Psychic Telephone · 68
Cheyanne
Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project. Read our first post about Cheyanne here.
Dreams were really where Cheyanne’s gifts started from, her true first thing where she felt, This is real. Growing up, she was a prolific dreamer, and it was always treated as important. She had dreams in which family members who had died came to her, so she would have to ask them to move on. Or she would dream of people before she met them, like once she was in the car with someone and realized she had dreamed that moment two years before. That was a mind bender, right?
She had felt really overwhelmed, connecting with the spirits but trying not to, how weird that was. But once her mother started helping her with her gifts, her dreams made sense. There was a great metaphysical store—it was the eighties—where they would do classes and go to psychic fairs. They spent a lot of time there. And she started thinking it was so cool. You know, I see dead people! But she was kind of reckless with it, being a punk rocker and all that, wanting to be open to it even though she didn’t necessarily ask for it. Learning what not to do, really, via making mistakes.
By sixteen she was also giving past-life readings. And putting all the woo aside, scientifically they’ve found that up to six generations of characteristics—trauma, whatever it may be—are carried in our DNA. But for people to be crying when she told them things she was seeing, that was kind of too much for her adolescent brain. It was a whole hell of a lot to take on. So by the time she was eighteen she put it all aside and went on with all the other things she loves in life. Making art, making music—living in West Oakland and San Francisco, creating queer zines and fronting a punk band.
She talks about her thirtieth birthday as the point at which she got serious about her gift. Right around then, her friend Tom died. He had been drinking and he took some pain medication, and she was shocked when it happened. It was a complete accident. He was one of those full-of-life people. That following week, he kept coming to her in dreams and asking, Why is everyone ignoring me? He didn’t know he had passed, and he was in the processing stage. So she had to tell him, You died in your sleep. After a few nights of this, he was like, Okay, well, I need you to tell Nicole to keep the baby.
He’d had a new girlfriend that she hadn’t even really met or hung out with, and he wanted her to go find her and tell her this message. It took a few nights of him coming back, though, because it was a lot. She didn’t know how to go say that to a stranger. It felt crazy. But finally she decided she had to do it. So she found Nicole through mutual friends and gave her the message. And Nicole broke down and was like, How do you know that? She had found out she was pregnant only about two days before Tom passed, and they hadn’t told anyone. So Cheyanne told her about the dreams. And Nicole kept the baby.
Now the baby’s twenty-something. And when Cheyanne looks back on the past twenty years, it’s like, Wow. Because from that point on, she felt that this is a gift, this is a blessing. But she needed to learn how to use it properly. So she basically dove in again. Taking weekend classes, reading books, even working personally with a psychic medium on a public access television show. And that’s kind of the gist of how this started for her.