This study examined the dreams of eight individuals admitted to the Palliative Care Unit of the Elisabeth Bruyere Health Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Content analysis of the dream reports in this sample supports the hypothesis that a continuity exists between dreaming and waking experience [1]. Results do not indicate that themes of death and aggression, negative emotion, or infant and child...
This article briefly describes the phenomenological reports of individuals who have survived a near-death experience (NDE) and summarizes the methodological problems of assessing and defining their experience, specifically the out-of-the-body (OBE) experience associated with an NDE. The authors, using a single-person research design, offer one approach to quantifying the OBE associated with an...
As a result of serious accidents and illnesses many persons undergo death-rebirth experiences. The changes in attitudes, personality, and beliefs that sometimes follow these experiences reflect rebirth and reveal a fundamental human strategy for coping with the threat of death. Many persons report that this threat is replaced by a sense of aliveness and a belief in life after death. These...
Interviews with thirty-six persons who had been close to death as a result of a suicide attempt were conducted to determine whether such persons report Moody-type near-death experiences. Seventeen persons, or 47 per cent of the sample, related such experiences which were more common for men than women (p <.05). Although suicide-related near-death experiences do not appear different from...
Thirty cancer patients suffering from psychological distress participated in a pilot project of individual psychotherapy that offered – over a four week period of time – approximately twelve hours of conventional verbal interaction and a single intensive drug-assisted therapy session that employed dipropyltryptamine (DPT), a short-acting psychedelic drug. The efficacy of the total therapeutic...
A factor analysis of questionnaire responses from 189 victims of life-threatening accidents yielded three factors of subjective effects. These factors, which included depersonalization, hyperalertness and mystical consciousness, appeared meaningful in terms of the endangered personality's effort to cope with a threat to life. Perception of a serious threat, loss of consciousness, and rescue...
Depersonalization is a frequent reaction to life-threatening danger. As an adaptive pattern of the nervous system it alerts the organism to its threatening environment while holding potentially disorganizing emotion in check. As a psychological mechanism it defends the endangered personality against the threat of death and, at the same time, initiates an integration of that reality. And, as a...