A Personal Religious Experience: God versus Me

In the early 1990s I had an experience that I haven’t told many people about.

I woke alone in the middle of the night and immediately felt a presence in the room. My heart was racing, my stomach churning, and I had those uncontrollable waves of goosebumps surging down my body that you only get with something awe inspiring. I expected it to subside but instead it worsened, and I became intimately aware that the presence was God and he was speaking to me. It wasn’t talking, but direct communication, and he was giving me a chance to accept his existence or die there and then. I was terrified, and my heart started racing more and more and I realized I might die of a heart attack. I was completely overwhelmed with the idea that this was a stark challenge to professed reason that I could only pass at the expense of my life, and my heart was bursting, and I seemed to be struggling for ages to regain rational control with no success, and …

Well eventually I calmed down and lived to tell the tale. This is a true account of my subjective experience.

Obviously, I had suffered a delusional episode, likely brought on by waking from a nightmare, but powerful enough to have remained with me for twenty-five years.

But the real point of the story is that an experience like that would no doubt be interpreted differently by someone with any inclination towards religious gibberish. They would take it as proof of God’s existence. No doubt some will argue that it really was God, despite the glaringly obvious: I didn’t die of a heart attack.

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