I’ve spent most of my life navigating two realities simultaneously—the consensus world where most people dwell, and the fluid, prophetic realm that bleeds through in dreams, intuitions, and moments when the veil between worlds grows gossamer-thin.
Psychic From Youth
The dreams started young. Not the typical anxiety dreams or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but something else entirely—crystalline visions that would unfold days or weeks later with disturbing accuracy. I’d dream of a conversation with specific, unusual details, then find myself living that exact exchange. I’d see someone making a particular choice, feel the emotional texture of it, then watch them walk that precise path. I’d wake with knowledge I shouldn’t possess—about people I’d meet, situations I’d encounter, outcomes that hadn’t yet materialized.
At first, I did what many psychically sensitive people do: I doubted, dismissed, rationalized. Coincidence. Confirmation bias. Imagination. But the dreams persisted, growing more vivid and accurate, until denial became its own form of delusion. I was seeing the future, or at least a version of it, accessing information through channels that materialist philosophy insists don’t exist.
Liminal Growth and Gift
This ability shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. It started out doubting, became liminal as I grew into it, and ultimately helped me see that it was a gift. It taught me that reality is far stranger and more flexible than we’re encouraged to believe. It showed me that consciousness isn’t confined to the present moment—we can extend tendrils forward and backward through time, gathering intelligence that transcends linear causality. Most importantly, it revealed that the barrier between ordinary and extraordinary experience is permeable, gossamer, constantly shifting.
For a writer, particularly one drawn to paranormal romance, this sensitivity has been both gift and guide. I don’t just imagine what it might feel like to possess supernatural abilities—I’ve experienced that peculiar doubling of awareness, that sense of operating on multiple frequencies simultaneously. When I write witches who read energy or vampires who sense emotional states, I’m drawing from direct experience of perceiving beyond conventional senses.
Psychic ability has profoundly enhanced my creative process. That prophetic dreaming taught me to trust non-rational sources of knowledge, to honor the downloads that arrive fully formed at 3 AM, to recognize that inspiration often comes through us rather than from us. The best scenes in my books arrive this way—not laboriously constructed but received, channeled, discovered rather than invented.
There’s a particular state of consciousness that precognitive dreams require, a loosening of the ego’s grip, a willingness to surrender control and simply witness. This is identical to the state required for deep creative work. When I’m truly in flow, writing becomes prophetic—I don’t know what my characters will do until they do it, don’t know what revelations will emerge until they’re already on the page. I’ve learned to trust this process, to write from that same intuitive space where dreams deliver truth.
Romance Fiction
The prophetic ability also deepened my understanding of desire, fate, and free will—central themes in paranormal romance. When you’ve seen potential futures, you understand that destiny isn’t fixed but probabilistic, that our choices matter tremendously even as larger patterns unfold. This paradox drives the best supernatural love stories: characters who are fated to meet but must choose whether to surrender to that fate, whose free will operates within a cosmic choreography they can sense but never fully comprehend.
My vampire series explores these themes explicitly. The immortals in my world possess heightened perception—they see auras, sense lies, feel the electromagnetic signatures of emotion. They’re psychic predators, yes, but also cursed with knowing too much, seeing too clearly, unable to hide in the comfortable delusions that make human life bearable. Their relationships become laboratories for exploring what intimacy means when pretense is impossible, when both parties perceive each other with supernatural clarity.
The witches in my stories understand what I learned through my own experiences: that magic is primarily about consciousness, about training perception to access information and influence reality through non-ordinary channels. Their spellwork mirrors the techniques I’ve used to develop psychic ability—meditation, energy work, intentional dreaming, creating the conditions where the veil thins reliably rather than randomly.
Some writers imagine supernatural abilities. I write from the inside out, translating direct experience into fictional form. This lends my paranormal elements a particular texture, a lived-in quality that readers sense even if they can’t name it. The magic in my books feels real because it emerges from real experience, however strange or difficult to explain.
Shadow Behind the Veil
Living with psychic sensitivity has also taught me about darkness—not evil, but the shadow realms of consciousness we’re encouraged to ignore. Prophetic dreams don’t arrive in sanitized form; they carry the full spectrum of human experience, including violence, sexuality, death, transformation. This has made me unafraid to write dark material, to follow my characters into uncomfortable territories, to explore the edges where danger and desire blur.
The veil remains thin for me. I still dream prophetically, still know things I shouldn’t, still navigate multiple realities simultaneously. Now, I’ve found the perfect outlet for this strange gift—stories where the impossible happens routinely, where heightened perception is the norm, where love transcends not just social boundaries but the laws of nature itself.
My psychic experiences didn’t just inspire my paranormal romance writing. They made it inevitable.
~ Serena Hawke
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