Okay, this blog is about me claiming to be psychic. This topic probably makes me even more uncomfortable than it makes you.

By now, you’re probably asking yourself is this person some kind of weirdo, occultist, mystic or what?

No. Absolutely not. I was raised in the Presbyterian Church. I am a very ordinary, mildly religious person.

I never looked for anything psychic to happen to me, far from it.

It took many years of somebody out there in the spirit world knocking on my very closed mind to convince me to at least consider that there were realities we couldn’t see. I write in depth about the important steps in this journey from scoffer to absolute certainty in my book Bedeviled, The Strange Life and Death of Actor Tom O’Rourke.

Here, I’ll limit myself to a briefer explanation.   

Let me start this by saying that when I worked as a model, while being a student in an Ivy League college studying Environmental Biology, one of the things that embarrassed me the most about my job was that all the women’s magazines that I worked for had horoscope columns.

In those days, men’s magazines never had any of that silly stuff. It was so mortifying!

Women! What the heck was the matter with them. They spent small fortunes on their clothes, hair and make-up and then sat around trying to figure themselves out by reading their horoscopes. Well, live and learn.

I was always a very practical person, not the type to ever give the slightest thought to anything paranormal or psychic.

My father was a scientist who, among other jobs, helped design nuclear reactors in many different countries.

You don’t consult your horoscope for answers when you’re building something that could blow up the world.

So, here’s what happened that basically turned my nice, predictable science world completely upside down.

Tom and I were in a very desperate situation financially. He got an offer to apprentice as a director with his old friends on the soap opera The Guiding Light, but we’d have to move from LA back to the New York area for this job.

We couldn’t afford to live in the city, so I was chosen to go fly back to Northern NJ to find something to rent, because I grew up there and was familiar with the area.

It was an emotionally desperate and very low point in our lives. Who would rent to two people with no jobs? How much rent can we afford? Can we even find a feasible place to rent in a town with decent schools for our kid?

As I was on the flight, my overstressed mind sort of relaxed and wandered. Suddenly, looking out the window at the passing scene of the western desert below, I knew that one of Tom’s scripts would be made into a movie.

It was a script that takes place in the desert. And I knew as surely as I knew that 2 and 2 make 4, that Desert Heat would be a movie. It was suddenly there, a fact.

And that was bizarre, because we’d shopped that script around for years, and no one was interested. We’d forgotten about it in the midst all our troubles.

But there it was, this stupid fact, stuck in my brain like any other thing you might know, except how come I knew for sure it was true? But I knew it was. It was all very odd.

And it was the most improbable fact ever, because anyone who knows anything about Hollywood knows there are literally millions of screenplays sloshing around Tinsel town. The odds of getting one made into a movie are pretty much nil, zero, and forget it.

During the next couple of years, we had so much to do in getting resettled that I forgot all about my strange fact. I knew it had happened. I had told Tom about it. But life goes on.

Then, out of the blue, Hollywood called because Jean Claude Van Damme had seen the script for Desert Heat and liked it.

And so, unbelievably, that screenplay was made into an actual movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme.

At some point in all the excitement of our great good fortune, Tom reminded me of my prediction from the airplane.

Now, I admit to being an overly intellectual person. Naturally, for a person like myself, it was always absolutely essential to have a theory of how the world more or less worked. I needed that. It gave me the confidence to carry on with life.

But, if in some weird way the future could be known—and I knew it could, because I had known a future event with absolute certainty—then as they say, all bets were off.

This stupid fact popping into my head and then actually occurring destroyed my entire concept of the structure of reality. It literally knocked me practically senseless.

I had many, many sleepless nights trying to recalibrate my understanding of reality.

The thing is, in the physical world of science, there is literally no theory or any whiff of possibility or any plausible physical model of the structure of the universe that would allow the future to be known and to be predicted. And even more unbelievable, to pop into my brain. How the heck did that happen?

