Just after I turned 11 years old, I dreamed that my maternal grandfather died the night he died. My dad woke me up the next morning to tell me what had occurred. But I already knew. His story was the same as my dream. And I felt discombobulated by Pop Kasin’s foretold death.

I find this fact interesting in the telling of my story because of a story my mom told me not too long ago when I first started seeing energy work clients.

She had packed a picnic with some friends as a girl of 6, 7, or 8 years old and they went to a nearby park that was boarder by a wooded area. She and her friends had put down a blanket and unpacked their picnic. My mother was facing the wooded area. A young man walked toward them and then into the woods where he turned to face them, unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to my mom and her friends. My mom stuffed her sandwich in her mouth and got up and ran away to see that her dad had just pulled up as he had a “feeling” that something bad was happening.

Her telling of this story was a great gift in that it gave me comfort, created a bond I thought had long disappeared, and made me feel not so alone within the confines of a sometimes still practicing Catholic extended family. I felt less in the ausländer role to which I’d grown accustomed.

My paternal grandfather dreamed numbers… lottery, horses, you name it. Dreams foretell the future. And my paternal grandmother died the year before my birth with my mom’s due date being the date of her death. Mag, as she was known, has always been with me from the moment of conception… watching, listening, loving, teaching. But even with her presence the knowledge of death coming has always been unsettling to me and is the reason I asked the premonitions to stop when I was 14 or 15 having just been seen the death of my beloved godmother. I did not know how to cope with the knowledge nor did I feel as though I had any one in which to confide.

In stepping into my calling as a seer of things, a channeler of energy, a grounding force, my psyche butts up against these bit of information I don’t want to have and invokes fear. And I keep trying to release the past, release the knowledge of the nasty bits but apparently that knowledge is a part of this path too.