TIME LAPSE - EXERPT FROM FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY HAIR

An old clock on a New York City building

The last psychic event that happened to me before Tom's death seemed so bizarre at the time that I forgot all about it until it turned out to be true. A very good friend, who is a successful professional photographer, pointed out that music is unique among the arts in that you can't see it, touch it, or taste it, and yet it has a profoundly powerful emotional impact. I think God may be the music playing in our hearts. You know how when you're watching a movie and are so engrossed in the story that you don't notice the soundtrack, but it's there, influencing you all the time? Well, that was me. The music was always playing, but I wasn't aware of it.

As the Road to Hollywood had led nowhere, we bid Tinsel Town a very unfond farewell. However, there was one small, last hope on the horizon. One of Tom's scripts, "Hunter's Moon", his best and most highly praised script, a World War Two murder mystery set on D-Day, was being considered by one of the best teams in Hollywood, Scott Free productions, the Ridley and Tony Scott production company. But we didn't have to be in LA to sell a screenplay, so our plan was to head back to the east coast because Tom's friends on the “Guiding Light” had offered him a chance to learn how to direct a soap opera and join the director’s union in the hope of a job on the other side of the camera.

During this time of stress and heartache, I was chosen to fly back east to look for a place to live in northern New Jersey, because I was raised there. We had truly entered the twilight zone of life, where nothing works and sheer luck is your only strategy. Does everybody reach a place like this? I think most of us probably do one way or another.

As I headed back to New Jersey, my stomach was in knots. Who will rent an apartment to somebody with no job? What rent should we pay or can we pay, when we don't know how we will make a living? Are there any places to live that we can afford that have decent schools for our hapless kid? What kind of menial job will I have to dig up to help support us? Even remembering those awful days is daunting. To be in your fifties and trying to start over was like being singled out for some special form of punishment.

In that very distracted state of mind, Tom put me on a plane to head back east. I boarded the flight to New Jersey by myself and choose a window seat. The plane hurtled down the runway and soared into the wild blue. It was late summer, and we flew over the vast, parched desert of the southwestern United States. Tom had another script called "Desert Heat" that he'd shopped around with no success. It was the crazy script about a suicidal biker in the desert which was inspired by Tom's first California trip when the VW broke down in Seligman, Arizona.

After all the worry and stress, the enforced inactivity of this long airplane ride was curiously relaxing, and my mind wandered. Suddenly, as I stared out the window, watching the barren desert slip by, I KNEW that “Desert Heat” would be made into a movie. It's not that I saw the movie in my mind, or that I heard a voice telling me it will be a movie, but as I gazed pensively at the aerial view of desert, somehow, with absolute certainty, I knew “Desert Heat” would be made into a movie.

It was a totally baffling experience for me. It wasn't wishful thinking. That would have been for "Hunter's Moon". No one was thinking about the desert movie. I certainly wasn't thinking about it till I looked out at the desert below.

This was not my imagination, because I've had to use my imagination a lot as a model and actress, and I know how that works. Pretending that you're carefree, rich and fabulous, while in reality you're being photographed on a city sidewalk in shoes two sizes too small with a crowd of jeering onlookers is a feat of imagination. That kind of imagination requires actively directing your thoughts and feelings to something appropriate for the mood of the photo and making it real for yourself, in other words, actual brain work.

This knowing that I was experiencing about “Desert Heat” was the opposite of work; it was a knowing that simply popped into my disengaged mind. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. It was so strange that I really didn't know what to make of it. But I did know “Desert Heat” would be a movie as surely as I'd ever known anything in my life. I knew it as surely as I knew that two and two made four. Now, as I look back, I think the combination of heartbreak and fear acted to fully unite me with my higher self, or soul, or whatever, and thus to the spiritual world. This wasn't a dream, like my grandmother visiting, nor was it a ghost, like Tom's grandfather; this was a wide-awake knowing. Of course, I laughed it off and ignored it.

This happened back during the mid-nineteen nineties. The psychic true life shows "Sensing Murder" and "Medium" wouldn't hit the television airwaves for another decade. Horoscopes were my only experience with psychic phenomena, and I never read them because I thought they were silly.