Having something like this happen to me was like having a brain worm, eating at me, night and day. I kept thinking how could that be? What is going on?

And believe me when I say I spent years scouring the library, extensively searching every conceivable resource that might provide some workable, scientific explanation or some model of the universe that could account for the future being known.

When scientists addressed the question of anything psychic, they dismissed the experiences by contriving alternate and very convoluted explanations to disprove anything supernatural.

They also dismissed psychics and mediums as people with delusions, or people who were just making it up.

None of this was any help. I knew I hadn’t made it up, although I often wished I had. And I knew there was no alternate explanation that disproved that I had known the future. 

I gave up on scientists and moved on to the psychic and medium crowd to see what they had to say.

Now the problem with that approach is that a lot of the people who are psychic or mediums are often kind of kooky.

I read their books, too. Clearly, they did often have knowledge that must have been acquired psychically.

But their ideas about the universe were usually so limited by their own intellect, and full of such fantastic ideas, like lost Atlantis civilizations, and interplanetary races of demons or whatever, that they weren’t much help in trying to figure out anything.

I spent several years reading everything from the Holographic Universe on and on, so many books; and I never found a satisfactory explanation. It was the most baffling puzzle I’d ever met, and I simply could not solve it.

Were we all operating outside of time?

And what about free will? Where the heck did that fit in?

And how and why had the future popped into my head. Who did that?

It took a long, long time to convince me there was a spiritual world that was far greater and that superseded this world in ways I couldn’t understand.

Now I see that it was God, or some representative of the great One, knocking on my stubborn, egotistical and very closed mind.

I am talking to you, God was saying, and you’d better listen up because I’ve picked you to tell a story for me.

For a long time, I felt like I was breaking a lot of taboos in believing that I was getting psychic messages.

I was afraid of the occult, I mean, wasn’t Hitler into the occult?

It all seemed too odd to even think about, but there was no escaping it. Once that second sight is open, it seems to stay open.

And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because no one believed me.

If you talk about it, a lot of people just think you’re showing off or trying to get attention.

I knew it happened, no matter what they thought. And I was stuck with that knowledge, uncomfortable as it was.

Truthfully, and quite obviously, if you think about it, I would never have written a book about how my husband cheated on me for our entire life, unless it had been made pretty clear to me that it was important to tell this story.

I think one of the reasons it’s important is that so many people in the modern world are like me: overly scientific.

I call it having blinkers on, like the things you put on a horse’s head, so it won’t get spooked. Well, I was forced to take those blinkers off, and boy did I ever get spooked.

But this is an age where so many of us are like me, Doubting Thomas’s. That’s why I call myself a Doubting Thomas. I had to feel the wounds in real time in this world to understand and believe in the next world.

I have pretty much proof that what I’m saying is true. There’s the earlier book which I wrote when I thought that the book I was supposed to write was about a happily married actor. It was titled DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.

Additionally, there is all the evidence of Tom’s wandering and inexplicable choices in his career; and I have the tapes from Pam Coronado.

I pass all these strange events to make it easier for you to confirm your faith in the divine. I spent so many difficult years without it.

There are many, many roads to faith. I hope you find the one that will take you there.

And when I ask why me? Why was I picked for this job?

I think in the first place I have the right skill set. I have the properly scientifically skeptical training and background.

Then, much against my will and inclination, I stumbled into the arts and subsequently got bitten by the theater bug, so I studied and learned how to access a great swath of theater and movies which helped me decode the language of symbols. This made it easy for God and his servants to tell me their complicated stories and to be understood.

Also, I was of a romantic disposition, which helped me toward faith in love.

But last and best, I guess I am just the kind of person God always uses: foolish and weak.

I have bounced through life on a shoeshine and a smile, as they say, seemingly at the whim of fate, always barely keeping my head above water in the surging cross currents of life.

 “But God hath chosen the foolish things in the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

KJB 1 Corinthians 1:27