“Are You Psychic?”

(This is revised and recycled from a previous post on my Facebook author page, for those who don’t read me on Facebook.)

Am I psychic? Yes, but I can’t do what Mae can do. I have history of precognitive dreams, some that predicted major events such a relative’s death or illness, or a major change in my workplace, and others that foresaw peculiar and unlikely but utterly trivial events. I have no idea why this happens, but it’s happened forty or fifty times. I stopped counting. I’ve only been able to harness this ability intentionally, to see something for a friend, once, and the dream took months to come true. I would not make a good psychic in a novel. I plan to have a character with a more focused and useful version of this talent in a later book. Ezra Yahnaki, the thirteen year old grandson of Mescalero Apache medicine woman Bessie Yahnaki, will be introduced in book five of the series.

The idea for Mae’s gift was planted a number of years ago when a neighbor invited me for dinner. She had a friend visiting from out of town. This visitor could hold something you owned, and pick information about you and your life. I didn’t know what to expect, but I asked her to find out what I most needed to know. She turned away from the dinner table, holding my eyeglasses, and was quiet for about five minutes. When she faced me again, she said she’d seen an elderly woman in a bed, and sensed that this woman was very sad. My mother was in a nursing home suffering from multi-infarct dementia. In this condition a person remembers the past well, and the personality is intact, but the events since the series of mini-strokes are lost. She had no short-term memory. It was distressing for her to be lost in the present and yet be intellectually sharp and know who she was in the past. My mother died shortly after this. I based Mae’s gift on this woman’s ability to see the present at a distance through touch, and added the ability to see the past.