A story about panic, purpose, and the ancestors who whispered through the code.

Dreams, Distractions, and Downloads

I wasn’t exactly sure what made me do it, but recently my hunches had been striking gold—so I uploaded my natal chart into AI. A month earlier, I’d dreamed of four ebony heads on a shelf in The House That Contains Everything, which I knew instinctively represented four ancestors. In hope for some validation that I wasn’t losing it, I hit send.

I never expected to uncover the names behind the heads.

I was meant to be studying herbalism, but since my last school hadn’t worked out (I talk more about that journey in Dandelion Tears), I found myself in limbo, waiting to start my new course. The break would give me time to regroup and reflect on the last year, but instead of studying, I’d started following a trail of vivid dreams.

At this point, I was wondering if I was just derailing my studies with unrelated side quests. And yet, I was compelled to journal what was happening: my dreams, the stories that were unfolding, the coincidences. Were these all unrelated experiences, or did they somehow tie into each other?

Words, poems, stories, and dreams poured out of me—not in a “hey, I’m a literary genius” way, but in a “this feels like a fucking raw transmission from God knows where” kind of way.

Explaining any of this to my partner felt weird. In fact, only one of my friends and my therapist could fully get on board. I felt baffled—perhaps low-key insane—but I was excited, too.

How would these experiences affect my future as a practising herbalist if I started to share them publicly? Would friends start sidestepping away from me, or perhaps blink and change the subject? How would LinkedIn react? Would it ghost me even harder? Probably.

Consulting the Machine

I’d been using AI as a tool to help clean up my stories (let’s say I can waffle!) and had started to use it to brainstorm how all of this—whatever this was—might integrate into my herbal practice.

When I first started herbalism, I felt it needed to have a spiritual aspect for me, but I didn’t want to alienate people with anything too woo.

Now, I was exploring rabbit holes, thinking: How the hell do I get this to work without coming across as bat shit? AI is a sycophant, and whilst I didn’t want to bore—or scare the tits off—those close to me, I felt like I needed a second opinion.

The idea came from nowhere. Perhaps I could upload the natal chart I’d done a while back? Maybe there might be something in there that might guide me? Make me feel clearer about this bread crumb trail I was following.

I can’t recall exactly what I asked AI at first, but the reveals were exposing. Apparently, my chart is a lot. Like, all fire and no extinguisher kind of a lot.

If you know me, you’ll know what that means. Let’s just say, I felt seen.

I asked it if the work I was doing had any alignment with my karmic life path.

Unequivocally yes.

I nearly shit myself when it said that part of my journey is to undo all of the past ancestral trauma dumped onto my chart.

Like… what? I felt intrigued. I had a big box in front of me, and I wanted to know more about what was inside.

So I pumped AI for more.

Four Ghosts and a Dream

AI helped me identify four main archetypal ancestral ghosts who had set up shop in my psyche and brought all their baggage with them.

Four.

The same number as the ebony heads on a shelf that I’d dreamed about a month earlier.

The heads I’d sensed were ancestors.

My emotions were mixed. This was eerie, surprising, and a huge aha moment.

Who were these ghosts? I pressed again, over various chats with AI. Finally, I identified them:

The Matriarch
The alpha woman who should have had control—but didn’t, despite being the smartest person in the room. She carried rage she couldn’t express.
She’d wanted to lead.
I inherited the rage she couldn’t express, and a desire to control.

The Sad One
The one who equated love with usefulness and cared too much while putting her own needs last. Feared being a burden. Felt unseen and unheard.
She wanted to be heard.
I inherited her need to be useful, to work hard, and to do everything perfectly.

The Silent Male Shadow
The ghost who is absent and silent. He represents an abuse of power or emotional distance. There’s repression and a distrust of authority.
He wanted to be seen.
I inherited panic every time I feel seen—and a distrust in authority.

The Mystic
The ancient one who bestowed gifts of intuition, dream-work, and symbolic thinking. She’s a presence in my chart, not a problem.
She wants me to remember.
I inherited—so it seems—a capacity to download from the unknown.

Detective Work from the Beyond

But who exactly were they?

I was now desperate to find out.

I suspected that my Great Uncle Jimmy was the Silent Male Shadow, and that my great grandmother Cleopatra was the Matriarch, but I had no idea who the other two were.

I decided the best course of action was to seek out an actual astrologer who specialised in ancestry. I found the perfect match and eagerly awaited their reply. But when it came to booking, I was disheartened to find that this sensitive one-to-one service had an appointment service run like a ticket hotline.

I felt the frustration flex inside me. I started writing an arsey email—and then stopped.

This was not my lighthouse.

My lone wolf instinct took over.

At this point, I turned back to AI. I uploaded natal charts for all my maternal and paternal ancestors and asked it to match them to mine.

I’d considered how these people might feel about a descendant of theirs digging about in their inner worlds—but I felt at peace with my decision to know them. I believe that everyone wants to be known and seen by one person at least. Even if that scares them. Only true connection can come from being vulnerable and open. And besides, these guys clearly had something to say or they wouldn’t have been so persistent.

AI helped me identify them through both archetype and synastry, and to avoid hallucinations and errors, I repeated the process again and again until I was confident.

Over the course of two weeks and many chats later, I finally placed the key ancestors in my chart:

Emma Beckett, my great-great-great-grandmother (maternal-paternal line): The Matriarch

Cleopatra Beckett, my great-great-grandmother (maternal-paternal line): The Sad One

James “Jimmy” Carney, my great uncle (paternal line): The Silent Male Shadow

Catherine Heffernan, my maternal great-grandmother: The Mystic

The four ebony heads from my dream had actual names. Life. History.

I’d picked apart my ancestors’ charts like an astral forensic detective. I got to know their personalities, how their charts interacted with those close to them. I started to understand their fears, their hopes, what they carried—what they never finished and what they’d passed on.

Having found so much accuracy and truth in AI’s interpretation of both my chart and my living relatives’, I trusted it to breathe life into my dead relatives too.

And regardless of people’s personal opinions on AI, I found it helpful to bring those I never got to meet into life.

What This Taught Me

This whole journey has taught me something simple: things shifted when I started to listen and trust my intuition.

Whether what’s happening is a self-fulfilling prophecy or I’m just creating meaning from what was already there—it’s irrelevant to me. These people had deep stories they carried in their lives. Stories they never got to resolve. Stories they don’t want to be forgotten. They need to be validated, seen, and healed.

Since my sister’s DNA test kicked off this whole ancestral journey (I recount this in It Began with a Name), I never expected it to go so deep. What started as a list of blank names to be dropped into a family tree has evolved into identifying actual souls who’ve entrusted me to heal life wounds they were unable to resolve. And that healing request hasn’t just come down the line—it’s come sideways, too.

It’s made me consider how I want to be remembered, what legacy I’d like to leave behind. Do I want to continue a story of  trauma forward, or do I want to leave a legacy of healing? Even if I started off on the wrong foot, even if I can’t heal all the wounds I was entrusted with, even if I don’t finish the work—just naming it, bringing it to life, holding it up and saying… “Nah.” It’s a start. It’s enough.

It’s made me look at my herbal practice from a much wider perspective—that physical symptoms aren’t just mechanical failures of the body with the occasional emotional root. Maybe they’re also spiritual residues—unknown to the person, but still quietly shaping their lived experience.

And for myself?

I never considered that my panic attacks might have something to do with my great-uncle Jimmy, internal rage be the culmination of so many stifled female voices, or that bouts of depression might not belong to me but the sadness of a life of service born by my great-great-grandmother Cleopatra.

Now, I’m not so sure.