I want to preface this blog by telling you I’m not crazy so please don’t sic the men in white coats on me.
At my school we had a French exchange programme. In Year 10 you could opt to spend a week with a French family to improve your French. When I was in Year 9 (13-14 years old), my teachers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to trial spending a weekend in France the year before the exchange. Something about accustoming us to the culture in an attempt to make the exchange less stressful. Of course, my year was the year that had that ‘privilege’.
I’m fairly certain it was around six months before we were supposed to leave for the trip that I had The Green Clipboard dream. In it, I was wandering up a hill with some of my friends, marking off what the shops on either side of the street sold. Halfway up the hill I became ill and sat down to rest in a little public garden, hidden from the street.
The reason the dream stuck in my head was because my blank map was clipped on to this tatty, murky green clipboard. I’d just bought a snazzy black one with a flip cover and decorated it with silver sparkly star stickers (I was 13 so cut me some slack, okay?) and I couldn’t work out why I hadn’t been using that one in my dream.
Several months later, my friends and I were lining up to board the bus for the weekend trip to France. As we climbed aboard, one of the teachers handed me a worse for wear, murky green one. I didn’t think much of it at the time because, hey, we were going to France.
What happened to my beautiful, starry black one? I’d used it to hand some homework in to my Home Economics teacher a few weeks earlier and she still hadn’t given it back (she kept it on purpose, I’m telling you, it was the stars that caught her fancy!).
On the last evening of our trip, all the students and teachers were supposed to have a meal together but my teachers chose a restaurant where there wasn’t enough space. We were split into groups and my friends and I were in the second sitting. The teachers, who were all in the first sitting by the way, gave us a small task to occupy us while we waited (can you guess where this is going?).
We were handed blank maps and told to walk up to the road the restaurant was on and mark off what each business was. To this day I haven’t worked out the purpose of this task but like the good girl I was, I walked up the hill marking off the businesses.
It wasn’t until I was halfway up the hill that I remembered my dream and a tsunami of dizziness and déjà vu hit me. Feeling seriously woozy, I needed to sit down. And what should be right in front of us but a public garden.
Years after the incident I’m still not absolutely sure if I had the dream before or after the real incident happened. I’m fairly sure it was before, but if that’s true that would mean I had a premonition, which I’m not even sure I believe in. Never mind, why of all the things in the world would I have a premonition about walking up a hill? Kinda sucks as glimpsing the future goes, doesn’t it?
The Green Clipboard Dream was a one off. I’m not psychic. I’m not claiming to have ESP in any way, shape or form. I mean, I know when my sister’s going to call because I’m either desperate for the loo or about to eat my lunch/tea, but I think that’s more of a Sod’s Law thing than anything supernatural.
The reason I’m telling you this (at the risk of sounding thoroughly unstable) is to hopefully give you a better idea why I can write a decidedly unparanormal paranormal with a sceptic as a protagonist, but also a very paranormal paranormal with a ghost as the protagonist (I also write an urban fantasy series about vampires, werewolves and the like but I think we’re best leaving that out of this for now).
I’m not quite a believer but I’m not quite a sceptic either. When I see a dark smudge out of the corner of my vision I always think two things. The first is that I need to get my eyes checked and the second is a quote from Hamlet
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy...”
Act 1 scene 5
Jordaina
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