In “All That’s Unseen, An Appalachian Memoir” by Emilee Hackney, she has an out-of-body experience in which “The Holy Spirit” tells her to marry her boyfriend

“My Bible was open on my bed. I’d been reading in Psalms when I was overwhelmed by a sudden heaviness. The Holy Spirit was in the room. It commanded me to stand and pray” (1, p. 95).

“I didn’t have words as much as a willingness to receive. Speak to me, Father, I thought, arms stretched toward the ceiling in supplication.”

“A whisper of urgency tugged at my heart, telling me to close and reopen my Bible. I moved quickly, letting the book fall open.”

“Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, chapter 19. My eyes landed on verse 5 near the top of the page. So a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

“For a moment nothing happened, and then I was being sucked out of myself, a thousand miles from my room and body. There was a desert. The sand was as black as coal, and the ground parched, shattered like broken glass.”

“Suddenly the jagged cracks glowed orange, then red. Magma was rising just beneath the surface of the earth. I waited for it to spill over. Instead, the broken pieces of ground began to converge. The cracks were filled and fused by the red-hot liquid. The magma cooled. The black earth was healed, solid and perfectly smooth.”

“When I returned to my body, I was on my knees beside the bed, breathless and overwhelmed. I pulled myself up and reached for my Bible, which was still open to Matthew. I read verse 5 again.”

“Warm and calm, awash in the Spirit, I knew with that powerful, inexplicable knowing what God was trying to tell me.”

“He wanted me to marry Sam.”

I’d never had a vision before, at least not like that…I had never been carried away from my body…or seen something as clearly as if I’d been watching a movie screen” (1, pp. 95-96).

Comment: The above has the structure of a conversation between alternate personalities in dissociative identity (formerly called “multiple personality).”

1. Emilee Hackney. All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir. New York, Penguin Press, 2026.