Preface: MEET JEFFREY WANDS

The first time I saw Jeffrey Wands in action was in December of 2001 when I went down to a television studio in Manhattan to attend a taping onThe Maury Show.I was there as a possible collaborator with Wands on a book about his psychic powers.

I was skeptical. While I believe in an afterlife -- I don't think it's logical not to believe -- I nonetheless doubted that anyone could talk to the dead or see into the future with absolute certainty. But I was there to see what he could do and how he worked.

What follows is a mostly verbatim account of what happened.

Wands came out on the stage to a nice burst of applause and a couple of shouts from the 150 or so people in the audience. A trim, thirtyish, handsome man all dressed in black -- shoes, suit, turtleneck. Wands looked nervous. I gathered this from the way he sat on a curved bench next to Maury: His body was still, his eyes a little too watchful.

I also looked closely at Maury -- a tall, thin man with a shock of gray hair, also dressed in black -- and tried to detect what he might be thinking, or doubting. Maury Povich had been around the talk show business a long time, and if anyone could spot something that wasn't kosher I figured he could. But I couldn't determine anything. Maury was smooth, melodiously articulate -- and unreadable.

Based on what Jeffrey Wands was about to endure, nervousness seemed to me an appropriate state.The Maury Showproducers had devised an acid test for him. And much more than his credibility was riding on how he performed.

As Maury explained:

"We have some grief-stricken guests waiting backstage who are desperate for Jeffrey to communicate with their deceased loved ones. Jeffrey has never met any of these guests and has no knowledge of their stories. Before we meet these guests we're going to escort Jeffrey backstage out of hearing range, then we're going to talk with our guests, and after they share their heartbreaking stories we're going to bring Jeffrey back out. Hopefully he'll be able to use his abilities to connect with their loved ones who have passed on."

Maury then led Jeffrey off the stage, after which he brought out the first guest, a pretty blonde woman with cornrow hair, wearing black slacks and a sweater and who, I guessed, was in her early twenties. Simultaneously, a large TV monitor on a back wall showed a photo of a goateed, smiling young black man.

"This is Angela," Maury said, "and if she looks sad it's because she is. Just three months ago, Alfie, the man you see in the photo, the love of her life and the father of her children, was murdered in cold blood outside her house. This is what happened."

Then, a dramatization, a blend of photos and video clips acted out by professional actors portrayed what had happened with Angela narrating.

"I was asleep in my bed," Angela said tearfully, "and I heard shots and I was scared. I saw that the clock said 2:40 and before it turned to 2:41 my doorbell rang three times. I got up and went downstairs and opened the door." She started to cry harder. "Alfie was lying there face down with blood coming out of his head. I didn't think he was dead...I couldn't bear to think of him as dead. But he was, and the hardest thing in the world is watching my children cry for him...."

"So what do you want to ask Jeffrey?" Maury said. "How he died...why he died...? "

"How, who, why...everything," Angela said.

"Okay," Maury said, "but before we bring Jeffrey out there's one other person who wants to know something about Alfie and that's his sister, Charlynn, who's in the studio audience."

Maury went into the audience and led a young black woman to the stage where she sat down next to Angela. Immediately, Charlynn, a heavyset person with large, expressive eyes reached over and grasped Angela's hand.

"And what do you want to know?" Maury asked.

"Why...how..."

Abruptly, she stopped and those expressive eyes got hard.

"I want to know," she said, "who killed my brother."

"Okay," Maury said, "let's bring Jeffrey out."

From time to time as Maury went through these preliminaries, a camera would show Jeffrey alone in a room backstage, sitting on the edge of a couch, his face somber, occasionally rubbing his hands together. I was worried for him. He was definitely nervous.

The camera followed him coming out of the room and down a hall with a floor strewn with cable, and then out onto the stage to be greeted by solid applause and a few shouts. Now, for him to help these women and to succeed, I knew he had to do one thing: talk to the dead.

Maury introduced him to the women and he sat down next to them.

"Is there anything," Maury said to Jeffrey, "you need to ask?"

"No," he said speaking rapidly as, I was to discover, he almost always does, "let me just hear what I'm hearing."

"I have one, two, three figures standing here," he said. "I have an older male and younger male who is about thirty coming through and I have a grandmother standing behind Charlynn."

He paused, looked down at a pad, a pen poised over it.

"Now what's confusing me," he said, "about their coming through is that they're holding this young man back, so this is an unnatural passing. I get a feeling of...confusion."

He turned to Charlynn.

"And this is your brother?"

"Yes," she said.

"This was in the house?"

"No," Angela said.

"But right outside in front of the steps," Jeffrey said.

My mind flashed back to the dramatization, which had shown Alfie lying face down next to the front steps. And Angela had said that was where she found him.

Both women nodded. Yes.

"Now he's looking toward two people...he's showing me two people...like he's connected to them. Does this make sense?"

The women looked at him, saying nothing.

"Two people," Maury interjected, "who did what?"

Jeffrey did not respond to Maury, as if he didn't hear him, perhaps because he was too inwardly focused.

"This has to be unnatural," Jeffrey said, "because of the way he's bringing them across...I'm getting an explosive feeling...hit in the chest."

"What you're saying," Charlynn said, "he has seen two people?"

"Yes," Jeffrey said and appeared to be struggling to see the two figures more clearly. "He's looking at two people, and they're connected to it...and I see him looking directly at this one person. This is somebody he would have been around in the three-day period before."

