deathlike state

If cornered, an opossum may resort to its legendary talent for playing possum, an autonomic response, like fainting, in which the animal falls to its side with its mouth adrool, excretes droppings and a foul odor, and remains in a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours, until finally it revives beginning with a twitch of the ears.

University of California Anthropologist Michael J. Harner, corroborating Schonfield, said last week that wine made from the mandrake plant was used in Palestine to induce a deathlike state in persons who were being crucified.

How long I lay in that deathlike state I cannot tell.

Only the discovery which in Europe at once takes life and birth, and becomes a prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in a deathlike state.