Why I’m Writing a Book

I’m getting on a bit to begin on a project like this, if we’re honest, but it’s been a long time in the making.  No point writing a memoir until enough years have passed to forge those memories.

So here I am, in the autumn of my years and with very little grasp of social media, publicity and so forth. Wish me luck.

So that I can explain why writing and sharing this book feels so important to me, and to Asher, let’s look a little more carefully at the ideas and attitudes of this world we find ourselves in.

People hold an interesting mixture of beliefs. Millions still follow religions and believe implicitly in the miracles and stories they are based around. Millions more, spurred on by classical science, believe only in what they can test, prod or otherwise interact with, using their physical senses. Just about everyone else is somewhere between those two.

Take the afterlife, for example: Think of the number of times you have heard someone say, “I could definitely feel Dad around when we were looking through his old photos.” or “My sister was up there looking down on us that day.” If you were to ask them, though, whether they believe in life after death, in consciousness that extends beyond the physical body, in ghosts… they would probably shuffle uncomfortably and change the subject.

The same goes for precognition: “I knew you were going to say that!” “As soon as the phone started ringing I knew it would be you.” “Can you believe I actually dreamed that this happened last night? How weird is that?”

Intuition is so common, there are even a variety of words and phrases for it in our language — gut feeling, hunch, inkling, sixth sense… People will say they had a ‘funny feeling’ or a ‘bad feeling’ about something, or that it ‘just felt right’. They will tell you they had goosebumps or that the hairs on the back of their neck stood up. Few of them, though, will look any deeper into the experience. They’ll simply shake their heads in momentary confusion and carry on with the parts of life they believe they understand.

I suppose I fell broadly into this category half a lifetime ago, before a six-year-old boy appeared in my life and set about changing just about all my pre-conceived notions about how things work. Since then, I’ve been leading a double life — my everyday existence as a parent, teacher, friend and neighbour and my hidden world of discovery, with Asher as my co-explorer, guide and helper.

Despite trying very hard to conduct a ‘normal’ life on the surface, Asher himself has always been more comfortable in the ‘hidden’ realms of premonitions, intuition and levels of consciousness beyond the physical than in the everyday world.

There are so many like him. They possibly have medical or psychological diagnoses including words like ‘disorder’ or ‘dysfunction’. Perhaps they are termed ‘neurodivergent’ as opposed to ‘neurotypical’. They may struggle to varying degrees to get along with daily life. They probably find school or the workplace challenging. If you’re prepared to listen and take them seriously, though, they just might trust you enough to share information about their unusual abilities and understandings.

That’s what happened in our case, and Ash insists that many others, who find conventional conversation difficult, will be able to pick up some ideas about how to get their message across from his example.