Sorry to be so late responding @cryptosharon, been swamped IRL...

Have you ever done Tarot before? It's fun, once you start to get the hang of it. I've been doing it since I was like 18, somebody taught me and I bought a deck and I've just always had them around since then. Basically, each card has a series of meanings, all centered around a core metaphor. Once you get the metaphor, you can kind of see the "soul" of the card anytime it pops up. In a reading, you use many cards, and the positions of the cards in the spread and in relation to each other affect their meanings. The metaphors associated with each card are multilayered and flexible in their application, so that the card will speak something specific to you in the context of the reading even though there are multiple possible interpretations. And then your own psychic abilities come into play, triggered by the images. It's a complex art form. In the story I related above, I was definitely picking up on a lot of that psychically.