Author Guest Post ~ Rhiannon Paille, author of Flame of Surrender

I'd like to thank Rhiannon Paille for being here today! She's become an online buddy over the last few months, and I was honoured to get a chance to read an ARC of her new YA book, Flame of Surrender (<---click the link to see my review). Flame of Surrender came out November 1st, so be sure to buy a copy! Today, Rhi's going to talk to us about clairvoyance. Enjoy!

The Truth about Clairvoyance

~Rhiannon Paille~

Most people think that Clairvoyance is just another word for Intuitive, or Psychic, or ESP. The truth is that it isn’t.

Clairvoyance is a term that literally means, clear vision. The term has been around since the 17th Century and has been used to describe a means of seeing without the use of the naked eye.

Clairvoyants have visions, and those visions are usually of people, objects, or places.

I can only speak about my own personal experiences, but Clairvoyance is something that can easily go misinterpreted. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all when I’m reading someone and I’m getting flashes of mismatched images like roses, pots, a kitchen with glowing yellow light coming through the window. Sometimes the things I see doesn’t help answer the questions my clients have.

Most of my clients want to know what people think and feel about them. They don’t care if I know what their significant other looks like. Sure it’s a cool trick and I often get an idea of what someone looks like, but I often bypass the clairvoyance for other abilities that can better help my clients.

In fiction I find that Clairvoyance is used too loosely as a term to describe people who have these brilliantly awesome visions detailing incredible aspects of someone’s life. In truth, it doesn’t work that way. I get bits and pieces of places, people’s faces, and objects. It’s great if someone asks me if their significant other has been around someone else, or if they’ve been going gambling or drinking because then I just check the timeline for a bar or another woman. Having a vision about someone in trouble, or an event that’s about to happen, is something else altogether. Granted it’s usually the superheroes in fiction that are having these types of visions, it still applies.

There are two abilities here that we’re branching off into. The first is Remote Viewing. This covers the person in trouble in the present time frame. The psychic would see what’s going on at that present time with amazing accuracy. They might not only see things, but feel things with the other clair senses. They might hear with clairaudience, smell with clairscent, and taste with clairtangance. Remote Viewing is like an entire sensory onslaught, it’s not just the seeing, but everything, and it’s happening all at once, and it’s very powerful. Usually people who can Remote View, have a tendency to block out the things they are sensing in their immediate vicinity to let in what they can see, feel, hear, smell and taste in an alternate location. The distance doesn’t matter though usually Remote Viewers are limited to events happening on Earth. (Hey you never know when that might come up.)

The other ability is precognition or premonition if the character is dreaming. In this case the character is having the same sensory onslaught, sight, smell, hearing, and feeling, but it’s for an event that’s happening in the future. The 5 basic psychic senses allow a person to perceive, the precognition defines that this is a future event.

Yes it’s hard to decode if you’re just having the sensory onslaught and you have absolutely no idea how to interpret what you’re seeing. By the same token, if you’re having visions and you’re a clairvoyant, you also need to learn how to weed out symbols that serve as metaphors. The mind often associates objects with ideas. So sometimes you’ll see a bridge. To the person the clairvoyant is reading, bridges represent friendships. In some cases it’ll represent an actual bridge, but often times it’ll represent the idea of friendship.

Psychic communication is something that literally takes years to perfect, but I hope in the span of this little article that you’ve been able to pick up some interesting little factoids about what clairvoyance is, and what it isn’t. 

About Rhiannon: Rhi was never a normal girl. She tried, but she couldn’t get rid of the visions, the voices in her head, and the hallucinations. When she was on the edge of crazy someone pulled her back and explained it all. She wasn’t insane. She was psychic, really psychic, too psychic. Her life was an urban fantasy wrapped in a paranormal romance and served with a side of horror. To escape her everyday weirdness she began writing fantasy. She frequents twitter and facebook, but if you really want to get to know her you should visit her site: www.rhiannonpaille.com  

GoodReads || Rhiannon's Website || Rhiannon's Blog || Rhiannon's Twitter || Flame of Surrender fan page