Before, I thought, the murder. I had a sense that whatever Jeffrey saw coming in to him came in a receiver that was imperfect. Sounds and images seemed to ebb and flow, come in and out of focus.

"Now the red car is whose?"

"That's my car," Angela said.

Just like that he knows the color of the car. I was stunned, and I thought I heard someone in the audience gasp.

"Was he near the car?"

"He parked behind me," Angela said.

"Okay, because he's showing me the car."

Then:

"This is a neighborhood feeling I'm getting. I see him looking directly at the person who..."

Shot him I said to myself.

"Was he in the car, because he's showing me the car."

No answer.

"I'm getting a high feeling," Jeffrey said, "I got to believe that there was an addiction issue with him...or someone else."

Again, neither of the women responded. In fact, I realized that other than paying close attention to what Jeffrey was saying and occasionally becoming tearful, neither woman was very vocal. I wondered why.

"This" he said, "happened three, four months ago?"

"Three," Angela said, "going to be four."

"Wow," Maury's melodious voice chimed in, "he didn't know that!"

"I have to be honest with you," Jeffrey said to Angela, "before you he did not have a great relationship with women. You were the first person he connected with...a genuine love...he gives me the sense that he was finally getting his life together...that's how he's bringing it over...

"You found him?" he said to Angela.

"Yes."

Jeffrey stopped.

"There's aKname connected to this case," he said, "and he said you know who this is."

Abruptly, Charlynn gasped and bent over at the waist, hiding her face and sobbing uncontrollably. Angela started to cry too.

Jeffrey didn't push it. All he said was:

"You know what I'm talking about."

I thought they did: Jeffrey had told them who murdered Alfie.

The next guest, Christine, was a matronly blonde woman in her early forties who had suffered, as Maury accurately said, the "unthinkable" loss of two of her three children, Melissa, seven, and Jimmy, eleven, whose images showed on another monitor.

Then, the dramatization.

It was a blend of photos of Christine and her kids, alone or together, and interspersed with staged video clips of a fire, one part of which showed a child trying to get down stairs, flames blocking the way. Christine, narrating the dramatization, was near tears or crying throughout. She told of how she had gone to work and how when she got there, she was told to call home immediately. She reached her ex-husband who told her Missy was "all burned up" in a hospital and "Jimmy was dead."

The dramatization finished with Christine, tears rolling down her face, talking about how much she missed Melissa and Jimmy, and how no day went by without her thinking of them.

"And what," Maury asked, "do you want Jeffrey to do for you?"

"I just want to tell them how sorry I am that I couldn't be there to save them. I want to say good-bye to Jimmy. I never had a chance to say good-bye to him. They wouldn't let me go near him. I know I can't have them back. But I want to hold them in my arms just one more time."

You could hear a pin drop in that 150-person audience, except for the sounds of people sniffling. I had tears running down my face and I had to swallow repeatedly to avoid breaking into open sobbing.

"Okay," Maury said, "let's bring Jeffrey out."

The camera picked him up coming down that hall again, suit jacket open, and I had an insight, a flash of gooseflesh. Maybe he was nervous, maybe he wasn't. But there was something heroic about him. It was his willingness to directly confront this woman's pain -- and help her deal with it. It was what psychics do -- or try to do.

As he came onto the stage the audience, recognizing that he had done something important for Angela and Charlynn, exploded in applause and shouts.

He shook hands with Christine and then he and Maury sat down.

"I got a female figure standing here," Jeffrey said. "Her name is Nana. She's making me feel like this is a granddaughter."

He stopped.

"Now let me get this," he said to himself, "I had it and I lost it...

"Oh," he continued, "what's the significance of thePreference...Pat...Patsy..."

"Pumpkin," Christine said.

"This is connected to your daughter?"

"Yes, I used to call her that."

"Now Lisa, or Lessie is who?"

"My daughter, Melissa."

My God, out of an infinity of possible names.

"Your grandmother is making me feel they're together. That's how they are bringing it across. The only thing that's confusing me is that she's making it seem unnatural...a suffocation feeling."

"Yes...yes," Christine said, her face contorted.

"But there's a lot of confusion, chaos with this...I'm running from one location to another. Does this make sense to you?"

"Yes!"

"Okay...now..." He stopped and dropped his head again. Then:

"Strangulation feeling in your daughter."

"She couldn't breathe! She was on a ventilator."

"Okay. That's why I can't get a breath. But she knew you were there. She's very adamant about knowing you were there...very adamant. It's almost as if she waited before she went because that's how she brings it across."

He paused.

"But the brother is who?"

Christine cried harder.

"Her brother," she said.

"But," he said, "is there a third child? They're making me feel there's a third child."

Christine shook her head. She looked totally puzzled.

"No," she said.

"There wasn't any pregnancy lost? She's making me feel like there's another brother with them."

Then, realization came into Christine's eyes.

"Years ago..."

"Yes," Jeffrey said, "this is how she's bringing it over...so they're all together..."

Christine's sobbing was audible. But part of her tears now seemed to be happy ones. Then following no logical progression...

"She's making it seem," Jeffrey said, "like I'm falling down stairs."

"She was trying," Christine said, "to go down the stairs but she couldn't."

"She doesn't want you to be angry at her," Jeffrey said.

"I'm not angry."

"But she's very concerned because that's the way she brings it across."

"Okay."

"The November connection is what?" Jeffrey said.

"She was born November fifth."

"Now you sing," he said. "Or she sings. Because she's making fun of singing."

