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compares with similar findings by Crookall,28 who found four out of his five subjects normal and well. He attempted to classify OBEs based on those occurring under stress (physical or mental) and those occurring under nonstressful conditions. Comparing these findings with those of Green,15 those who had one OBE only were characteristically people under some identifiable stress prior to the experience, especially physical trauma. In our sample, an analysis of the top and bottom 25% for frequency of OBEs utilizing univariate independent group t-tests failed to find any precondition reaching the level of p < .01. The bottom 25% of the sample reported more spontaneous OBEs, that is, those occurring without effort to leave the body, significantly more frequently than the top 25%(df = 62, p < .01). A small but intensive study of 10 subjects* reports that states of mental calm were mentioned 20 times more frequently in subjects with multiple OBEs. Single OBE subjects reported psychological stress only three times in the sample. Most of the pundits of parapsychological literature recommend a physically relaxed state10,22 from their own personal experiences. OBE occurring during dreaming is distinguished emphatically by subjects as being “more real than a dream” in the majority of cases. Flying and falling dreams, quite common in childhood, comprise a majority of the dreams occurring at the time the OBE is noted. It was of interest to us the certitude with which the subjects emphasize that they knew the difference between a dream state and an OBE state. Subjects who were in a state of mental calmness at the time of the OBE tended to have a significantly greater proportion of meditators (df = 178, p < .0001) than those who were not in such a state of mental calmness; otherwise no other preconditions significantly separated this group. Subsequent multivariate analyses of this data will be conducted to determine any cluster emerging from the preconditions listed. Life-threatening experiences as described by Stevenson and Greyson29 have given rise to a prevalent opinion in the literature that OBEs are frequently associated with severe illness, threat to life, either internal (psychotic) or external (physical). Can such near-death experiences be separately characterized from out-of-body experiences? Another study will summarize this in more detail.† However, certain characteristics of the out-of-body experience itself allow a discrimination between nonstress OBE and those that occur while under stress (emotional and that posed by imminent death). A Chi† test of associations showed that the following experiences are more common in combined subjects (near death and under emotional stress): (1) experience of going through a dark