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Anabiosis-The Journal for Near-Death Studies
stress, not on drugs or alcohol, and without any of the characteristics
associated with high anxiety or arousal states. The subjects, however,
had a seemingly random distribution of physical causes for their near-
death experience, such as childbirth, illness, accident, etc. None were
pyrexic. What is characteristic is their calm and relaxed responses to
the experience, in spite of physical circumstances that would normally
be accompanied by considerable distress.
2. Emotional-Stress Cluster. The six subjects in this cluster all
described themselves as under emotional stress. None were calm,
relaxed, or meditating. They were not under the influence of alcohol
or drugs during the experience. Once more, other physical precondi-
tions, childbirth, accident, etc. were seemingly randomly distributed.
3. Intoxicant Cluster. This group of four subjects all experienced
severe emotional stress without any reports of meditating, being
relaxed, or feeling calm. Narcotic drugs and/or alcohol were used in
all cases at the time of the NDE.
4. Cardiac-Arrest Cluster. The four subjects in this group all experi-
enced cardiac arrest. Accompanying the arrest, subjects reported a
primarily meditative state of mind, not necessarily described as relaxed
or calm and associated with dream-like images, especially flying and
falling dreams implying a sense of movement within the experience.
5. Anesthetic Cluster. The three subjects in this cluster all experi-
enced a general anesthetic. They described most striking distortions
in levels of arousal. Specifically they were under considerable emotion-
al stress, fatigued, but at the same time, paradoxically felt relaxed
and calm. The whole experience was dream-like in quality.
In an attempt to ascertain the explanatory value of these clusters,
one-way analysis of variance followed by Newman-Keuls individual
mean comparisons were performed for a number of key variables.
Key variables chosen were: age at the time of reporting the experi-
ence, age at the time of the first out-of-body experience, Absorption
score (Tellegan and Atkinson, 1974), Danger-Seeking score (Tellegan
and Atkinson, 1974), Psychoticism score (Eysenck and Eysenck,
1968), Hysterical Tendency score (Caine, 1972), and Death Anxiety
score (Dickstein, 1972). There were no significant differences among
the clusters for age, danger-seeking, psychoticism, hysterical tenden-
cies, death anxiety, or absorption. There were significant differences
for age of first out-of-body experience between the "low stress"
cluster (mean age, 29.9 years) and the cardiac arrest cluster (mean
age, 10 years) (F = 2.956, df = -, 32, p <.05).
In our previous publication (Gabbard, Twemlow, and Jones, 1981)
we made a comparison between subjects who had had a near-death
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