Christine smiled through her tears.

"We used to sing together."

"She said she had the better voice."

"Oh my God," Christine said smiling. "She said that to me once in the living room!"

"You need to know," he said, "that she's blaming herself. But the important thing is that we have both grandmothers here. This is not something you could have prevented."

"Is there anything else you want to ask him?" Maury said.

"I want...to say good-bye to Jimmy."

"Oh no, believe me," Jeffrey said, "they're both together. You got a lot of busybodies on that side. Which means you have a lot of relatives. What you didn't finish on this side, they're finishing on that side."

"Thank you."

"Is Jeffrey giving you some comfort?" Maury asked.

"Oh yes. Yes, he is."

For me he was too.

The final guest that day was a pale-faced twenty-year-old woman named Tisha whose father, Maury said, had been brutally murdered fifteen years earlier, when he was only thirty-five. "The mystery of her father's death still haunts her," he said, "and her desire to put all this to rest is even stronger now because she herself suffers from a fatal lung disease and could die at any time."

The dramatization came on, this time with Maury narrating. As he spoke, photos and professionally staged video clips depicted the action, telling of how her father, a handsome man with black hair and an engaging smile, was hitchhiking on his way home when he was assaulted and stabbed thirty-six times. The video showed a bloody butcher knife in simulated action, and then his body lying face down on ground that was blanketed with leaves.

One photo in the dramatization showed the entire family that had been "destroyed" by the murder, while another showed the man's mother who had died three years earlier, her dying wish that someone find out who had killed her son.

"Why do you want to contact your father now?" Maury said to Tisha when the dramatization was over.

"I grew up without my father," Tisha said. "Someone took him away from me and I want to know why. Why did they do it?"

Then Maury said, "Let's bring Jeffrey out."

The camera followed Jeffrey out of the backstage room and as he walked down the hall I got the feeling that I was watching a rock star approach. Indeed, when he came out on stage he was greeted with loud shouts and sustained applause.

He shook hands with Tisha and sat down.

"I have a young man in front of me and he's with his father but they're making me feel as if there's a distance between them, something that they did not resolve before they went over."

"That's my father," Tisha said, "and my grandpa. They weren't close..."

"So Michael is who?"

"My fatherandmy grandpa."

"Wow," Maury said. "Wow. Right off the bat."

All I could do was blink.

"The March connection is what?" Jeffrey asked.

"My grandma's birthday."

"And grandma's passed?"

"Yes."

"You've got a lot of dead people here."

"Now the Fran. Or Frances..."

"That's my aunt."

"And she's passed?"

"I believe so."

"That's who your father's with."

Tisha nodded.

"And there's a Je name...like Jersey..."

Tisha looked puzzled.

Jeffrey started to move on to something else when Tisha realized something that brought tears to her eyes and a smile.

"Oh, Jean! My grandmother's name was Jean!"

"That's okay. The way they come across is the way they put it.

"Now," Jeffrey said, "the picture that was put in with him. He's showing me a picture in a pocket and a note you put in with it."

"Yes I did."

"Now," Maury said, "this is getting scary."

"That's his way," Jeffrey said, "of validating that it's him."

He paused.

"The only confusion I have here," he said, "is that he's making me feel an accident. It's unnatural."

"He was murdered," Tisha said.

"He's coming through that way. The connection with the impact is related..."

"He was injured in the head," Tisha said.

"That was the first impact. They hit him from behind. I'm also in the stomach area."

Tisha nodded.

"He was stabbed to death."

"This," Jeffrey said, "is like a robbery connection. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Jeffrey paused.

"Who's TR?"

"His sister Terry."

"That's who he keeps making reference to..."

Pause.

"This was A.M.," Jeffrey said, "the middle of the night. I'm coming back from somewhere. Between four forty and four forty-eight..."

"Yes, that is when people said they heard screams."

"This is definitely robbery...and men in a van followed him. He's like leaving a local place. I'm getting a feeling of him walking along a road. The side of the road."

"He was hitchhiking."

He paused again.

"Yes, but...you need to tell Terry that he's okay. He's very concerned."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

And I realized that not only Terry would know he was okay, but so would Tisha.

Looking back, I realize that the core of Jeffrey Wands is the same as the core of this book. The desire to help people and in the book's case help you tap into your own psychic side, which can lead to some wonderful benefits, including helping you to better avoid danger, make better business and romantic decisions, put yourself in closer contact with yourself spiritually, and let you connect with those who have crossed over. By itself the latter is, as it were, worth the price of admission. Think about it. How wonderful would it be to talk one more time with lost loved ones, to put your arms around them and tell them the things you didn't say before they left? Wow.

As for me, I left my skepticism somewhere back there between the first and second guest, and I'm happy and proud to help in any way I can.

-- TOM PHILBIN

CHAPTER ONE: We're All Psychic

SOUL ENERGY

When I was around seven years old I lived in a garden apartment with my mother in Islip, a town on the south shore of Long Island about fifty miles from New York City. I was a normal kid in every way. I fished for catfish at a local lake. I read comic books. I played baseball every chance I got, just one of many young Mets fans who wished he was Tom Seaver. And I also loved to watch a neighbor who I only knew as "Tony" work on his car, a candy-apple red GTO he kept in showroom condition. Tony used one kind of polish for the bodywork, chrome polish for the chrome sections, a toothbrush and Q-tip to get at narrow spots on the grille, and he even cleaned the engine -- which always looked brand new -- with a rag and some sort of special solution. I remember my mother watching Tony one day through our kitchen window, saying: "I hope that man never has to make a choice between his car and his wife. She'll be looking for a new husband."

