A few months after she awoke from a coma, Laurie McQuary began to have vivid dreams of airline crashes.  They were not ordinary nightmares. Each was like a Technicolor newsreel unwinding in her mind.  She saw the passengers, the plunging, tumbling interior of the plane and, finally, the broken tail of the rudder standing out like a flag in the pitiful wreckage.

Her terror was magnified when in the next few days she saw her nightmare replayed in relentless detail in the newspapers and on TV with headlines screaming the fatal downing of an airplane identical to the one that crashed in her dreams.

Tormented by her prophetic black visions, she cried out for understanding. How could she have known in advance that the plane would crash? Bewildered, haunted, cornered, she could find no sane answer to her catastrophic visions of death falling from the skies until she met a warm, understanding woman who herself was a psychic.

After counseling with her, Laurie was able to accept that she was different, might always be so, and that most probably her dubious gift of power to see into the future was the result of a terrible fall from a horse - a fall that hospitalized her in Escondido, CA, in a coma that lasted three weeks.

Laurie discovered from her own research that medical science has little understanding of the human brain. "We don't understand sleep, or the simple act of walking, or what a coma really is", Laurie said.

She said that numerous cases of head-injured people who revive from comas demonstrate an enhanced ability in many of them to intuit the thoughts of others and future events.  How this happens no one knows, Laurie said. But one of the theories is that an "awakened" portion of the brain substitutes or compensates for a damaged portion. This awakened dormant part of the brain may be responsible for the very old human ability of intuition. In some people, by accident, genetic makeup or mental training, it  becomes highly developed, powerful. And it is manifested  in  several forms  - precognition, telepathy, telekinesis and others.

One form of intuition less frightening than disaster dreams to Laurie was her ability to listen in on the thoughts of others. This talent first occurred after her coma while  she was on a routine shopping trip to the grocery store. Suddenly, she was flooded with the random thoughts of other people.  At first she couldn't turn them off. On one occasion she was compelled to speak to a woman who was standing in the check out line in front of her.  "Don't worry about your son," she said. "He's going to move to New York and he'll get the job he wants." The woman almost fainted. Later, Laurie learned to shut out unwanted voices.

Laurie said she did little to develop her second sight until she created some evenness in her life and the self-respect that comes with maturity. Much of her young womanhood  was  spent,  Laurie  said,  rebelling against the anger of a molested childhood. She was married and divorced, held a variety of jobs, bore two children and eventually settled in Portland where about three years ago she began to give psychic consultations in her home. Soon she was  able to give up her full- time nursing job.

She founded Management by Intuition in 1984 when she saw that her  clientele was gradually changing from frustrated housewives to business men and  women who came to her for employee appraisals,  character  evaluation  and business trend predictions.

Presently. Laurie reads for about 120 people a month, including 25 Portland-area  corporate clients. Also, she has business customers for whom she consults in California and Hawaii. Typical of the intuitive services she performs for clients is the business man who came to her with the request that she give him the lowdown on a prospective new business associate with whom he had tentatively agreed to do a business deal. Thousands of dollars  were  involved.  He  wanted confirmation of his personal judgment. Laurie asked for the name and birthdate of the man. Then she said to her client, "You cannot trust this person. He was in business in Eugene, Oregon. He had some business partners there whom you should talk with."     Alarmed, her client said, "Are you sure about this?" "Yes. Contact the former partners."  Several days later the man called back. "You saved me from what might have been a disastrous investment. I found his ex-partners. They gave me the dope on him.  He's dishonest. I don't know how to thank you."

In another case, a distraught woman made an appointment with Laurie and said with a bitter sigh. "I've tried everything to locate my business partner.  The s.o.b. absconded with almost $60,000. Can you help me find him?" "I'll try," Laurie said. "What is his name and birthdate?" The woman gave Laurie the information  and Laurie said, "What does he have in Alaska?" "Well, he used to do business there."  "That's where you'll find him. In a motel,  he's working in a low profile job, in Nome,  Alaska"  Did the woman recover her money? No, Laurie said. He had already disposed of it.  But the man was apprehended by the police.

