Second Sight (4 page)

The big surprise was the other residents: Pete, a schizophrenic in his early twenties who mostly kept to himself, and Dolly, a wired manic-depressive woman. My God, I thought, Jim put me here with the mentally ill! Pat and Ray agreed: That was exactly what Jim had done. And yet, somehow, it didn't matter to me. What mattered was that I felt free. Still, the first time I opened the medicine cabinet and placed my toothbrush beside Pete's Thorazine and Dolly's lithium, it did give me the creeps. But besides the times when Pete was hearing voices or Dolly had her bouts of insomnia, we all got along just fine and life was pretty uneventful.

I continued my therapy with Jim. Yet despite the bond I felt I had with him, I didn't open up immediately. Nor did my initial timidity last: I was a hard case, fighting him at every turn, testing and probing to see how far I could go. For several months I missed appointments, challenged him, threatened never to come back again.

Then, one day, after being in therapy about a year, I told Jim about a troubling dream I'd had when I was nine years old. The dream was similar to a wakeful state, vivid, not at all like a regular dream. I'd never discussed it before with anyone except my parents. In fact, I'd purposely kept it a secret. Recalling it now as part of my therapy, I described it in my journal:

My nightgown is drenched in sweat as I bolt awake, knowing that my grandfather, who lives three thousand miles away, had just died. I can hear his voice saying good-bye to me over and over again as I struggle to get my bearings. It's the middle of the night. My bedroom is pitch black. I can't tell if I'm dreaming or if this is really happening. Almost too frightened to move, I drag myself from bed and run as fast as I can into my parents' room to give them this message.

Instead of being upset by my announcement, my mother smiles and assures me, “You were having a nightmare. Grandpop's fine.” The absolute certainty in her voice makes me doubt myself. Of course Grandpop's all right. I've simply overreacted, I'm told. So I head back to my own room again, comforted by the notion that my panic was unfounded, and drift off to sleep.

A few hours later, my aunt calls from Philadelphia, to tell us that my grandfather has died of a heart attack.

As I recounted the dream to Jim, he listened intently without flinching or recoiling as I expected he would. Instead, showing genuine interest, he asked me to speak more about it. I first told him my mother's reaction to the dream, which had confused me. She'd been intrigued and quite tender, yet at the same time seemed to be holding something back, as if she was purposely trying not to make too much of it. Even after she learned of my grandfather's death, she seemed to write off my dream as coincidence. But something in her eyes said she didn't fully believe what she was telling me. And neither did I. I was certain my grandfather had come to say good-bye. The way he looked and the sound of his voice had been too alive, too real, to be mere imagination. Unable to resolve this puzzle, I'd wondered if somehow I was to blame for my grandfather's death.

Grandpop and I had always been close. Years before, he would hoist me up on his shoulders and promise that even after he died we'd never be apart. All I'd have to do was look up at the brightest star in the sky to find him. Our love ran deep, and it was unbearable that I might have hurt my grandfather.

My capacity to bring up these feelings was enhanced by a growing romantic relationship I was developing with Terry, an artist I eventually moved in with for two years. He lived across the street from the halfway house in an old two-story converted brick Laundromat with enormous clear glass pyramidal skylights in practically every room, including the bathroom. As the sun shone through them, the light was pristine. Terry also used the space as his studio. A few inches taller than I, twenty-five, Terry had a short, blond ponytail and piercing blue eyes. He habitually wore a pair of paint-splattered jeans that mimicked the colorful brush strokes of a Sam Francis canvas.

Terry was one of a four-member group of male muralists, who were futurists of a sort. They painted visionary disaster scenes such as earthquakes, snowstorms, and floods. Their murals so closely resembled some of my own premonitions that it seemed they'd been painting my inner life. The group called themselves the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad and did their artwork on huge bare walls of commercial and residential buildings all over the city. A first of their kind, they were a central part of the Venice art scene.

Terry and I related to each other through the world of images and dreams. I used to speak a lot to him about the dreams that I'd written down for years. I dreamed voraciously, and relished waking up in the morning and retrieving my dreams. On the days when I couldn't hold on to them, I felt empty and vacant, as if I'd missed out on something important. When the images lingered, their richness filled me up like the finest food. They were sacred to me.

