My sister talked me into shelling out $65 for a psychic reading when we went to Las Vegas back in 1999. I didn’t want to spend the money on a professional “guesser” but decided to play along. She went first and came out beaming.

Still a doubting Thomas, I walked into the small room and plunked down my cash. The first thing the psychic asked was what I did for a living. Shouldn’t she know already?

“I’m a writer.”
“Oh! I see you writing a romance novel, set in Wyoming.”
“No, I’m a horror writer and my novel is set in Arizona.”
“Oh.” A befuddled look crosses her face. Then it disappears and is replaced with a smile. “You love wide open spaces.”
“Yes. Will my novel become a bestseller?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll have several bestsellers.”
I nod, thinking, ‘A writer’s dream come true. Cool!’
She changes the subject. “You are heavily psychic.”
I’ve had some strange experiences, but I’m not about to dub myself a psychic by any means. I don’t tell her this, but I’m certain that she has gleaned this information from my sister, who was heavily into the New Age spiritualism at the time.
Then she asks me if I have any children and what their ages are. They were quite young at the time. She tells me about their futures and predicts that my family will enjoy good health.

I left the reading room, feeling lukewarm about the whole experience. Except for the good health, nothing she predicted has come true. The experience was entertaining, if anything. However, I must say that her predictions for my sister came true. My nephew was born the following year.

Coincidence? Most likely. My sister had undoubtedly told the lady that she was dating my then future brother-in-law. To this day, my sister is still heavily involved with New Age practices while I am still skeptical about psychic readers.

Quoted from Newsday.com

“Only one-tenth of 1 percent of all those who claim to be psychic are,” she said, basing her conclusion on 15 years of research.

Frauds use many techniques to make people think they are getting information from “the other side” when they are actually getting it from the clients, said Wendy, an artist and self-proclaimed “master” psychic who lives upstate. Wendy requested that only her first name be printed because of threats she said she has received from scamming psychics-mediums angry about her book.

I don’t know if this woman, who calls herself a “super psychic,” is any different from the other celebrity psychics or psychic readers out there. $550 for a 90-minute session is an awful lot of money to spend on something as frivolous as fortune telling. People will pay just about anything to listen to what they want to hear, though. Their obsession with psychic readings becomes as addictive as gambling, and these con artists know it.

Can a deceased loved one visit you in your dreams? Many people claim that they have experienced dream visitations. In these dreams, the spirit of a loved one appears suddenly and unexpectedly either during or after a normal dream. Often their image will be brighter, and their surroundings quite vivid.

Why do they come?

I think they come into our dreams because we shut them out when we’re awake. The majority of us are taught that ghosts are the products of the crazy and delusional. They come to us through our dreams because we are in a more “open” state when we are asleep.

Quoted from Esoteric Dreams:

Deceased relatives are certainly frequent visitors in these kinds of dreams. They may come to comfort the dreamer, to let him know that they are all right, that death is not what it seems, not the end. They may come to give some helpful advice, or to set the dreamer straight. Sometimes they will even come to ask a favor of the dreamer. (In one case, a murder victim appeared to the dreamer, and revealing the identity of the murderer, seemed to ask the dreamer to see to it that justice was served.)

Are they real?

Skeptics will have you believe that these visitations are nothing more than the biproduct of a distraught mind. While that may be true with many cases, I feel that we have no solid clues about the afterlife. For many of us, seeing is believing.

Visitations: After-Death Contact Investigative Files
Visitations from Beyond the World

I’ve just been remembering an incident that happened to me before I’d heard of the book, Cosmic Ordering. I must have inadvertently practised this technique over some furniture a few months ago.

We had noticed that the sofa and single chairs were looking a bit tatty, so decided to replace them. Now, I loathe shopping, so I thought I’d try the internet. After a long spell online I stared up at the ceiling (as one does) and cried, “Why can’t I find some decent furniture?”

Well, time passed … about two weeks, then my former business partner turned up out of the blue. He’d inherited his mother’s house and all the furniture. Most of it was being sold but a few items were being kept for sentimental value. These included a very luxurious, red leather suite, spectacularly comfortable and absolutely huge. It was far too big for his cottage, so he asked if I would “store” it indefinitely.

When it arrived it fitted perfectly and looks quite magnificent. Everyone is satisfied and we didn’t pay a penny.

So, does “cosmic ordering” work, or not?

In The Times (London), that excellent journalist, Ben Macintyre, ask the serious question: where have all the UFOs gone? Here’s part of his answer:

Just a few years ago, the sky seemed to be littered with flying saucers and every other sort of astral crockery: strange lights, cigar-shaped spaceships, paranormal things that went bump in the night. Scully and Mulder were rushed off their feet. Now the UFOs have almost vanished. Sure, you still get a few alien abductions, especially on New Year’s Eve, and diehard ufologists are still recording close encounters of the umpteenth kind.

Since 1955 the National UFO Reporting Centre in Seattle has clocked 125,000 reports of sightings. But in recent years the numbers have dropped dramatically. The British Flying Saucer Bureau closed down three years ago after half a century of saucer-spotting. The simple truth is that the little green men don’t come calling like they used to, and they have stopped leaving circles in our crops.

[ … ]

But it is also a result of human invention, and humanity’s evolving relationship with new technology. UFO sightings have declined as the internet has expanded. The web is the natural home of every crackpot and conspiracy theorist, but it also, eventually, produces a rarefied atmosphere of rationalism in which aliens and other elusive creatures cannot long survive. In the short term, the internet was a blessing to UFOs; but over time, it has all but killed them off.

[ … ]

UFOs tend to appear at moment of turmoil and technical innovation, and the full-scale alien invasion started after the Second World War. On June 24, 1947, an American pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine silvery objects hurtling through the air near Mount Rainier in Washington state.

[ … ]

Within a month, flying saucers had been reported in 28 states. On a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, the US Air Force recovered bits of debris from a crash site, and rumours of bodies of bug-eyed aliens quickly spread. Britain became a favoured UFO landing strip, with hundreds and then thousands of reported sightings. “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?”, wondered Winston Churchill in a memo written in 1951. “What can it mean?”

Read the whole article.