My mother’s constant goal was to turn both of us into psychics.

Here is how she did it.

There used to be an ESP game whose purpose was to test and develop your intuition. It contained a deck of cards, and each card had a large, colored dot in the center, either blue, green, yellow, orange or red.

You would practice with it like this.

First, decide who is to be the Sender and who is to be the Receiver. Set up the trifold cardboard between the two of you. The Sender takes a card off the top of the deck and looks at it, but does not let the Receiver see it. Then the Sender and Receiver look into each other’s eyes, and the Sender attempts to psychically transmit the color to the Receiver. All the correct guesses go in one pile, and all the incorrect guesses in the other. As you continue to play the game over time, your ability to send and receive intuitive messages should increase.

My mother and I would spend evenings working at our psychic development at the dining room table. Whenever she would be sending yellow, and I would receive orange, and go to put the card in the “incorrect” pile, she would object.

“No, you got that one right.”

I would say, “No, you said yellow, and I guessed orange.”

Then she would say, “Oh, come on! Yellow and orange are practically the same thing.”

Thus, our intuition grew at a prodigious rate.