Tony loved that car with an unholy passion, and my mom and I both knew that anyone who messed with it would have problems. Big problems. Tony was a tough looking guy with a shaved head (this was in the sixties when no one but the toughest of the tough would dare shave his head), and he had muscles on muscles. Tony was young and strong. He wore nothing but form-fitting black T-shirts and tight black pants. He looked like he could kill you with his bare hands.

One Saturday in late May I spotted Tony polishing his car, as usual. So I left my house to go and talk with him, also as usual. Or so I thought...until walking toward his house I was struck by a strange and fleeting thought, a weird feeling that something had happened to his car. I don't know where this thought came from -- and certainly I didn't know how to explain it -- the only thing I can say is that it was sharp and sudden and seemed to leave my mind as quickly as it entered. I was a little unnerved by the experience, but even as a kid I knew I probably shouldn't tell Tony. I knew he wouldn't like it. Not at all. Easier said than done, though. I was seven years old and painfully direct.

"Hey, Tony," I said, "is your car okay?"

Tony was standing on the opposite side of the car, polishing the hood. When he heard my question he stopped what he was doing and looked straight at me, his dark eyes hostile. My stomach did a freefall. I was sorry I had said anything, but I couldn't change it now.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. I just thought something might be wrong with your car."

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know," I said. And, of course, I didn't.

That was a tense moment. Real tense. Then, slowly, Tony took one long last baleful look at me and went back to polishing his car. I watched him for a little while longer, then turned away and left without him saying his characteristic "See ya kid."

The next day when I got up I had the same thought as before, that something was wrong with Tony's car. So the first thing I did was to look out the window toward Tony's driveway and...it was gone! Tony's driveway was empty and his beautiful candy-apple red GTO was gone.

Where was it?

I spent some time during breakfast worrying about the car, but after a while I did what most kids did and switched my thoughts to something else -- baseball. I forgot about the car altogether, then a little while later left my house, glove and ball in hand, to meet some friends and play at being a Met. I didn't get ten feet from my house when I saw Tony's door open. Somewhere deep inside me an alarm bell went off. I was scared. When I saw Tony walking my way, waving me toward him, I knew my fear was justified. He was mad. Real mad.

"Where's your car?" I asked.

"I have a problem with the tranny," he said, looking at me carefully. I nodded as if I knew what he meant, but I didn't. I didn't know a tranny from a fanny.

"Let me ask you something," he said.

"Sure," I said chirpily, trying to hide my fear.

"Did you do anything to my car?"

"What do you mean?"

"Put something in it that doesn't belong?"

Stunned, I shook my head vigorously. Tony looked at me as if evaluating a virus under a slide, then turned and walked away. I made it to the ball field as fast as I could.

Every day for the next few days I looked out the window to see whether the car was back. Before I left my house I looked across at Tony's to see if he was around, and only then would I leave my house. Thankfully, he didn't show.

The car reappeared during the week, but next Saturday when I saw Tony begin his polishing ritual I stayed inside the house. I knew we were finished, and we were. To this day I'm sure that he thinks I sabotaged his car.

I didn't know it then, but that was the very first time I had used my psychic ability, the very first time in my life when I "just knew." I didn't have any help from so-called logic or conscious thought. I wasn't told anything about it. I didn't see or hear a thing. I just knew.

What happened between Tony and me is common to all psychic experience. I was able to get special information without

really thinking about it, at least initially. This information is special because although it may come from the present, it might just as easily be transmitted from the past or the future. It's also special because we wouldn't be able to obtain it without using psychic ability.

So where does this information come from? It comes from energy, the sort of energy that all human beings -- living or dead -- give off. You might call it soul energy. Soul energy is both positive and negative, yin and yang, and it is transmitted back and forth between the living and the living, and the living and the dead. Places and inanimate objects contain psychic energy too.

Soul energy contains all kinds of information about the past, present, and future. Our other senses can't perceive this energy, but it can be picked up by our "sixth sense," which is a physical capacity like sight or smell, located somewhere in the vast and as yet unexplored (some scientists say 95 percent) part of our brain. To put it another way, the capacity is like a radio receiver that picks up radio waves and decodes it for us to use.

We're all psychic, because we all have that sixth sense.

CONSCIOUS INFLUENCE

Psychic energy comes to us along different paths, consciously and unconsciously. The energy that yields information that we're consciously aware of goes under various names, such as "intuition," "ESP" (extra sensory perception), and "psi" (psychic phenomena). We have a feeling about something, a sense, an idea that something is true or is going to occur. And it does.

It's this aspect of being psychic that most people think is the whole ball of wax, psychically speaking that is. But it's only one of the many ways in which we psychically perceive. There's a whole grab bag of psychic happenings that should be included in the category of conscious psychic information, psychic events that occur on a conscious level.

What I'm talking about can be clearly seen in what happened to my cousin Jennifer Johnson last summer. Jennifer was traveling in upstate New York with her two boys, John ten, and Mark eleven, when they started to yowl about not having any ice cream. Kids! Jennifer decided to give in and started to look for a place where they could stop for a cone. She saw a sign for a place called Saugerties and followed the road into town. Just before she got into Saugerties proper, Jennifer thought of her obstetrician, Dr. Raymond Fierstein. That was odd. Jennifer had not thought of Dr. Fierstein since John was born, ten years earlier. She knew she wouldn't likely be seeing him again on a professional basis. How strange that he should pop into her mind like that!

