Laurie Nadel had her first paranormal experience at the age of 11 when she had a lucid dream that her pet parakeet was lying dead on the back seat of a car. Her grandparents were driving home with the bird a few days later. As they parked, Laurie ran to their car with a feeling of read. There, in the back seat, her beloved pet was dead, exactly as she had dreamed it.
Terrified by her own sixth sense, Laurie screamed. Her parents were horrified that she was making a scene and upsetting the neighbors. But when she told them about her dream they were even more disturbed. Nice girls didn’t have weird dreams that came true.
Without any guidance or support to help her understand that her sixth sense was, in fact, a gift, she shut it down until a series of events in her 20’s launched her onto a lifelong quest to explore the unknown and explain the unexplainable.
As a young reporter working for the United Nations news service, she had just moved into a single girl’s one bedroom apartment across the street from the UN when she found herself unable to sleep because of an eerie voice that emanated from the alcove where she’d placed her bed. It was a whiny old person’s voice that seemed to come from underneath her pillow, talking about what it was like to get old and die. It happened every night for a week. Then she moved her bed to the opposite wall where there was a lot of street noise. Logically, those sounds should have kept her awake. Instead, she slept through the night. When she moved her bed back to the alcove, the voice started up again. It was creepy and she wondered if someone had died right there, in that corner. But her logical mind knew that there were no such things as ghosts. They only existed in movies, right?
As an investigative reporter, she had to find out what was keeping her up at night. Was she insane? Her father, an atheist who believed in reductionist science, thought she was crazy and needed to be hospitalized. But a psychiatrist checked her out and explained that according to Carl Jung psychic experiences happened to people all over the world every day. A researcher at the prestigious American Society for Psychic Research told her that her experiences were “normal for the paranormal” and said that other side was trying to send her a message.
“Why can’t it just use the phone?” Laurie wanted to know.
After all, it was the 1970s. There was no New Age movement and very few people believed that ESP—extra sensory perception—was real. In fact, there was…and still is…so much paranoia around sixth sense phenomena that for decades Laurie never spoke about her own psychic journey.
In 1990, she published the first book to break the story of the government’s secret psychic espionage/remote viewing program. Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power has been a four-time best-seller and was featured twice on Oprah. It was easier for people to talk about incest than to reveal their own psychic experiences, she told the queen of daytime talk shows.
Sixth Sense was groundbreaking. It explains that intuition is a natural ability that everyone has—like athletic or artistic ability. It explores the science and psychology of intuition as the basis for many scientific breakthroughs and inventions. The book became the foundation for a series of corporate seminars on intuitive leadership and high-performance thinking. Sixth Sense rocks on: It has been in print for 30 years and is available as an audiobook.
After writing Sixth Sense, Laurie went on to complete two doctorates: in cognitive psychology and clinical hypnotherapy. She completed post-doctoral clinical training in mind-body medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School and spent a decade traveling and studying with shamans and healers in South America. Her esoteric training includes certification in evidential mediumship at Lilydale, the oldest Spiritualist Association in the US; and intermediate level remote viewing training with master spy Lyn Buchanan, a veteran of the Pentagon’s secret remote viewing program.
The author of seven books, her most recent is The Five Gifts: Discovering Hope, Healing and Strength When Disaster Strikes.