Jane Cranmer's Experience about Ancestors and Angels

My name is Jane Cranmer, I am very nearly forty-five years old, and when my first book comes out in print next month, it will be the culmination of a lifelong ambition.
Last night I had a dream, to be honest if I'd had this dream five years ago the timing would have made more sense, but that said, even with my basic dream analysis, the meaning seems fairly straightforward.

I was heading out on the final mile home, and two paths stretched out before me.
One path ran alongside the edge of a cliff, the surface was muddy and crumbling away, and to compound the danger it was slick with ice and snow. The view, however, was breathtaking... for the entire journey I would be able to gaze out over a deep and rolling seascape, see the sunlight and the moonlight dancing on the water, watch porpoises and dolphins leaping through the waves.
The other path ran straight, it went directly through a meadow, no twists and turns along the route, safe and secure, it led directly home. I could see for miles in front and miles behind, the view was pleasant but unchanging, but I would no longer be able to see the sea.

I stood at the point where the paths diverged, trying to decide my route, the safe, staid, pleasant unchallenging one, or the wild, dangerous, exhilarating one, with the views over forever.

I am sure you will know the meaning behind this dream, it is an analogy for the choices we sometimes have to make in life. Every once in a while we will be presented with an opportunity that takes us out of our comfort zone, that requires strength and courage, and has an uncertain and possibly perrilous journey to take getting there. Of course we always have the option of not straying from the path, sticking to the tried and true, heading always towards the light that will guide us safely home.

There are no right and wrong answers, we have to choose and we will all choose differently, according to our circumstances at the time. Someone who is young, free and single will find it much easier to skip off along the cliffs edge, than the woman with a husband, and children and a mortgage to pay...

Of course I am talking about myself.

I don't know if you'd call it a midlife crisis, or one of those magical moments of self discovery, but anyway, I hit forty-something, and I decided to go out on a limb.
My job was draining, soul destroying, and when I got in at night all I wanted to do was collapse in a heap. Then again, it was secure, and stable, I had lots of lovely friends there, and I knew exactly what I was doing.

But I had always really wanted to be a writer. From the age of three I had somehow known that this was what I was born to do, but you know how it is, sometimes, in fact frequently, life gets in the way.

I had been struck by writers block for the past twenty years.
Now you see the significance of those two paths that lay before me. I had spent years getting to a position where my husband and I could finally afford to buy our own home, put food on the table and actually run a vehicle we didn't spend more time pushing than riding in.

I quit the day job!
Isn't that the one thing they tell you not to do?
But I had to, you see, you have to choose one path, it's really not possible to keep slaloming between the two.

I also decided to come out of the closet... no I don't mean I discovered I was gay, there are other closets we can hide in you know.
I mean the spiritual closet. I had been hiding behind some kind of middle aged respectability that defined me as "normal" and "logical" and level-headed" and "sensible".

Well, actually, I am still all those things.
They just don't sit well alongside the tags of clairvoyant, mystic, prophet and witch do they?

My book is an expose of all these things. It tells the tale over several generations of one ordinary family and their extraordinary experiences, or maybe if you prefer, one extraordinary family who lived ordinary lives. As someone once commented, my book reads like "Angela's Ashes" meets "The Twilight Zone".

I had an unconventional upbringing in very many respects. We weren't a family of any religious denomination, and several influential members were in fact athiests. I had a mother who declared she was a witch, but so far as I could see her only witch like attribute was a way of wriggling her nose like Samantha from the tv programme "Bewitched". I had an Uncle who could predict the future, and told me he could do magic... but he always did it with a twinkle in his eye and a wink, so I was never sure whether or not to take him seriously. My Nana could read tea leaves and palms and tell the most amazing stories. My Aunty Mary had the hands of a healer, and the ability to see ghosts and spirits... and my Great Grandmother came back from the ther side of the veil.

I kid you not, right there in the mortuary, three or so hours after a doctor had pronounced her dead.
Which is where my story really begins...

Better hold on tight now!