"I'm not sure how long this beating lasted — perhaps an hour, perhaps only 20 minutes. Toward the end..."

"... I heard the leader approach and braced myself for another blow. It didn’t come. Instead, he knelt close to me and whispered in my ear: 'I hate Americans. All of them. I hate you all.' After this, I lost track of time. I dreamed that the fighters were rolling my body in a winding sheet and lashing my ankles together with golden straw. In the days after this dream, I thought, I have seen the winding sheet, so I must be quite far along in the killing process. But every time I asked myself if I was alive or dead, the answer came back, You are most certainly alive. I thought, The custom must be to wrap the corpses in the winding sheets before they are entirely dead. How peculiar. I didn’t know."

From "My Captivity/Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria" (in the NYT).