I was about eleven when it happened.

I was excited to have my very own bedroom all to myself (earlier I had been sharing it with my sister). It was incredibly dark in there, though, and the only nightlight I had then was the light seeping into the room from the crack under the door. It worked well enough -- I was finally getting out of my phobia of the dark. But my paranormal experience almost made that fear worse.

One night, a week from that Thanksgiving, I woke up in my darkened room, leaning against the wall. I wasn't particularly shocked by my position -- there had been earlier instances where I had walked in my sleep -- rather, it was the fact that I was staring down at my unconscious body.

I freaked. The light was under the door, so I knew that my parents were still awake and just outside. Maybe, if I twisted the doorknob, the burning electric light would wake me up from this nightmare, tell me that seeing my body from a third point of view was just a figment of my admittedly vivid imagination. No such luck. My fingers couldn't grasp on the knob enough to actually turn it. It was like having a smartphone with a low-quality camera and trying to focus in on a far-away object.

That November night, I did everything I could possibly think of to wake up in myself. I screamed, I pounded on the door, heck, I tried walloping my head with a pillow -- everything an eleven-year-old could think of to escape an out-of-body experience.

That next morning, when nightmares seemed a thing of the past, I knew that that experience -- whatever it was -- was not just a dream. Maybe it was the unfiltered fear spiking through my veins, or maybe it was the pillows found haphazardly strewn through my room.

I haven't done much research into out-of-body experiences, but I believe that was what happened to me. So, in short, that was my first (and hopefully last) paranormal experience.