Jennifer drove slowly down the street into Saugerties until she spotted what looked like an old country store. She parked the car and went inside, the boys trailing after her. The place had a wide-board creaky floor and a tin ceiling from which hung a slowly revolving fan. The shelves were packed with all sorts of items, many of which appeared to be lightly coated with dust. This quaint little place seemed straight out of some old movie. It even had a big old counter at the back. Jennifer liked the store. She was glad she stopped. Taking her time to admire some of the dusty old canned goods, she started toward the back of the store hoping to find an ice cream freezer. But it was Jennifer who froze in her tracks. There, standing before her, was a small balding man wearing shorts and a flowery shirt and holding a pistachio ice cream cone. It was Dr. Fierstein.

"I was just thinking about you," he said, obviously flummoxed.

"I was just thinking about you!" Jennifer responded. "How about that?"

Coincidence, right? Wrong. It was psychic energy that drew Jennifer and Dr. Fierstein together, an invisible and imperceptible signal that each sent out to the other. In some ways it reminds me of that great line that Humphrey Bogart utters to Ingrid Bergman inCasablanca:"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." I don't know exactly how people's energies connect, but I do know that they do, and I do know that there's always a "why."

A few weeks after Jennifer met Dr. Fierstein she was talking to a friend who was looking to find a good fertility doctor. Jennifer didn't know anyone, but she contacted Dr. Fierstein and he gave her an excellent referral to pass along to her friend, who ultimately became pregnant. That, I believe, is why Jennifer really met the doctor. Of course, one could say that she would have recommended him anyway, but people we haven't seen in a while tend to fade from mind, and she might have recommended someone else, possibly with a less desirable result.

It's not just people who emit psychic energy. Places do too, and we pick up on that energy through our sixth sense. That's what happened to a friend of mine named Jim Dwyer as he drove up from Arizona to New York a while ago. That drive is filled with endlessly boring signs announcing innumerable small towns, the names of which are forgotten right after reading them. Crossing over into Maryland, Jim's eyes glazed over the signs until he saw a very ordinary signpost announcing what seemed like the very small town of La Plata. Jim's eyes opened wide. He felt a charge, a sense that somehow this place was important. Jim couldn't see the town -- it was two or three miles down a side road. The only thing visible was the lonely green-and-white sign. He thought about it. He tried to articulate what it was he was feeling, but all he could isolate was the physical feeling of getting ill.

Why should a little town in the middle of nowhere seem so very important?

Jim kept thinking about La Plata even after he got to his home in New York, and he continued to think about it until about a week later when he heard some shocking news: A 20-foot-wide tornado had ripped La Plata apart.

Why was Jim so obsessed with the little town that was to suffer this devastating tragedy? In truth, I don't know. I wish I had the answer. All I know is that Jim's sixth sense picked up this free-floating psychic energy that La Plata was giving off. Someday the reason may emerge, but it hasn't yet. I have some ideas of course. Maybe someone will show up with a name that sounds like La Plata, and that someone is to be avoided since the name is associated with a bad event. Or maybe Jim will meet someone with a similar name, and that will alert him to a potential problem that he'll be able to help avoid.

UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE

Sometimes psychic energy flows into our unconscious mind and motivates us to do something unusual or out of character, and the only way we can tell that it has paid us a visit is a post-event analysis. Consider, for example, what happened to a client of mine, John Barzac.

If someone asked me to compile a Top 10 list of the neatest, best dressed people I've ever met in my life, John would certainly make the list. John always looked like he stepped from the pages of GQ magazine. His clothing was not only beautifully pressed, but impeccably coordinated and fitted. John himself was also impeccably predictable in his life and in his job, which was as a manager of a brokerage house ensconced in a building across the street from the World Trade Center.

September 11 had started for John, who lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn, like every other day. He got up, shaved and showered at his regular time, ate a low-cholesterol breakfast as he always did, and then donned his duds, which he had laid out the night before. His entire morning regimen was geared to being on time for work and his record was astonishing. He had not been late -- or absent -- once in thirteen years. But this day was bizarre. For the first time in thirteen years John couldn't find his keys. He always put his keys on his dresser -- specifically the left side -- so he was as puzzled as he was annoyed. Where were those keys? John searched unsuccessfully for ten minutes by himself and then, frustrated, enlisted the aid of his wife who had just gotten out of bed. When together they still couldn't find the keys, they got their two daughters to help. It took this little search party another ten minutes to find the keys...inside a slipper in the closet.

"I have no idea how they got there, "John told me. "But let me tell you, I was fuming."

As a result of the misplaced keys, John was twenty minutes late for work. Thank God. Chances are if he had been on time he would have been walking across the street from the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. just as the first terrorist plane slammed into the north tower, raining fire and debris down on top of him. There's not much doubt in my mind that John would likely have been killed if the search for his keys had not triggered a different scenario, making him late for work for the first time in thir-teen years. When that flaming debris came down in the street at 8:45, John was standing on a Manhattan-bound train well out of harm's way.

"Being late saved my life," he said.

What saved John's life was actually psychic energy. This energy -- perhaps transmitted by a dead relative or a living relative or even someone outside his family -- had directed John's unconscious mind to put the keys in a place where he would have trouble finding them so that his life would be saved. Why he was designated to live to "play another day," as they say, I don't know. But somewhere, far down the line, the reason may become evident.

