and the first person I see is Danny. I ask him about the same project from my dream, and he tells me exactly what he told me in my dream. It was pretty uncanny.

The good thing about these periods, is that it’s kind of interesting to see what matches up. The bad thing is that I get anxious, because I worry about if the bad nightmarish things might show up too. Luckily, it’s usually just the random details (like an item I notice in a room in the dream) or small scenes that happen.

Some people have asked me about why people who are intuitive can see some things but not others. So I’m going to jot down some random things about what I’ve learned about intuition from my own experiences and from what I’ve gathered from those who are working psychics. You know I don’t like to call intuition “psychic ability” because of the stigmas, but I’ll refer to it as that just to make things easier.

1. Psychic ability is just another sense. It’s an ability to perceive. The interpretation is up to the person perceiving. For example, 2 people can watch a car accident. Each sees the exact same event, but one person may have seen one driver on his cell phone and interpreted the accident as being that person’s fault, and the other one may have missed certain details and interpreted the accident differently. Almost everyone has intuition, with the potential for it to become what is refered to as psychic ability. It’s just a matter of tuning into that sense. The rest is interpretation.

2. Why can’t psychics fix their own lives? Because of blindsights. Imagine you have amazing vision and can see objects hundreds of feet away while others can only see things 20 feet away. Now imagine how clearly you can see those far objects because you’re focused on them. Now, imagine that an object pops up 5 feet away from you into your line of sight. You won’t be able to see it very clearly because you’re eyes are focused on something else. You can perceive it and try to figure out what it is based on guesses (it looks like a person, it looks like a car, etc.) but you won’t be able to see it very clearly. This is what happens when someone is really in tune to that sixth sense. You can see/feel/perceive things that are hidden, but have trouble interpreting cues that should be obvious within human interaction. Futhermore, the closer someone is to you, the harder it is to see them objectively. The size of the blindsight is directly proportional to how sharpened your intuitive abilities are or to how close the person is to you. Because the closer someone is to you relationship-wise, you will psychologically begin to project hopes and fears as well as take in realistic evaluations, which is the normal process of human interaction/relating. But if you have that extra sense turned on, it confuses the situation and it’s really hard to trust the information coming in, especially if the information is conflicting. For example, when it comes to relationships, I have to ask trusted third parties for “reality checks” because my radars go haywire the closer someone gets to me and it’s very easy to get blindsighted. Furthermore, psychics can’t see their own lives and their own problems. PEOPLE IN GENERAL have a hard time seeing their own problems because it requires a high level of objectivity. Imagine, you and I are sitting across from each other. You have something on your face and I can see it. I may have something on my face too, but I have no way of knowing unless you tell me, just as you wouldn’t know unless I told you. So psychics are just people who have extra facilities for perceiving, but yet, they are bound by the same laws of perspective.

3. The Future. Okay, I was never one who predicted the future. I’m an empath and don’t have enough objectivity to be a medium, so I don’t trust the things I see. But to explain the nature of the “future” I want to explain that the future is not set in stone. It’s about probability. If you are driving as fast as you can towards a wall, you are most likely going to crash into the wall. But there’s a chance you could brake at the last second or take a sudden turn right after the point when I perceived your situation and predicted that you would probably crash into the wall. The future is a lot about free will, but if you are moving in a certain direction, then there is probably a high probability for certain specific things to happen. They say that most very successful business people measure high when tested for psychic ability. This just means that are just able to subconsciously calculate complex equations regarding probability. So, from my experience, if people push me, I can tell them what I see happening, even though I don’t like to. But I also know that I’m calculating probability from a snapshot of the present–all the circumstances, factors and elements that lead to a likely conclusion. But things can change and the outcome can be different. If I read for you now and tell you about a problem, and you change something, and then I read for you 2 weeks later, I could see a different outcome. It’s not because I was wrong the first time. It’s because you introduced a new set of elements into the equation.

4. Accountability. This is about interpretation. Imagine that you have a problem with your girlfriend. You had a fight last night, you made up, but now she hasn’t returned your call today and you don’t know what’s up. You ask your best male friend for his opinion. He takes the series of facts (you had a fight, she doesn’t return your calls) and interprets that she’s mad at you. Now you ask a good female friend who happens to be a therapist, let’s say :) She says, well, it could be that your girlfriend feels bad about what happened and is taking time to think about things and come back with something that could improve the relationship. This would probably leave you to be willing to be more open-minded about your girlfriend’s intentions, rather than immediately jumping to being defensive and planning an exit strategy (not for breaking up per se, but to save your pride). Both situations could be possible, and both people analyzed the same set of facts that you presented. But what both people did was internalize the facts and come back with an interpretation that reflects how they see the world. This is the challenge for those who are genuinely intuitive and work in the psychic advising field. You can take two psychics who can both perceive the same situation, or person, but depending on how they see the world, will give you advice based on that. Therefore, an empath will probably focus on emotional/psychological factors, while someone who is clairvoyant (mostly factual, concrete things…a lot of male psychics are like this) will give you the basics without looking too deeply into things (ie…”she’s upset.” “She needs time.” “She’s busy right now.”) It’s the dichotomy of big picture vs. sum of all details. They don’t always equal the same thing when it comes to human interpretation. So a good psychic is not just one who can see, but one who can interpret the information in a way that is as accurate as possible to the objective truth, and convey it in that way. That’s what makes one psychic better than another (just as what makes one therapist better than another). Step one…perceive the situation, Step Two…interpret the situation, Step Three…communicate the situation as clearly as possible. The last step would be advising, but most intuitives should stay away from that if possible because sometimes it’s up to the person to put together this information and understand this part of their journey.

5. Permission. Just as with people who go under hypnosis, a hypnotist will NEVER be able to make that person do something to which they are morally or psychologically opposed. I can only speak from my own experience, but someone has to give me permission in order for me to be able to see inside of them. What I mean is that, they have to open that door. And it’s not necessarily a conscious process for them. I do not have the ability to intrude and see things that they absolutely do not want me to see. For example, I once knew someone who had some deep-seated issues from his childhood. From the first day I met him, his mouth said one thing, but he opened the door and reached out psychically so that I was aware of a subtext and was able to perceive things that were hid
den within him, even though his actions and words were actually going out of their way to contradict them. In essence, he gave me permission to look at what a part of him wanted me to see, and actually unconsciously opened the door and guided me there. It was like a cry for help. Even though the rest of him was quite resistant to any sort of acknowledgement of or assistance to that part of him that needed help and exposure, I wouldn’t have been able to even know that it was there if he hadn’t communicated to me on that level and shown it to me. I don’t walk around and probe people’s insides. In fact, there are a lot of people who keep their doors closed, and even those who have them open, I choose not to walk through and look. But when you look inside someone else, you are giving up quite a bit of control, and in some sense, there’s no way to turn it off once that connection has been established.

If people really want to know what intimacy truly is, it’s that connection. The opening of the door. Like I said, everyone is intuitive and has this ability to perceive. People who hone that ability just have more ways of applying it.

6. Interpersonal connection. Everyone connects with some people better than others. This comes into play in a psychic’s ability to see into you. It’s parallel to the relationship between a therapist and a client. A therapist can be an AMAZING therapist, and the client can be extremely willing to dive into his scary places, but if they can’t communicate on the same frequencies or can’t create a comfortable enough space for intimacy to happen, then it won’t work out. Whether or not an intuitive can see into someone is not necessarily related to his/her perceptive abilities. It could be the connection, and the willingness of each person to open that door that allows for the connection, as well as ability to communicate what is said. I don’t get as much information from some people as I do from others, even if the door is open.