#floatworks

The door of the one man pod slowly closes, encasing me in darkness.

New age music wafts in from speakers on either side of my head, still discernible through the rubber plugs keeping the warm salt water out of my ears.

I wonder if back in the control room they have given me the wrong music. From the laminated selection of ten atmospheric tracks running from Rainforest to Crystal Healing I have selected Africa. I can hear none of the promised drums and chants however, just soothing synth washes and warbling. Have they pressed the Crystal Healing button instead?

The music seems to go on for a long time. Has there been a malfunction, will my entire 55 minute float will be soundtracked by music, rather than just the promised first ten minutes? Eventually it stops and there is, save for the occasional distant whir and clunk of salination machinery, silence.

By this time I still haven’t gotten used to the fact I am floating. When I first got into the attractively white and bulbous tank, when the lights were on and the water was blue, I laughed out loud at the sensation. Somehow I hadn’t believed it would quite work. A ratio of x to x salt to water is nothing to trifle with however, and I soon found myself suspended in the warm liquid, my face and the top of my hands the only parts of my body meeting the air.

On the whole, it’s a supremely relaxing feeling. As a first timer my mind has much to ponder, but even then a focus on my breath brings me back from stray thought patterns to the effortless present.

The sensation is fascinating. Presented with a complete absence of structure with which to conform itself against, my body is confused. There is no ground for my feet to take my weight and brace against the force of gravity, no flat surface to stretch out on and feel my head fall back and my shoulders spread.

There is only buoyancy: a gentle but insistent force pushing me upwards. How then do I choose how to lie when I have nothing to lie on?

Gradually I move my head backwards so that the water gently engulfs the top of my face. I realise my shoulders are hunched forward for no good reason, squeezing themselves in relation to some nonexistent force. I pull them back, loosen them. There is space here, space for infinite infinitesimal variations of posture.

The body can choose how it wants to be. It has freedom to lie in the most pleasurable way possible. This isn’t as easy to ascertain as you might think, however. Is this position releasing or restraining, is it good or could it be better?

Again, these thoughts, these questions bubble up and burst into consciousness like the waste gasses of an aquatic plant at the bottom of a pond. They come and go, but as the time passes they diminish.

The sensation now is like that of just being on the verge of falling asleep. Reveries, visions on the edge of consciousness that start to take on a life of their own, observing conversations between different parts of myself. A dream-like state.

Of course you can get this sort of thing by simply almost falling asleep, and that doesn’t cost any money. But the joy and interest of this is that generally you don’t fall asleep (some do of course) and instead remain in this hypnagogic dream world between waking and sleeping for an extended period.

This I believe is akin to the coveted theta state also present in meditation (though the undisciplined nature of my thoughts made it a different experience). The literature around the tanks suggests that the more you enter them, the quicker you learn to get to this state, and I can believe it.

All too soon Africa (or whatever it is) begins again, signalling that my time in the tank is up, and it is with great reluctance that I slowly reach across and press the button to raise the lid again. I feel like I have woken from a deep sleep, with the sense of relaxed well-being that comes with it.

I’m not sure how long I can linger here - the woman on the desk was very clear that when the music starts it’s time to get out - so I stand up and move to the shower to get rid of the salt covering my body.

Soon I am back in the reception area, with its groovy ambience. The whole branding of the place, with its white walls and typography and fish tanks, somehow reminds me of being in Amsterdam and seeing how psychoactive mushrooms are packaged there. It’s the same odd feeling of something uncontainable and somehow illict being mediated and presented as a consumer choice.

The few fellow floatees I see in reception look like stressed execs from the nearby office blocks, and I can well understand the lure of a moments uninterrupted peace amid a lifestyle of diet coke, board meetings and beers after work.

I can also see how this could be addictive. The way I fondly look back on my flotation tank experience a week or so after it happened and think about doing it again suggests it could turn into an expensive habit - though with probably fewer health risks than more common stress relievers.

There is admittedly something of returning to the womb in all this, but as the work of ‘sensory deprivation tank’ originator John Lilly suggests, this is not just the realm of the pre-personal but the transpersonal. It might be easier to contact higher intelligences in the tank when you’re on huge amounts of ketamine, as Lilly was want to be, but even the more prosaic problem solving and consciousness expansion are widely attested to.

As ever with this sort of lifestyle choice I wonder about how many times I will do it, what would happen to make me stop doing it, and whether its worth starting in the first place. But I have another voucher, so the decision is made: I am going again.

Further reading:

I first really heard about all this in John Lilly’s super intense autobiographical book the Centre of The Cyclone which combines drugs, systems of consciousness, the teachings of Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo and some entertaining slice of life anecdotes into a whirlwind read. Watch out for the hell realms and be prepared to consider if your consciousness is a crappy -20 or not so bad +10.