Guest Post - Tracy Richardson

Have you ever had a hunch, a premonition or a flash of insight? Most people I talk to have had some kind of ‘extra-sensory’ experience. A parent who somehow senses that one of their children is in trouble, reaches out and finds their hunch was true. Or maybe they were thinking of a friend just as the phone rings and the friend calls. Or something more profound - a dream or premonition that comes true. 

I recently watched my niece and nephew while their parents took a vacation. After I dropped them off at a play center, I had a fleeting premonition that Ben would break his arm. At the time I didn’t give it any consideration, but when my phone rang while I was having dinner in town, I knew they were calling me to tell me Ben had broken his arm. Could I have prevented it? I don’t know. I do know that something told me what was going to happen to my nephew before it did. But how?

Can we really all be connected by the same energy field, the same power, the same consciousness?

That is the essential question behind my YA novel, The Field. Quantum physics says that at a sub-atomic level, once particles are connected, or entangled, they are always connected no matter how far the distance between them. Einstein called this phenomenon ‘spooky action at a distance’. My idea in writing The Field was to show how we are all connected at a human level through the Universal Energy Field or the Collective Consciousness using high school soccer as the vehicle for Eric’s sense of knowing where the ball will go before it gets there.

In The Field, Eric is a soccer goalkeeper with an uncanny sense of knowing where the ball will go. He can’t control it and doesn’t understand it. He also has an immediate connection with Renee, the new girl in his science class, and recurring dreams of explosions that he hopes aren’t prophetic. As he learns more about what he’s experiencing from experiments Renee’s father is conducting he finds it all hard to believe. But he must open his mind to all the possibilities before him if he is to succeed in saving what he could never forgive himself for losing.

My premise is that we all have the ability to connect with one another through the collective consciousness. Quantum physics proves it. We just need to open our minds to the possibility.