The case of the $5,000 money bag is a memorable one for Laurie who was contacted by a Portland real estate appraiser who regularly holds big auction sales. She was in the process of moving into a new house when she discovered the money bag in which she kept large amounts of cash was missing. Frantic, she telephoned Laurie after several hours of searching for the bag came to nothing.  "I'm desperate," she said "I've never been to a psychic, but you've been recommended.  A money bag with $5,000 in it has been stolen. Can you tell me who stole it?"  "Describe it to me," Laurie said.  After listening to the description, Laurie said, "Nobody stole it. It's in your apartment."  "It can't be. I've Iooked everywhere."  "It's underneath something. I can see it  clearly. It seems to be underneath a table, or lying on a table," Laurie said into the telephone. "I'll look again," the woman said. Two hours later, she called back. "You are something," she said, "I found it on the kitchen table beneath some pots and pans.  How can I ever thank you?"

Occasionally, Laurie's gift of extra sensory  perception involves her with celebrities, at least Oregon ones. This happened when the  sister of Jack Faust, TV Channel 2 Town  Hall host, was visiting with Laurie. On impulse, Laurie brought up Jack's name.  "This man is going to change his career, she said. "He will be in the spotlight. I see a  talk show of some kind." "Jack? You're kidding,"  the sister responded. "He's a lawyer. No way. He'd  never do anything like that."  A few months later the sister came back and said, "You were right. Jack took the job as host of Town Hall."

Does being a woman psychic of scrupulous reputation who can see with solitary eyes that pass through time and space and penetrate secrets of the past and future, sometimes entail a greater social responsibility than peering into the future for business trends or lost articles?  "Yes. it does," asserts Laurie. I call it balancing the scales for the someone at loss and the person lost. The pain of not knowing  whether or not a missing loved one is alive and safe or dead and lost can be something terrible to live with."

In some cases, the spirit of a dead person will remain where it last inhabited the corporeal body until the mystery of its death is solved, Laurie said. Often that spiritual presence is open to communication.

Such was the case of Kenny, a 25-year-old man who was found hanged in his bedroom  closet. The coroner ruled suicide, but the family was not convinced and asked Laurie  McQuary to investigate. With the family, she entered the house of  the dead son in Kennewick, Washington. She bade the parents to wait in the living room while she entered the bedroom and closed the door. Almost immediately. she perceived the outline of the dead man and heard his voice declare that he had not killed himself. Laurie listened for several minutes, then returned to the living room where she told the parents what she had learned. Their son, who had been involved with two men and a woman in drugs, broke away from them. They became alarmed and felt that his declaration of independence was a risk to their safety. At a party, they slipped a lethal quantity of a drug into his drink, then brought him, in a dying condition, to his own home where they hanged him in the closet, making his death appear to be drug-induced suicide. When she had finished talking, the mother of the dead man broke into tears. The night her son died, she said, she had dreamed of three indistinct figures, two men and a woman, holding something up in their arms and the woman saying. "No! No! Not Yet!  He's not dead yet!"  Was the suicide verdict changed?  No. Insufficient evidence, it was claimed. And neither Laurie nor the parents were going to dispute the law based on her interview with the departed spirit of her son.

Laurie's second sight earned the gratitude of a family, the father of which had been   missing 30 days following a hunting party in Southern Oregon. Laurie marked the location of the body on a map and said it was resting near a lake. When the search party returned and found the man's body exactly where Laurie said it would be, a few feet away from the original search path, and partially obscured by some branches, the sheriff was awed.

Laurie McQuary is practical about her gift. Intuition, she feels, is a learnable art. It is a human craft that in a growing depersonalized America should be relearned as an improved, ultimate communications skill. There is nothing weird, or strange, or wicked about extra sensory perception. We all have it in varying degrees. But, she said, giving intuition the status of fact, giving it scientific recognition as a respectable. learnable human art is asking for too much right now.

To do so would be to radically change our view of our physical world. It is still easier to scoff at things we don't understand, said Laurie. But, hey, we are growing more    human. Nobody can really stop that from happening. Nobody can really stop us from learning to see through time and space and tomorrow, into ourselves, and opening our hearts to understanding.

In the meantime, Laurie  McQuary continues to expand her customer base with men and women in business who want to know a little bit about their future and who find a link to it in a reading from the striking, dark-eyed woman, with gypsy  ancestors, who blends lovely personal witchery with a bright personal approach to  psychic analysis.

- Management by Intuition.