Some people, of course, would call this a lucky coincidence, but I've analyzed literally hundreds of these coincidences -- events where people do things totally out of keeping with their characters -- and I believe that they can only be explained by psychic energy.

Auras

Unconscious energy can change our habits and our moods, and it can also change our psychic appearance, which is what an aura is.

One day a few years ago a news anchor for CBS television -- let's call her Linda -- came to see me in my Flushing office. She was, as anchors are wont to be, a beautiful woman: smart, articulate, and bold too. But she had some issues. And she wanted my help.

Linda sat down in a chair across the desk from me and just as I was about to start telling her some things about herself, which I always do in a reading to help establish my credibility, she surprised me by reaching into her bag and handing me a small color picture.

"Who's this?" she challenged.

I scrutinized the picture. The woman appeared to be in her late sixties. She had gray hair pulled back and parted in the middle. Her features were heavy. Eastern European, I thought. Perhaps Slavic.

"She's your mother," I said, "but not your birth mother. You were adopted."

Linda blinked a few times.

"That's right."

I started to hand the picture back to her when, abruptly, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I pulled the picture back and looked at it again. An aura of black, circular light had formed over Linda's mother's stomach. Alarm bells went off inside but, as always, I made my advice as gentle as I could.

"I don't mean to alarm you," I said, "but your mother has a medical thing going on in her stomach that needs immediate attention."

"Right now?"

"Right now," I said softly.

We terminated the session. The next evening I was in my office about nine when the phone rang. It was Linda, and she was gushing with thanks.

"I want to thank you so much, Jeffrey," she said. "The doctor said that my mom had an aneurysm in her stomach which was about to burst. But they got it in time and she's going to be okay now. You saved her life."

No I didn't, Linda, I thought. The aura did.

Auras are colored lights that react to moods and also to people and places. Sometimes they appear as clusters on the body, sometimes as halos around the head or the entire body, and sometimes both. Auras are great because they can give anyone who picks them up a quick read of a person.

Auras don't appear to everyone. Like other forms of psychic energy, you have to be aware of them before you can read them. Everyone has an aura, but you won't be able to see it until your psychic eyesight is ready to receive it. As you develop your psychic abilities you will find that reading auras comes naturally -- that's how it should be. Don't try to force an aura to come to you. It won't. In fact, if you try too hard to read someone's aura then chances are you'll conjure up something that isn't there. Relax. Don't "over-focus." You can't stare an aura into existence. Just be aware. Be receptive. Let go and be ready to receive the colors.

The key to extracting information from auras is understanding what the colors symbolize. When I saw the black light on Linda's mother's stomach, I became alarmed because black or gray light means a health issue. Red usually denotes a creative person, green is an indication that someone is searching for answers, blue indicates sadness or grief, and yellow means that there is a positive development in the offing.

Auras are not static. The colors can change on a particular person. For example, a person may have a white aura (indicating positive personality traits) which may then change to gray -- indicating illness. Or it may change to some other downbeat or upbeat color because of a change in emotional state. The change can occur over a long period of time or quickly.

About six months ago, for example, I saw a client named Rita, and I immediately saw a maroon aura over her stomach area. Maroon is usually a fertility issue.

Rita confirmed what I saw: "I'm afraid I'm not going to get pregnant," she said. "I've been trying for a couple of years without success."

I said nothing because I saw nothing but then, near the end of the session (just a half hour later!) I saw something very exciting: The maroon aura over her stomach was changing to pink, and to me that meant one thing.

"You have a pink aura, Rita. And you know what that means?"

"No."

"You're going to become pregnant and have a baby girl."

She was thrilled, but even more thrilled when she called me a few weeks later and told me she was pregnant...with a baby girl.

Dreams

Even the most reluctant among us seem to be willing to admit the presence of some psychic element in our dreams. We imbue our dreams with meaning, sometimes spending hours to decode their meaning. Dreams can be powerful because in an unconscious state we are more receptive to psychic energy. Our defenses are down and we're not so resistant to picking up information from those who have passed.

It's not difficult to determine when a dream is psychic in nature and when it's not. There are signs. Psychic dreams are vivid or contain unusual colors. They may also have a special impact on the dreamer who somehow knows instinctively that the dream is extraordinary. Psychic dreams normally occur soon after someone crosses over, but they can occur before an event to give us a premonition. As one of my clients pithily put it: "No way are some of my dreams ordinary."

Dreams are endless in their number and in their meaning. So much of what we dream can only be interpreted when it's put in context, when it's analyzed in the larger meaning of experience and emotion. That said, there are some constants, some key symbols that are useful in unlocking the door to our dreams. Here are a few to get you going:

SYMBOL=MEANING

angel= success in love, a visitation in the house, prosperity

bell, ringing=quarrel in the family

coffin=success in love, the coffin of a family member may mean serious health issues

teeth=major health problems

gold teeth=dishonor and corruption

extracting teeth=good fortune

toothache=health and happiness

train, locomotive=good business

wine=prosperity

water=abundance

dirty water=sickness, bad tidings

heavy fog=bad business

fog clearing=love is coming your way

death=spiritual awareness or awakening

many deaths=great happiness

storm, stormy weather=great problems in business

snow=abundancesnow on a mountaintop=big money coming shortly

lights=inheritance, a new beginning

One of the most famous psychic dreams ever was experienced by none other than President Abraham Lincoln. On April 11, 1865, Lincoln related the details of a disturbing dream he had to a group of friends. One of them was Ward Hill Lamon, author ofRecollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865,who reported what Lincoln said in his book.

