One "fateful" October night I went to sleep and fell into the worst nightmare of my life. It started off innocently enough. I was in a small room made to look like my bedroom-only I was in an old fashioned twin bed with four posters. It was unlike any I have ever owned, a child?s bed. Next to the bed was a white answering machine. I was getting phone calls...beep...Alanna this is your brother...beep...Alanna this is Dad...beep.

Suddenly there is a rapping on the window. Immediately this triggers my fear. I am on the third story, impossibly high up. There is no ladder or anything that could explain how someone could be making this noise. "Ahh, the good old tree branch hitting the window scenario", I think and I begin to feel relieved-only to lapse into terror again as I see a whitish face in the window. The entity begins to speak to me in waves like a radio broadcast. I am horrified.

At this point I know I am dreaming. I am an apt lucid dreamer and I attempt to change the scenario to something less threatening. Nothing happens. It is still there. I can feel the psychic force of this entity that wants something from me. It wants me to listen. I cannot accept this. I am afraid, as I never have been before. The entity becomes frustrated. I can feel its anger building, and my terror escalates.

The being tries another route. It begins to descend from the ceiling. A ghostly white shape lowers. It is glowing white and frosty, billowy-emanating anger and evil. I cannot believe my heart has not stopped out of sheer fright by now. I am more determined than ever not to listen to a single thing this creature has to say. It continues to pressure me. I am doing the dreamtime equivalent of covering my ears and going "nayah nayah nayah". I try to wake myself again, and again and again.

Finally I am awake, in my real bed. In my real bedroom. I immediately throw on my robe and dash down the stairs to make any kind of human contact. My Dad is on the second floor landing. He is ashen. I say, "What's wrong Dad?" He says, "my mother just died."

When I tell my Dad my dream he just says, "Ahh you must be the one in the family who ?gets the messages?". I was pretty pissed when he said that, I prided myself on my intellect and wanted to be cool and detached. I immediately associated being a psychic channel with being soft, fruity, and kind of crazy. I wanted nothing to do with the whole thing. I almost forgot about it? then on the exact same day of the next year I got a repeat of the dream scenario. This one was more intense, and more frightening. When I woke up though I was pretty confused. Why was I so scared? What was it that I did not want to hear? My waking mind was very curious as to what the entity- I had to assume was my Dad?s mother Carrie- wanted to say to me. Over the next few months I put some things together. I was not close to my grandmother Carrie so it confused me as to why she would visit me. I am my father?s oldest child and he is the youngest of nine. I hardly stood out in a crowd of what was now close to a hundred of her descendents. I had spent time with her over the years, but she was a shy Appalachian woman. She had rarely spoken directly to me. I wondered what she could want from me. I had an excellent boyfriend and I was doing well in school. What did the matriarch of the family want to tell me? I finally asked my Dad point blank if she was some kind of psychic or mountain witch lady. Grandma was a Scorpio

Ironically in light of what I have said about not having an interest in being a psychic medium I was raised with astrology and I found it to be a harmless Hippie-type pursuit and I had always used it without really noticing or thinking it was odd. So grandma was a Scorpio, and I knew that this would make her a very psychic and shy woman. Dad finally admitted to some of Grandma?s psychic feats from the past. The most dramatic of these was when she helped find flood victims under the mud near their mountain home in Eastern Kentucky sometime in the 30?s. Another Scorpio theme is religion and spirituality. Grandma had noticeably jumped from sect to sect in the years before her death. I could only assume she was looking for something she never found.

Ok possibly psychic, spiritually frustrated Grandma tries to shake me up in the middle of the night. So I tried an experiment. I chose a moment of solitude and said "OK Grandma you win, I will study Astrology and Tarot cards, but that?s all. No religion or God stuff. That?s it." I can?t remember now if it was that very night or not, but shortly after that I had a dream. Grandma looked much as she had in life. She was wearing varied shades of pink (her favorite color) and she did something I never remember her doing in life. She hugged me. And then she was gone.

So now I have to figure my subconscious mind must have just gone to tremendous trouble to trick me into doing something I perhaps had secretly wanted to do all along, or I had witnessed my own private miracle. To this day I don?t really care. I have never looked back and I can?t help but say the rest is history. It ended up taking me six years to finish my Art History degree, because I was spending at least half my time studying Astrology and Tarot. Upon Graduating I became a full time psychic and have been ever since.

Everyday I become more and more fascinated with the unexplained, and more and more convinced that there is so much that we have yet to understand that we can nevertheless utilize to full advantage in our daily life. My rational mind remains baffled, and can?t begin to explain so many of the things I have experienced, yet I do have faith now that we can know so much more if we crack open the mind of science and dare to look beyond it.