I was considering suicide at the time. I'd been deeply depressed for years. The only thing that was keeping me from following through was fear of losing my eternal salvation in the afterlife as a result (committing the unpardonable sin). I fell asleep and this is the dream I had...

I was laying in the grass in my parents' backyard at night, looking up at the stars. I remember thinking they looked brighter than usual. Suddenly the pine trees all around me started to stretch upward, and I realized I was being pulled up into a vortex. 

Suddenly I was in outer space, suspended outside of a huge, burning ball of light (which I assume was a star). I could hear it burning softly in the background, like a natural gas space heater. I looked down and realized my body was gone... I was just a small, bright orb of light. I felt naked, exposed. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so.

As I looked around, I realized I was only one of thousands of other little spheres of light just like me. And I knew them, like I know myself. Not their names or their stories, but who they were at the core of their being. We were all thinking the same thing without even trying. If our hearts had been beating, they would have been beating in unison. I've never felt an intimacy like that before or since. We were all waiting for something, but we didn't know what. 

I could see earth far off in the distance, and tiny little people hurrying around, doing tiny little things. Time seemed to move much faster than normal. And it struck me how silly it was, that they were all so worried about such tiny little things! It all seemed so meaningless from up here. 

At the end, I knew I had to go back, but I didn't want to. I started falling back toward earth, faster and faster. Back down through the atmosphere, back down through the clouds... I looked down and could see my limp body lying right where I'd left it in the grass in my parent's backyard. When I hit my body, I woke up in my bed. 

It was hard to move when I woke up, like I had to remember how. Breathing took work. It felt heavy. I remember thinking, if all those souls up there are watching me right now... I can do 70 more years down here. 70 years will go by in a heartbeat. 70 years is nothing. I didn't want to disappoint them. 

Several different scriptures from the Bible came to mind when I woke up... Seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2:6); waiting for the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:23); I [Christ] have not lost any You have given me (John 18:9). I realized it's impossible for any of God's children to lose their salvation because... we've been up there with Him the whole time. I believe we're actually up there right now, watching our lives (and everyone else's) play out on earth, like the backstory to our eternal destinies. It's not like God chooses some people and not others... He already KNOWS who belongs to Him. And He searches through time and space and ensures every single one of their destinies with Him is fulfilled. From our perspective looking forward, we choose Him... but from His perspective looking backward, He always chose us. 

Prior to having that experience, I never believed in psychic abilities. But since then, I've started having experiences where I dream in other people's bodies. I look in the mirror, it's not me. I feel my face, it's not mine. I can't control what happens in these dreams, it's like living someone else's memories. Sometimes the dreams are physically painful. I hear and see other languages I don't recognize. The first time it ever happened, I dreamed about a girl at night while she was dying. When I opened facebook the next morning, the first thing in my newsfeed was her face.  One of the more recent ones was of a Jewish family in the holocaust. During the dream, I kept thinking "cells have memory." I took a DNA test; turns out I'm 1.1% Ashkenazi. No one in our family knew we had any Jewish heritage.

I've tried to share these experiences with my family, but they aren't sure how they fit inside a Christian worldview. I'm not either, to be honest. My experiences have created distance between us. I've learned not to talk about them. To me, the only explanation that makes sense is if souls can become entangled like quantum particles. Perhaps I'm remembering the core memories of the other souls I recognized so intimately in my initial out of body experience in outer space six years ago.