Since I was a young child, I have been confident there is another life after this one. How do I know? I have regular contact with it, and have done for as long as I can remember.
I accept the cynics will label me as deranged, but they've never seen tables tip over of their own volition, glass tumblers move around untouched and a CD holder lift off the floor and hang in the air for several seconds.
Recently, I was chatting to a girlfriend and watched with some curiosity as the blurred outline of an elderly lady circled the top of my friend's head with the palm of her hand. My friend sensed something was happening, but she couldn't see what I did.
Why didn't I run screaming from the room? Because for many years I thought such experiences were entirely normal.
It was only when I left my home town in Gloucestershire at 18, to study drama in London, that I realised not everyone believed in ghosts. The reason for my unshakeable beliefs is that my mother, Elizabeth "Bet" Ann Rose Duggan, was a medium. That word meant little to me as a child, but I just knew my mum was "different" to other parents. It is through her that I have witnessed scenarios that leave me in no doubt that there is another world where the departed go. Born in 1926 in Llangollen, South Wales, of Irish-Welsh mining heritage, she gave great credence to all types of paranormal behaviour, whether it was the TV suddenly switching off or a door slamming shut.
Thankfully, my spiritual experiences have been primarily positive. I've frequently heard voices, smelled others' fragrance - sometimes lavender water, other times tobacco - and watched body shadows and silhouettes moving from one space to another.
Once, when I was 12, I saw, briefly, my former best friend hiding under my bed as if playing hide and seek. She'd been dead for three years. Of course, I was shocked and pulled back from the bed so that the covers fell down. When I looked again, she was gone. It was the first time I'd seen a physical manifestation of a ghost. But I was so schooled in the idea of the supernatural that I remember feeling sanguine about the whole episode.
Thankfully, I can recall only two negative events. The first occurred when I was only eight. Our three-bedroom semidetached home, in a cul de sac in the Cotswolds, was opposite an old manor building which was being transformed into flats. During the building work, Mum acquired a round antique oak table and one evening she prepared it for a seance. Within moments of the tumbler being returned to the table, it seemed to be filling with an unseen force and began vibrating. Swiftly the tumbler moved around the letters and then came to an abrupt halt after frenziedly zigzagging round the table. The obscene message it spelt out, and the accompanying dark, menacing aura that filled the room, caused Mum to stop the seance immediately and return the table. At that moment I understood the concepts of fear and evil. Even Mum didn't know from whom the message came or at whom it was directed, but the feeling was that we shouldn't have brought the table into the house.
In retrospect, it was irresponsible for Mum to have let me get involved in things like that, but I'm convinced that she was preparing me for a life without her, and trying to show me that she would not be taken away from me for ever.
My other deeply negative encounter occurred more recently, when my daughter was five days old. It was about 10pm on a September night in 1997 and my two brothers and their families had just left our home after visiting our new arrival. My partner, Stephen, was watching TV in the living room and I had gone to bed after settling Shaye in her moses basket in our room. Moments after lying down, I became aware of something in the room. My mouth ran dry and I couldn't open my eyes or even speak. I felt deeply threatened and consumed by fear for the safety of my child. Panic filled me, my eyes were still clamped shut as if every muscle had been removed from the lids, and I pleaded in my head for God to help us. As quickly as the presence came, it disappeared and my eyes opened and I screamed out.
Thankfully I have not experienced anything like it since. Merely to recall it fills me with unease and fear about the darker forces I am convinced move among us.
Some things are beyond words, and you don't have to believe me - but I know it happened. It was real to me.
Scientifically, of course, the question of life after death is unequivocal: there isn't one. Science has no tools to grapple with the unseeable - it cannot prove the existence of ghosts. But should we place so much importance on visual evidence?
Our eyes, according to psychologist Dr Jane Morton, are notoriously unreliable. "Eyewitness accounts are highly fallible," she says. Far more effective, in the act of recognition, she says, are the physiological functions of our body.
Some people refer to it as "gut instinct", but I know when a spirit of some kind is around me because my palms sweat, my heart palpitates, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my mouth runs dry. Not dissimilar, in some respects, to how a cat reacts whenever it feels a presence in the room.
But it is not just physical or spiritual manifestations. I regularly hear voices around me, even when I am alone, and most nights, for decades now, a soft, comforting voice whispers: "Goodnight Sonia" as I am drifting off to sleep.
I don't know if it is a boy or a girl, man or a woman. Yet it exists. And I love it.
No, I am not psychotic. Neither have I suffered a brain injury. I am reasonably intelligent and educated (up to degree level) and I am studying the scientific discipline of psychology. Which, for the most part, has little time for things that can't be observed or measured. But I know there is more to life than, well, life. When I was at primary school, some of my classmates used to call my mum a witch and even though the cynicism has become more sophisticated there is no denying how some people perceive me and people like me. I don't blame them. If I hadn't had my experiences, I might have been as cynical as them.
But I am confident there is something more because it is continually revealing itself to me. Take, for example, an incident four years ago, when I was living in a 400-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. One evening, as I was packing cases to move home, a wooden CD rack which was leaning against the wall set itself straight in front of my eyes and raised itself a foot or two into the air. Then it sank down to the floor and rose up again before coming to rest on the carpet. By then I was beyond being shocked. I didn't feel threatened by it, and it was almost as though someone was helping me with the moving. So yes, the paranormal is there for all of us. We just have to allow for the possibility of its existence.
'Death', claimed Freud, 'is a fearsome prospect for many'. Might it be less of a worrying proposition if we knew more about what it entailed? That there was more to death than the nothingness we dread. That's how I feel, and the thought reassures me.
I take umbrage when mediums and spiritualists describe themselves as having "the gift", because that suggests it is only available to the few. It isn't. I believe everyone is capable of spiritual contact. The only difference in my case is that I have been raised with that understanding and taught it on an intimate level by my own mother. So if you ask whether she did me disservice by introducing me to such things at a young age, I say no, she opened my eyes to a host of extraordinary experiences which have made my life richer than it would otherwise have been.
