My mother was abusive and had been suffocating me with a pillow sporadically, beginning when I was 5. I was a screamer and she would hold the pillow over my face until I quit struggling and went quiet. I learned to quit struggling very quickly.

When I was 8 my older sister tattled on me for something, I don’t recall what, and my mother slapped me and I began screaming. She then threw me down on the bed (it was evening and time for bed) and held the pillow over my face until I quit struggling. After she lifted the pillow, she left the room and I laughed and told my older sister that she could tattle if she wanted, I knew how to fake out our mother and she would quit before I passed out.

Our mother was outside the door and heard me and came back in very angry, grabbed me and slammed my head against the bunk bed frame, dazing me and threw me down on the bed and put the pillow over my face again, only this time she knelt on each side of my face holding it in place as she screamed curses at me and punched and slapped the pillow. I went still and quiet in an attempt to make her believe that I had passed out but she did not let up and I began scratching and hitting her legs to get her to let me go.

Suddenly I was no longer on the bed being suffocated; instead, I was up by the ceiling bouncing against the ceiling like a balloon. There was what appeared to be a silver, glowing, wide thread from me at the ceiling to me on the bed. I could see the event transpiring below me. I saw my mother kneeling over me with her knees on each side of my face holding the pillow down. I could hear her cursing and screeching at me. I could see my younger sister sitting curled up in the corner at the foot of the bed, crying and shaking. I could see my older sister attempting to drag our mother off of me and hear her begging her to stop. As the ceiling above me became more and more transparent, I could see through it to a foggy white light area, and as the fog cleared I could see several unknown (at the time) older people watching and looking very sad standing in the receding fog. (I saw pictures of them later and they turned out to be my father’s parents.)

I was just beginning to drift through the now very transparent ceiling when my mother quit suffocating me, threw the pillow across the room and left, slamming the door. My older sister (she was 14) immediately went to me and began shaking me and calling my name. When I didn’t respond she pulled some flowers from a nearby vase and dumped the water on my face. When I still did not respond she pulled me from the bed onto the floor and began pushing on my chest (she had recently learned what was called "rescue breathing" for drowning victims). She had made one attempt to do mouth-to-mouth when I saw an unknown man appear below me.

He was stocky, balding with reddish hair, wearing a gold watch and had a tattoo on one forearm. He reached up and touched what I perceived to be my big toe and said, "Now, lassie, tis not time for you to go yet; you have many important things to do," (in an Irish accent). He then reached down and touched my big toe on my body and I was immediately sucked down that glowing "thread" and back into my body.

I woke coughing and began crying quietly. My entire personality changed after that. I became painfully shy. I couldn’t stand to be looked at or spoken to or even noticed, especially in public. I quit crying and screaming. I seldom talked at all. I began taking myself away on day dreams constantly. I hid and played by myself in the forest. I had no friends for years. I had had thoughts that religions were false before the event and after, I just knew they were. My previous sense of "knowing" things became stronger and over the years, it has become stronger still.  My mother never suffocated me after that (she found other ways to torture me), and my older sister never tattled on me ever again.

I have had 13 dreams (as an adult) wherein I experience the death and crossing over of other people. Some of them I have known and others I have never met. A few times I found reports of their deaths in the news or online. None of these dreams were pleasant.

The Irish man showed up again at one point several years ago when I was accidently poisoned and quit breathing several times. I was trying to walk towards a lake with a boat (I wanted to get into that boat), and he kept turning me around. I never lost consciousness but I saw him never-the-less. (I had accidently eaten a friend’s triple-strength marijuana gummies and I DON’T DO marijuana as I don’t react well to it.)