What colour is your Polaroid?

Adventure Girl finds spiritual enlightenment... well, sees a picture of her aura, anyway

So apparently I'm clairvoyant.

I know this because Chris from Enlightenment Photography knows this.

'See how the purple extends almost all the way to the edges? That indicates intuition and psychic ability.'

I'm sitting in a small study in Boganburbia staring at what appears to be an over-exposed Polaroid of myself.
Everything smells like oils and incense, and I'm sure someone has taken to the entire house with a crystal Bedazzler.

The photo is mostly violet with a smudge of blue to my left (the picture's right).

'Blue is a communication colour, so you are a good listener, an intuitive listener, able to transform others through loving listening.' This represents my future.

In the centre I'm told 'Mystical unifying would best describe you... Enchantment, charm, sensitivity and deep spiritual understanding are the qualities most important to you.'

On the right side is the energy I am 'putting out to the world... People see you as magical... What you want comes to you as if by magic.'

The Polaroid was taken over several seconds of me sitting on a bench, spreading my palms on a metallic hand-shaped template with some kind of electrode sensors on each fingertip. 'Don't move,' Chris says, and I feel like I'm in an episode of House undergoing a CT scan.

Afterwards, we don't just talk about the photo.

'Dreams?' Chris asks. His flavour-savour beard jiggles when he talks. It's reddish-brown and it reminds me of a faun. Actually he's kind of faunish in general. It might be the purple t-shirt (or the purple everything), but there is definitely something mythological about him.

'What about them?' I ask.

'Do you have them?' Not the everyday vanilla ones about stuff that happens during the day, he explains, but the really real ones.

'Oh, you mean those horrendous ones where you can't wake up?' (which I always thought were a case of sleep paralysis), 'Or the ones that later come true?'

Chris is staring at me. It's an intense stare. The kind of eye contact that makes you want to scream, blink already!

That's when he asks me if I believe in ghosts. Except he doesn't word it like that. There seems to be an entire vocabulary that spiritualists use that I haven't quite gotten my head around. Thank God/my Spirit Guide/the Earth Mother for Google.

'I don't know if they're ghosts or spirits or whatever, but I see what I call the Night Eyes. In the dark, with my eyes open or closed, they stare back at me. All different ones.'

'They're people who have passed on,' he says. He wants to know if I'm in touch with them. If they make contact with me.
 
'Hell no.'

'Why not?'

Is he serious? What about the girl with long blonde hair who came to me at my lover's house, terrified, or the one standing in my bedroom doorway, mouthing silently as she strangled, or those guys who were hovering in my living room, looking like they wanted to steal my TV? 'These are different to the night eyes.' I shudder.

'Are they malevolent?'

I nod. 'The others, the eyes, the faces, they're neutral, they just watch me like I watch them.' I always assumed they hadn't 'passed over'.

'Maybe you need to get in touch with your Spirit Guide.' Apparently my Guide will protect me if I ask it to, keep the ghosts away from me, away from my room, and the hell out of my house.

'Do you sometimes wake up with a song stuck in your head? When you've had these dreams?' This, too, is a spirit, sending me a message, he explains.

For some reason this freaks me out. Not the idea of someone sending me a message, but the mention of hearing a song when I wake up. It's probably something he says to everyone, but it resonates because I was talking about exactly that to a friend the night before. In this case (because there are others), it is a song by UNKLE called 'Nursery Rhyme,' and it has haunted me for years. 'There's something in the way it makes me feel that is also in my book, something I am trying to write out, that is also in the way that my lover sometimes holds and whispers to me. They are connected,' I say, 'but I don't understand how.'

I know this makes no sense to him. It barely makes sense to me.

He asks about my writing. I tell him yes, sometimes when I write it's not like I'm writing at all, but as though I'm reading. I have no idea what is going to happen until it is on the page in front of me. 'When that happens it's exhilarating.'

He tells me that it is most likely a spirit guiding me in those times.

Then he takes a bag and asks me to pull out a crystal. I rummage around for the one that calls to me, that feels right in my hand. I don't quite get the sensation I'm looking for, but we're running out of time, so I take the next best thing. It is small and blue-ish black with lighter blue veins. He thinks it is sodalite rather than lapis, and this is consistent with his opinion that I am very in tune with my third eye. It is the stone of 'insight and intuition'.

Next he draws out two cards.

I take a sharp breath. One of the cards shows a child standing at a gate. She is locked out. It is called 'The Outsider.' It is a scene from my book, a premonition that comes as a dream to the main character of her daughter standing at the gates of Nedran. It is also the name of one of these posts, and represents how I feel about my family.

His explanation of the card bears no resemblance to mine.

The second card is called 'Comfort,' and is mostly words but we run out of time to look at it in any detail.

I want to be able to stop looking into his unblinking eyes, stop seeing the flecks of dark against light. I can feel things crawling behind me. Hovering. It is a sensation of eager malice. They don't want to get to him, they want to get at me.

'Do you have any questions?' he asks.

Where do I start? 'No, I think that's it.'

I pay him in cash, take my photo, my crystal, and leave.

It has taken a while to shake the creepiness, to stop remembering those dreams, the picture on the card, and the feeling of that song. I know I've had dreams that have come true, names of people I never knew and later met, always in some significant way. I know that if I ignore the nagging in my gut for too long it will slam itself in my face, usually at 3am.

I have no idea how much I believe of what Chris said, whether the photo is a reflection of the colours I happened to be wearing, a random result of over-exposure on film, or some other con. I didn't get any insights into my future, or any signs to help me work out what I should do next, but I did learn a bit more about me, about the things that haunt me, real or imagined, (and I did wake with a song stuck in my head the following morning, this time, the Eurythmics' 'Thorn in my Side') and maybe that's adventure enough.

-AG