Lincoln first told the assemblage of people that he had had the dream a few days earlier, that on that day

"I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. "Who is dead in the White House?" I demanded of one of the soldiers. "The President," was his answer, "he was killed by an assassin." Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Three days later, April 14, John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate zealot, sneaked up behind Lincoln and shot him in the head while he was watching a play at the now infamous Ford's Theater. Lincoln lingered until the next morning, when he died. His dream had been a premonition of his own murder.

Lincoln's reaction to the dream shows that he knew his dream was special. How many people tell their dreams to a group of people? He was afraid, afraid enough to tell friends of the dream's content. Lincoln was not unfamiliar with psychic phenomena. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was heavily dependent on psychics and, in fact, used them to try to contact two young sons who had crossed over because of disease. Lincoln had to know it was special, psychic.

To me, also, there is further evidence of its psychic nature because of its apparently coincidental nature. To me coincidence, rather than meaning something is happening by chance, is a clear clue that psychic forces are at work.

Peggy Klein, a client of mine from Hicksville, New York, had a series of remarkable dreams that have all the earmarks of being psychic.

On December 29, 2000, Peggy suffered the ultimate loss any parent can have: Her twenty-year-old son Robert crossed over as the result of an automobile accident. As Peggy was to learn, Robert and his girlfriend June were in a KIA -- "a scooter with a roof," Peggy calls it -- and were making a turn on Hempstead Turnpike on Long Island when a drunk driver in a Jeep coming the other way barreled through a red light at high speed and smashed into the passenger side of the small vehicle where Robert was sitting. That impact was so forceful that Robert had to be cut from the car by firemen. "He was rushed to the hospital," Peggy says, "but his injuries were just too severe and he died after about six hours."

Peggy's first dream actually took place a month before the accident. "In the dream," she said, "I saw his girlfriend June on a phone, and she was calling me hysterically to tell me that she and Bobby had had an accident. She didn't know whether to call me or 911. She said she couldn't find him."

What Bobby's girlfriend meant by not being able to find him Peggy couldn't figure out, but she knew the dream was something other than a regular dream because, she said, "It had a big impact on me, far more than a regular dream would, and when I awakened -- I was crying -- I remembered the whole thing. Usually I just remember a fragment of a dream."

Peggy knew instinctively that the dream was somehow based in reality. But what could she do? Robert was in some kind of peril, and though this sense of danger hovered in her mind, she had no idea how to protect him. She didn't know what kind of an accident it was she feared, nor did she know where the danger was coming from. But on the day the accident was to occur she felt terror and dread right from the start. "I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin," she said.

All day Peggy debated whether to call Robert at his landscaping job and make special arrangements to protect him, but she didn't want to embarrass him with her maternal concern. Besides, she knew he wouldn't have listened. So it wasn't until 5:15, getting more and more concerned, that she finally called his girlfriend's house. No one was there. "I got the answering machine," she said. "And I was afraid."

Not long after -- at around 6:30 -- Peggy got "the call." It was horrific.

As it happened, Bobby's girlfriend was on the cell phone with her brother, Jim, when the accident occurred. The cell phone was knocked out of June's hand into the back of the KIA, but it did not shut off. Jim heard the crash and alerted his mother, who continued to listen on the phone. She was actually able to hear the EMS technicians come on the scene and begin ministering to the young couple. June's mother then used another phone to call Peggy and tell her what she was overhearing, and alert her that she needed to get to the hospital immediately.

Peggy had had her "premonition" dream a couple of weeks before Robert died, and her first one after his crossing over occurred just two days after that event. She was having a horrific time with Robert's death, and had been up for countless hours. "Finally," she said, "I had fallen asleep from exhaustion. Then the dream came. In it I was sitting on a bed, and Robert was sitting right next to me. We were in my room, which was dark, but I could see his face clearly -- his beautiful blue eyes, his handsome face. He rested his head on my right shoulder and I stroked his beautiful brown hair. He was crying and I started to cry too. 'Mom,' he said, 'it hurts so much to be without you.'

"I continued to stroke his hair -- it was so, so soft -- and my heart was breaking. I told him that we couldn't change what had happened, that we had to bear it. God, I could feel his closeness," Peggy said. The dream lasted about ten minutes, and then Robert left, telling his mother that he had to go see his Aunt Shirley. Peggy saw significance in this. "Twenty-one years earlier my Aunt Shirley had lost her son Dan in a car accident, and I thought that maybe Robert was going to be with her and him."

Peggy had two more psychic dreams after Robert's passing. In one of the dreams, which occurred about six months after he had passed, Robert was only ten or eleven years old. "I was thrilled," Peggy said. "He was wearing a blue suit and he told me, among other things, that he had come back to spend the day with me and his grandparents. And he did. It was terrific." Again, Peggy had a strong feeling it was a psychic dream and, more than that, there was the color of the sun. Says Peggy, "Rob came to me in my garden and the scene was ordinary in every way -- the grass was green, the flowers colorful -- except that the sun was not yellow as it should have been. It was white. Pure, brilliant white. The entire garden was bathed with a pure white light that I had never seen before, inside or outside a dream."

