Early Gifts and a New Friend
Several months later, I began to notice some unusual talents that started to manifest themselves. One of these centered around oddly realistic dreams. I’ve always had the ability to control my dreams, and at the time I often dreamt of cartoons. However, every once in a while, I’d dream of places and events that felt very real. They were places I’d never been to before and they were activities I’d never done. This was so unusual, I took note of these dreams when they happened and tried to remember every detail.
At the time, my family often played card games. After I started getting the oddly realistic dreams, I noticed that I had an uncanny ability to know who had the better cards in their hand. I could also predict what the next cards in the deck were. I tried using this knowledge to start winning these games. It worked often enough that my brother accused me of marking the cards.
I began to wonder if I were psychic.
Dropping the atheist shell like an out-of-style fashion, I embraced these gifts, thinking they might be a way to understanding the spiritual realm. After I did this, a weird feeling began to guide me when I made decisions. It gave me insight about what other people were thinking. I tried to use this to manipulate people, and it worked.
I was insatiably curious. What was this strange feeling? Was it a guardian spirit? Was it something different entirely? When I was alone, I tried to talk to it and seek its guidance. Shortly after school ended for the summer, I received a name for the creature behind this feeling: Liar. (Note: this is NOT his real name! I changed it so that nobody reading this would be tempted to seek him out.) When I prayed to him using that name, he began to talk to me inside my head. He claimed he could guide me and give me purpose. He told me that I was to be a great prophet during the last days. He said he would reveal more to me as time passed. Until then, he would teach me how to use my spiritual gifts and I needed to train with them.
Two days after my twelfth birthday, the oldest of my odd dreams came true.
I was riding my bicycle and entered a parking lot behind a building. I remembered seeing that building in a dream. It wasn’t just the building but also every car in the parking lot right down to the exact types, colors, locations and even my position in relation to them all. It was a similar experience to déjà vu, but much stronger and much more vivid. Unlike déjà vu, this was no strange but ambiguous feeling that I’d seen all this before.
I remembered when I had that dream. It was the first one of the oddly realistic dreams that wasn’t just about the cartoons I watched at the time. Because of that, I’d made special note of it. This wasn’t just some feeling. I knew when I had the original dream. I knew when and where it was fulfilled. I had a vision of the future that had come true. This couldn’t be explained away by pop psychology or as some sort of mental disorder. That’s when I knew for certain that this wasn’t all my imagination. These spiritual gifts were real.
Liar told me that this was only the beginning. He promised many more gifts were to come.