Terry and I used to take long walks at night in front of the deserted amusement park—Pacific Ocean Park—where he shared his artistic visions and I shared my dreams. With our faces eerily lit up by the blue mercury lights lining the boardwalk, Terry said that sometimes he could see the images shining right through me. He believed that my ability to generate them indirectly influenced the quality of his art.

Terry's only desire since he was a little boy was to be an artist, to create. As I watched him, so calm and directed, sketching at his rough-hewn pine drawing table late into the nights, lost in the world of art, I prayed I too might find a calling that could give me so much joy.

When at the last minute I decided to forgo college in favor of living with a struggling, long-haired artist eight years my senior who wasn't even Jewish, my parents were exasperated. Having already paid thousands of dollars for my tuition at Pitzer College in Claremont, where I was supposed to begin the following semester, they forfeited the money and refused ever to meet Terry. Convinced that at seventeen I was throwing away my future, they couldn't support that. Not knowing what else to do, my parents decided to withdraw all financial help except the fees for my therapy sessions.

To help earn living expenses, I got my first job as a salesgirl in the towel department at the May Company, earning seventy-five dollars a week. It was located on Fairfax and Wilshire, less than half a mile away from the Climax nightclub, where Terry had been commissioned to paint an outdoor mural. From our studio in Venice, he would drive me to work each morning on his BMW motorcycle. On the coldest, rainiest days, our eyes tearing from the cold, bundled up in our army jackets, I would hold tightly on to his waist as we sped through the city streets. I had never felt happier or more free.

It was through Terry's Love and insight that I slowly began to accept myself and my images. Whether or not they were psychic, they were an intimate part of who I was, and Terry recognized that. He understood and valued their importance as no one had ever done. Terry was the first man I'd been with who I felt could truly “see” me. By encouraging me to explore my psychic life, he also helped me to start trusting Jim.

In the course of my therapy, I slowly recalled other premonitions I'd had as a child. For instance, one day when I was nine, my parents introduced me to Evan, a longtime friend of theirs from London who took frequent business trips to the States. An impressive man, he was an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur who appeared to have it all: a beautiful wife and family, good health, and the means to maintain an elegant lifestyle, complete with servants, a Rolls-Royce with chauffeur, and a country estate in Surrey.

Within minutes of first being introduced to Evan, however, a sense of dread overtook me, a sinking feeling in my stomach, a certainty that something bad was about to happen to him. My feelings alarmed me because I could see no apparent reason for them. Here was this successful friend of my parents, but I couldn't wait to escape his presence. When I told my mother, she said, “How can you feel that? You've barely met him.” I couldn't explain my feelings; there was nothing to back them up, and I felt terrible about myself for having them. We both gladly dropped the subject. Nonetheless, I couldn't help my response. It was automatic, instinctive. I was reminded of how my dog once reacted to a friend of mine, barking and growling at her whenever she came to the house. That was annoying to me, so I had a sense of how my mother felt.

But then, three weeks later, my parents received a call from mutual friends. To the surprise and shock of everyone who knew him, Evan had committed suicide. This time my mother didn't call it a coincidence. Rather, she acknowledged that I must have sensed something: “You were right about Evan. I can't figure it out, but somehow you knew.” It was also clear, however, that she was unsettled, reluctant to have further discussion. There was an unusual resignation in her voice, a heaviness, a mix of awkwardness and sadness. She seemed not to know what to do with me—I was odd, a curiosity, something from another planet. My mother had validated what I'd said, but in the end she left me more mixed up than ever. She dropped the subject and life went on as if all this had never happened. Once again, I felt alone, tainted, fearing I'd colluded in something awful, as if stranded with my own thoughts on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. So I tried to act normal, didn't talk about my feelings.

