Laura Day On What It’s Like To Be An Intuitive To Celebrities

Laura Day saw her friend Demi Moore’s second pregnancy coming. Moore wrote about the prediction in the introduction to Day’s 1996 book, “Practical Intuition,” calling the intuitive a “remarkable woman with a remarkable abilities.”

Day’s debut was a handbook for “rediscovering” intuition, as she put it, and seeing its transformative power firsthand. Thirty years later, Day continues to publish books that distill her unique perspective on the world into gifts for her readers.

Her latest, “The Prism,” out April 29, is a series of exercises of how people can identify where they need changes. “This is the framework for how you build yourself to build a life that you want,” Day tells TODAY.com.

She’s written bestsellers on teaching intuition — but books, she says, are not how she pays the bills.

A working intuitive, Day uses her abilities to guide companies’ investing decisions and says she is on retainer at several companies (four, to be precise).

She also gives regular readings for her coterie of famous friends, including actors like Moore (the two are still close, she says) and Brad Pitt, who blurbed the book.

Day’s husband, the writer and former skeptic Steven Schiff, chimes in during the interview to give instances of telepathy, detailing a time he helped a friend track down a cat states away.

“I think she’s very generous when she thinks everyone can do this. I think almost nobody can do what she does. Yeah can she teach people to be in touch? Yeah. And have I also seen her like, bring out gifts that people didn’t know? Oh yeah,” he says, counting himself among them.

While she’s made a living, and a good one, by making individualized predictions, she shirks the label “psychic.”

“I did not want to be known as a psychic,” she says, sharing that she only wrote her first book because she “had to” make “a lot of money very quickly” while raising her son. “I didn’t want to write books about intuition. I definitely did not want my face on those books. I come from a family of three generations of scientists.”

Speaking of family, “The Prism” also gives insight into the making of an intuitive mind. Day gets into the her harrowing upbringing, the oldest of four children to, what she describes as, a narcissistic father and a manic-depressive mother. Her parents bought an adjoining New York apartment to house their children. Essentially raising her younger siblings, Day writes she was aided by the “imaginary friends” who never went away.

Day went on to lose her mother and two of her siblings to suicide. She’s come to think of her intuition as the compass she used to make decisions, using information that did not come from within her but was given to her.

“Why did I survive? I realized that intuition gave me a framework for what a healthy human being was and how that healthy human being should interface with the structure of the world. But it was so subconscious, and it gave it to me because I had three younger children to take care of,” she says.

She says people are their own “magic wands,” and her books are meant to teach people how to use their own abilities rather than outsource them.

“Telling the future? That’s a really good skill, and it’s been helpful for me, and certainly I’ve made a career of it. But more important is being able to change your present so you can change that future,” she says.

Below, Day opens up about her latest book — and why she says it’s her last self-help.

You’ve given intuitive readings for an array of famous people. Are famous people really different?

People who become very successful are very intuitive, but they’re often intuitive in little parts of their lives. So, some of the other parts of their lives sometimes crumble around them. They need to be intuitive, because intuition is a survival skill. And what people don’t realize about celebrities: you are always under attack. Even if they’re beloved, they live in a hostile world.

What does ‘The Prism’ offer readers?

I really feel like “The Prism” is the answer to, “What’s wrong with me?” And, “How do I make it right? What’s wrong with my life, and how do I make it right?” The answer is never inside of you. We’re held together by our patterns, but our patterns are also our jailers. They keep us stuck. You have to try something new on something you cannot think outside the box. You are the box. You can only imagine from what you’ve been exposed to. You can intuit something else, though, and this book has a lot of different ways, again, to find the little alleys in your conscious mind where intuition can be found.

My former books are very much about intuition, right? “The Prism” really is about life. It’s so important to me, and it is my last self-help book. I’m writing memoir next.

With your work, you give people the tools. But do you ever find people come to you just wanting the answers?

Yes, and I have no boundaries, so I often just give them the answers. But I find that there you can give somebody the answer and they don’t do that much for you. That’s why “The Prism” gives you tiny behavioral shifts. Your world will change, and then you’ll change as a result of your opportunities will change and your health.

I was watching a video of you talking to Demi Moore when she was married to Ashton Kutcher. Moore said she followed her intuition by marrying him even though you were among the skeptics of the relationship

I very rarely don’t say anything. That’s why I always know my friends are doing something they shouldn’t be doing when they don’t call me. Because I have, you know, I have learned to have more of a filter. Believe me, I was not popular in third grade.

So when people are in crisis, how do you help them?

I find the solution and I find the solution that they can do. And that’s what “The Prism” is about. Because a solution that someone can’t do is not a solution. It takes more baggage. I find the solution that they can do, and then I give them a timeline so they can experience that.

What I’ll also sometimes do is see something coming up or someone coming up that will mitigate the pain, and then I’ll say a couple things that are going to happen between now and then, so that they can verify it.

You know the answers. Do you ever get anxious?

Knowing the answers leads to — I mean, listen, I think the most courageous thing is to be human. It takes a lot of courage to be an aware human being. Seeing the future can be really scary because there are some things you can’t do anything about. There’s a lot you can and my precognition has saved my life quite a few times. But it’s also let me know things that were too heartbreaking to know, and it also let me know too much so that I had to spend a lot of energy on repressing what I knew. Everything is a mixed bag. I am grateful for my gift.