He remembers walking towards the worst experience of his life. The dorm hall was a concrete tunnel, with chipped white paint on the walls and a stench of sweat trapped inside. The stairs, he recalls, squeaked underfoot. They led to a wooden door, which Andrew Pledger prized open.
He stepped inside, sunk into a peeling black couch and locked eyes with the man sitting across the desk.
And then something happened.
“Everything around me just faded away,” Pledger says. He floated out of his body. “I almost couldn’t hear him anymore … time just completely slowed down.”
The next thing he remembers is leaving the office, a pounding pain in his chest. An hour had passed. Whatever happened in that room had shaken Pledger, then a tormented, depressed student at a private evangelical university in South Carolina. A voice filled his head, telling him: “You cannot do this. This is unhealthy. This is not good.”