A few months later, in what Peggy called her "college campus" dream, she was looking out over what looked like a college campus, with broad swaths of green grass, and again she tapped into this incredible white light. "There were people walking up and down along the grass, one of whom was Robert. I was able to see his face up close, like when a camera zooms in. He looked very peaceful, just like the other people." The day was sunny, but once again the sun was not yellow. The place was beautifully illuminated as if by a bright sun, but the light was pure white. "The light was so bright," Peggy said. "But it didn't hurt my eyes."

That was no ordinary white light. That was Heaven, and Peggy had caught a glimpse.

YOUR PSYCHIC ABILITY

We are all psychic, but that doesn't mean we all come into our psychic ability at the same time -- or that we all accept that ability. Psychic ability can emerge, like other talents, at any point in your life. For me it was when I was young, for others it may be in response to stress, or it might have a physical trigger, like an accident. The most important thing to cultivating the psychic in you is first to recognize its presence. Only then can you begin to hone it.

For starters, ask yourself some questions. Sit down in a quiet spot and think back over your life and try to remember experiences that were psychic in nature.

• Were there times in your life when you unaccountablyjust knewsomething?

• Have there been instances when you modified your behavior for no logical reason -- with important results?

• Was there a time when you believed that you had a psychic dream?

• Did you ever dismiss a color or light that perhaps might have been an aura?

• Have you seen the dead or signs of them? Did they speak to you?

• Have you ever dreamed about an event that had nothing to do with you -- and then learned it came true?

• Have you ever thought that you had a sixth sense about people?

• Have you ever made a successful business decision based on a hunch?

• Have you ever known the phone or doorbell was going to ring -- and then it did?

Recalling such things will not be easy and, indeed, you might find yourself looking for a psychic needle in a haystack. Our brains are filled with millions of experiences. Sorting through them to discern what's psychic and what's not is going to take effort. You'll have to think about it, so try not to get discouraged when you don't come up with something right away. Be willing to think about it again -- and again.

Some people, of course, will not want to do it. Not because they dislike hard work (though some do), but because they'll have rejected the whole notion of being psychic. These are the same people -- and I don't mean to criticize, just tell the truth -- who could never imagine that the world was round, or that men could fly, or that a living creature could be created by cloning.

Years ago I was subjected to a blistering attack by a skeptical radio talk show host named Candy Jones, who questioned whether everyone has psychic ability. My answer -- still my answer to skeptics -- is a question: How can you say it doesn't exist unless you try to experience it yourself? If you are not willing to try, then you have no factual basis for your conclusion. To put this another way, don't decide it before you try it.

One question I frequently get is if I'm so psychic why don't I guess the lottery numbers. My answer is that emotion gets in the way. I would love to win the lottery, but I could never approach it calmly and coolly, which is required for good psychic work.

Emotion colors and modifies our feelings and thoughts, and it interferes with psychic energy. If we could all just have psychic insight, which is cool and quick and very objective, we'd all be rich. Plus -- and this is important -- being psychic entails accountability. When you enhance your psychic powers you automatically take on some special responsibility because, for one thing, you will be seeing intensely private things about people, things that must stay private. Ethics demands it. When someone comes into my office, for example, everything they say -- and I say -- stays in that room unless they give me permission to reveal it.

DÉJÀ VU

• We're all born psychic, and our psychic abilities can show up at any time in our lives.

• Being psychic is all about receiving information without the use of regular thought processes. This information is contained in soul energy that comes to us through conscious and unconscious perceptions.

• Conscious psychic perceptions are thoughts that pop into our heads. We justknowthings. We may describe these perceptions in various ways, such as "a feeling," "a gut instinct," or "it's just something I sensed." But if you examine the perceptions you'll see that they're cool and quick and have little if anything to do with emotion, which is hot and often relates to desire perception.

• Unconscious perceptions are psychic thoughts we are not aware of. They enter our minds surreptitiously, and influence our decisions in significant ways. Besides not being aware of them, we have no choice between action and inaction. We are, in a way, forced to do whatever the unconscious perceptions require us to do.

• Auras are halos or clusters of light that reveal a person's essence, including health and character. They change according to emotional or physical states, and the changes can occur quickly or over a long period of time.

• The dead speak to us telepathically, which means that a thought or cluster of energy in their spirit can be transferred to us. Our sixth sense -- the psychic mechanism in our brains -- picks the signals up like a radio receiver and translates these messages so that we can understand them.

• Psychic information is often imparted to us in dreams, when our defenses are down. Psychic dreams normally occur soon after someone crosses over, but they can occur before as a premonition. Psychic dreams are vivid or contain unusual colors, and they may also have a special impact on the dreamer.

• To start to get a handle on your psychic side, review your own life for psychic experiences. Recognizing that you have a psychic side is key to developing it and using it.

Excerpted from The Psychic in You: Understand and Harness Your Natural Psychic Power by Jeffrey A. Wands
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Acknowledgments	vii
Preface	xi
One: We're All Psychic	1	(28)
Two: What's In It for You?	29	(26)
Three: Understanding the Dead	55	(24)
Four: The Language of the Dead	79	(16)
Five: Sign Language	95	(20)
Six: Unleashing Your Own Psychic Ability	115	(24)
Seven: What to Do If You're Afraid of the Dead	139	(16)
Eight: Readings	155	(22)
Nine: Catching Criticism	177	(16)
Ten: Cleansing Yourself of Pain and Negativity	193	(24)
Eleven: Making the Most of Ghosts	217	(20)
Twelve: Practice Makes Psychic	237	(6)
Glossary	243

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

The Psychic in You Understand and Harness Your Natural Psychic Power

9780743470001

0743470001

Supplemental Materials

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program