Jim's attitude toward these incidents was enormously comforting. What I appreciated the most was that he didn't seem judgmental or afraid. A psychiatrist, trained of course in conventional medicine, he could very well have pigeonholed me as a “nut” and dismissed my experiences. Worse, he could have analyzed and interpreted them, searching for hidden meaning rather than taking them on their own terms. Or he could have prescribed antipsychotic medications to squash my abilities. But he didn't. Nor did he hide his bewilderment. It was an odd situation: He was confused; I was confused. But we were trying to sort out our confusion together, which in a roundabout way, allowed me to feel safe.

One day, Jim recounted a psychic experience of his own, which occurred when he was a psychiatric resident at the Meninger Institute in Kansas. During a snowstorm, his car had a flat tire on a remote country road. When it was clear that he wouldn't be able to return home on time, he knew that his wife would be worried. He really wanted her to know he was okay, but there were no phones. During what they later established had been the same period, his wife had a dream in which she saw Jim's car having tire trouble but that he was unharmed. Not surprisingly, this unusual communication between them had stirred Jim's interest in the psychic.

I was touched by Jim's story as well as incredibly relieved to be in the company of an educated person with advanced academic credentials who'd also had such experiences. At least I wasn't the only oddball running around! This gave me solace. Also, I'd taken a risk in trusting Jim, and he didn't let me down. Far from condemning me, he'd shown a profound respect for what I was going through. So when Jim encouraged me to go farther and remember other such events, I felt safe enough to do so.

My mother had a close friend, Harry, a Superior Court judge in Philadelphia. She thought of Harry as her mentor, loved him dearly, credited him with inspiring her to attend medical school in an era when few woman were being accepted. When I was ten, Harry ran for reelection to the post he'd held for the past thirty years. Few things in life meant more to him than being a judge. A week before the election, I had the following dream:

I'm in a huge, well-lit room jammed with people. Harry is up on the podium giving a speech. It's so crowded I can barely breathe. My head pounds. I'm afraid of something but I don't know what it is. A man's voice comes in over a loudspeaker and announces that Harry has lost to his opponent. Harry lowers his head, walks into the crowd, and is about to leave the room when suddenly a woman whose face I can't see rushes toward him and bites his hand. From Harry's expression, I know he recognizes the woman and is crushed.

I didn't want to alarm my mother, especially after her reaction to my premonition about Evan. But I was upset and wanted her support, so I took a chance and told her. Anticipating the success of her friend, she of course found my dream the last news she wanted to hear. She sighed and put her arm around me. “Why do you say such negative things?” she asked, exasperated. After my predictions of her father's death and her friend's suicide, this was just too much. I sat there and wished I could take it back, but the damage was already done.

The night of the election, I sat with my parents in Los Angeles, anxiously awaiting the outcome. Nightmarishly, it was as my dream had predicted: Harry lost by a landslide. If it had only been his defeat, the dream would have seemed less significant. But there was more. At the polls that night, Harry's daughter-in-law, a manic-depressive under psychiatric care, had an acute psychotic break and rushed up to him, viciously biting his hand. Immediately following this attack, she fled into the crowd to hide. Later, she was found and admitted to a hospital for treatment.

Of course, the lives of Harry, his son, and his daughter-in-law were radically disrupted that evening. Over the next few months I heard a lot about their suffering, and couldn't help but question what role my dream had played. Although my parents never suggested that my prediction was in any way responsible, I had my doubts, especially when in a moment of frustration my mother told me never again to mention another dream to her. I knew she was disconcerted by what had happened; I knew she hadn't meant to hurt me. She was simply on overload, and I backed off. But it was also true that she could be overbearing, that she was a woman of great force, and that I couldn't help re acting to her. From that day on, in any case, I kept to myself what I'd come to regard as a shameful secret.

With Jim's support, I was able to feel my tremendous sense of guilt about having made these catastrophic predictions. It seemed, in fact, that I could easily foresee death, illness, and earthquakes, but rarely picked up anything on a happier note. I'd grown up believing there was something malign in me, that somehow I was causing the negative events I was able to predict. Could I have contributed to Harry's defeat, triggered his daughter-in-law's psychotic break? I wondered. None of my friends ever spoke of such experiences. Increasingly, I felt like an outsider, never quite fitting in anywhere.