Later, when I called Tom from New Jersey, I mentioned my strange knowing. He was somewhat disappointed. Are you sure it's not "Hunter's Moon," he asked, jokingly. No, I told him, it was definitely “Desert Heat”. And frankly I don't even know why I told him, except like two plus two equals four, I knew it would be made into a movie. It was baked into the cake. We never told anyone else. It just didn't seem important. And we both forgot about it.

On the flight back to LA, once I saw that desert again, the same feeling of certainty about “Desert Heat” being made into a movie came over me. I laughed at myself. My adventures in the psychic world were getting off to a very slow start. I didn't even think of my experience as something psychic because I barely knew what the word meant.

But, three years later, while living in New Jersey, with Hollywood reduced to a very distant planet on the other side of the universe, the phone rang. Jean Claude Van Damme liked the "Desert Heat" script, and a producer wanted to negotiate a deal. Thunderstruck, this piece of good luck had come completely out of the blue. Without our knowledge, somebody had been shopping Tom's script around among their other properties for the last several years. BANG! We were off to the races. Selling a screenplay in Hollywood is always a miracle, yet Tom’s script was sold, which is unbelievable, and even more unbelievable, got made.

And then, somewhere along in all the excitement and work, Tom suddenly reminded me of my airplane prediction about “Desert Heat” getting made into a movie three years ago, when we first moved east. Once he mentioned it, it all came back to me, that strange 'knowing' which had popped into my head on the airplane. How odd, how very odd. Eerie, goose bumps, chills. Alright, more than odd. And it had actually happened. We went up to the high desert outside Los Angeles, visited the set, and saw our movie being made, in a desert, just like I knew it would ... three years ago.

This really stumped me because it was completely impossible. I knew that for a fact. My father helped build nuclear reactors around the world. I had a pretty clear idea of how science worked from the molecular level on up, and there was no possible way that the future could be known. But it had happened. How long could I go on denying and ignoring these things? I had to admit to myself that, truly, these things were actually occurring. I even began to feel a slight twinge of guilt about sticking my head in the sand. Am I just too embarrassed at being thought different to acknowledge this stuff, even to myself? Yes. No one will believe me. I don't even believe me.

As I began to feel a weight of responsibility with this knowledge, I was also a bit scared. If these things were happening, it raised the very uncomfortable possibility that there were a lot of other things going on that I never dreamed of. There might even be some purpose in life greater than merely trying to be a good person. There might even really be a God. Surely, I thought to myself, I'm not the only person who has had these kinds of experiences. 

It was clear that there was something much bigger than science. Much as I hated to admit it, much as I knew everyone would think I was crazy, I had to live the life I was given and this psychic stuff was part of it. Distantly, as if playing in a far-off land, I heard the music of my deeper heart for the first time. Something new awakened in me, a feeling that I didn't know I could feel, a burst of ecstasy. If there was some greater force ruling life on earth, then I am not just one of seven billion people, I am, in my own small way, part of that force. And little did I guess at the time, love was reaching out to rescue me and my son from the tragedy that was heading our way.

The idea that I had seen the future appeared to negate free will, and that was very disturbing. But when I thought more about it, wasn’t it possible that time might be an illusion? Wasn’t that what Einstein had said? On the other hand, feelings were very important in all my psychic experiences. Love and fear had opened my window to the universe and moved the creator to let me see a little of the magic that makes the world go round. It seemed possible that just because we didn’t exercise free will in a time context didn't mean that free will wasn't a very powerful motivating force.

Furthermore, I realized that nothing in my life would or could ever be the same. Nothing. Not sunny days, not laughter, not people's faces, not music, not anything. Everything was created by the creator for some wonderful, mysterious purpose. That was kind of thrilling. I had received a message from a higher order, something outside the natural world. I couldn't really process this epiphany all at once, but it was like being reborn into a new world.

This is the strangest afterlife story you will ever read. A man with a divided soul, one in hell and one in heaven, came back to confess the truth and expose how the devil ruined his life. A must read for anyone struggling to reconcile sin and mental illness.