About a month or so ago I was listening to an episode of my favorite podcast, Scary Stories to Tell on the Pod, and it put an idea into my head. Anna Drezen, co-host of the podcast, was talking about a session she’d had with a dog psychic named Latifa Meena, and all the funny and insightful stuff she learned about her dog Lady Bird. Being that I personally land on a woo-woo scale of 8/10, while also being unable to hold on to a dollar to save my life, it didn’t take long for me to book an appointment of my own with Latifa. My English bulldog/American bully mix, Dracula, was approaching her second birthday soon, so I figured, what better time to channel the forces that be, via Latifa, to hear proof, from my dog’s very own mind, that I am, indeed, the best mom in the world.
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On February 4, 2021 I spoke with Latifa, who’s based out of Louisville, KY, for 30-minutes on the telephone at the very reasonable price of $65. I not only got that loving confirmation I was fishing for, but also alarming revelations such as the fact that a ghost woman who likes to cook hangs out in my kitchen, and that the spirit of my dad is also always here, looking over things, watching out for us, and most likely judging me for spending money I should be saving for things like, oh, mortgage or whatever.
I’ve had two two prior sessions with a psychic, myself. The first took place during a street fair in Riverside, California, where I spent my formative years, and I was told then that this was my first life as a human and that, in every previous life time, I’d been a wild dog of some sort. The second session happened in New York while on a particularly bad date and I was instructed to clear my blocked third eye by going home and dumping Visine on my head, which I did. The success of this is to be determined, but I do have the unique ability to predict the exact chain of events in any given episode of Law & Order SVU so … maybe?
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While I’ve always had pets that I loved, and always wondered, to what degree, they loved me back, I’d never been previously compelled to seek out a psychic to communicate with them. The loss of my dad, mom, and grandmother over the past seven years has made me even more curious about “what’s out there” than I already very much was, so I dialed up Latifa with a mix of hunger for signs of a world bigger than the one we know, and ingrained skepticism.
Latifa lost some points within the first few minutes of our call by referring to Dracula as “he.” This is a common mistake, and something that should be expected when you name a precious female puppy after an ancient Transylvanian vampire. That being said, I can always argue the case that Dracula is technically a last name, and can therefore apply to any (or no) gender. Once we got past this though, I was surprisingly wowed by how spot-on the psychic was when it came to the specific way she described Dracula’s thoughts, and the things she knew about my house, and my family, that she couldn’t have possibly known.
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Latifa told me that Dracula was the fourth of her litter to be born, that she’s happy with us, that she gets bored easily, and that she wants another dog her size and age to play with. I was instructed to make a habit of letting my dog know our daily schedule in a more detailed way, and to describe days by “light” and “dark” because that’s how dogs mark time. So, instead of saying “in two days we’re going to the dog park,” I should instead say “in two lights we’re going to the dog park.”
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Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the dirpiest dirp of all?
Photo Credit: Matt Mansolino & Kelly McClure
While communicating with Dracula, and relaying her thoughts back to me, Latifa would pepper our conversation with “okay Dracula, slow down, girl,” as though my dog were talking a mile a minute. She barks more in an hour than most dogs bark all day, so this tracks.
A few times during our session I could feel the hair stand up on the backs of my arms after being told something that, I feel, Latifa couldn’t possibly have had any way of knowing. “Dracula wants to know what happened to the black dog she used to play with,” she asked at one point. From time to time I take on dog sitting jobs through the Rover app, and when Dracula was a puppy I did doggy daycare for a black puppy a little smaller than her named Athena, who recently moved to a different city. And when Latifa asked “did your dad cross?” And then went on to tell me that he is still here, watching over me every day, hot tears just shot out of my eyes. The power in being able to relay that information, and the vulnerability it takes to receive it, and believe it, is very intense.
Whether you’re the sort to believe in things like psychics or not, it’s interesting to hear a stranger communicate deeply personal things to you in this way. If you’ve got a spare $65 laying around, and a pet you love, or have loved and lost, that you’d like to get a closer understanding of, I highly recommend Latifa Meena. Be forewarned though, you may end up hearing things you were absolutely not expecting to hear. Now that I know there’s a ghost lady cooking up a storm in my kitchen, I’m grappling with the idea of charging her rent.
