"Do you guys know the whole theory about how when people die in one time line, they shift into another? I think that may have happened to me.

Back in early July of this year, my family (M45, F54, Me:19, B16), S(13) were going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going. I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all, and I never have anxiety about road trips: I love them!!

So we left Saturday of that week, I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious, but I had never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my death sentence. So we get about 6 hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where s@#t gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole 4 or so minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift. This was the scary part because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me. And then it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was, but it felt like something imperceptible had changed.

I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes, and when I reached back to remember; I saw blood, our car and another minivan in shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies. I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe. But this never happened? Yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.

I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this. And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. And it’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation, and I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had died in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain. And I fully accept that I might be reading to much into this, and for some reason, I imagined an event that never happened, but I thought I would share anyway."