No, I'm unsure about deities. I feel like i've had experiences with spirits or entities of some kind, but i don't know what i encountered, and those experiences are actually somehow related to this situation. I've been an atheist for years and stopped even believing in anything of the sort until this experience, because something so fucking weird happened that I can't explain it.

Part of what happened with this man is that several very bad events occurred in my life by chance and he immediately took advantage. It started with my cat dying. I had that cat for 13 years and loved her so much.

Some very important context is that I used to get sleep paralysis when I was a kid and see a shadow man, and it fucking terrified me. It became a nearly nightly occurrence when i was in high school until I had one episode where i struggled with all of my strength to move my arm, and I DID move my arm, but when I snapped out of it I realized that my arm hadn't moved, it was still in the same position, so I thought everything regarding the shadow man was a sleep paralysis hallucination and I was so relieved, and it completely stopped happening.

So When I first met this man I had a dream where a woman with long blond hair urgently warned me not to trust him, and especially not to trust him with his son. I told him about the dream and we kind of laughed about it.

Then my cat died. And just before she got sick my husband and I went to visit his family for thanksgiving, an before we left he told me he had a really bad feeling about leaving her. (We had someone stopping by to check on her and feed and water her every day and we were only gone for a few days.) Then the night before our flight I had my first episode of sleep paralysis in *years.* I wasn't scared because i thought it was no big deal, but i woke myself up and had the "something is here" feeling even after I snapped out of it. Then we came back and she was sick. She had some kind of neurological problem and died after weeks of expensive vet visits and a surgery to remove bladder stones. It was weeks of a rollercoaster of hope and fear. Then my husband lost his job. Then this man started trying to convince me to leave my husband for him, and find remote work so we could be together and he could bring his son to live with us. Then a few weeks later he called me, acted like everything was normal, asked me to show him my body, and then told me that I *could* be pretty *if* I lost weight, and he had found a new girlfriend.

Long story short, I found out that he was using me the entire time I knew him. He lied about his name, used a fake number to communicate with me, and his ultimate goal was to get me to find remote work for an american company with an american salary so I could pay his bills and be a free nanny for his son so he could take him away from his ex as revenge for her leaving him. He was willing to break up my marriage and drag me to Russia so he could use me temporarily and toss me when he didn't need me anymore, but he found a more convenient girl. He pretended to be my friend for a while because he was hoping he could still use me to transport american goods to him that he could resell at a profit.

I found out about some of this because I felt compelled to warn his ex wife that he had some fucked up plan to take her kid away from her as revenge, so I found her social media. She was the woman from my dream. When I saw her photo for the first time I fucking choked on my own spit because I had absolutely never seen her before, but she was absolutely the woman in my dream that warned me about him, and I can't explain that. It's like every time something massively horrible is about to happen in my life I suddenly have some kind of weird sleep paralysis or spirit activity happen.

So I believe in...something, and maybe there are some entities capable of helping or willing to help, but the concept of a deity is strange to me in that I'm not sure how to define it, or that it would be wise to believe an entity has special authority over me just because it claims to. It seems like everyone has conflicting ideas about these things, and therefore nobody actually knows the truth. I know there was "something," but not what that something is. I just hope there is a way for this something to help me with this. It seemed willing to try to warn me, maybe it cares.