I was stark naked and alone in an unfamiliar and strange place. In the pitch black I could see nothing at all and at first could hear nothing but the faint hum of some distant mechanism, a sound that soon faded away.
I couldn’t see or feel the vessel imprisoning me, but I knew the walls were close on all sides. I was almost, but not quite, as confined as I would be in a burial chamber or an MRI machine.
I had been told to remain still, and I always try to follow the rules. To an external observer, my body would have looked about as vital as a drowning victim’s. My brain, on the other hand, was an invisible hive of activity, thoughts and ideas ricocheting wildly around its neural network. My deaf, dumb and blind mind sure plays a mean pinball.
Apparently, they call this relaxation.
I never planned to be here, suspended in a lidded basin full of Epsom-salt-laden water like a lonely bacterium in an agar-filled Petri dish. I was there because of a Christmas-present misfire, and to add insult to injury, it wasn’t even my gift.
My sister doesn’t care for holiday shopping, so she’d left it very late and was in a pickle.
‘What does your dad want for Christmas?’ she asked my daughter.
‘Nothing,’ my daughter said.
It’s true. My husband is possibly the least materialistic, least acquisitive man on the planet, consuming so little and leaving such a scant carbon footprint that said planet has no reason to suspect he’s even on it.
‘What does he need?’ my sister asked.
‘Sleep,’ my daughter replied.
This too is true. Capable of being jolted awake by the sound of an insect crawling across the ceiling, my husband has been underslept for the better part of four decades. Had he ever experienced the restorative powers of deep delta-wave sleep, he’d probably have developed an entirely different personality.
Whenever by some miracle he does manage to enter the REM stage, his long-neglected dreams seize upon him with such desperation and ferocity that it’s best to be elsewhere when they arrive. I’ve woken up in the morning with burst blood vessels in my eyes a few too many times for me to believe he hasn’t got anything to do with it, and he also specialises in preverbal, inchoate wailing that wouldn’t be out of place in the creepiest horror film. That’s bad enough, but I shouldn’t complain, because on the one occasion where did manage to form a recognisable word, it was ‘vagina.’ He said it about twenty times on a rapidly escalating scale from mutter to unhinged shriek - vagina, VAGINA, VAGINA!!!! - until I slapped him awake.
‘Yes,’ I said to my sister. ‘Something that helps him sleep would be good.’
We weren’t sure how my sister could give the gift of sleep. She’s too ethical a vet to pilfer animal tranquilisers from her practice, and he’s always refused to wear those sensory-deprivation sleep hoods that make a person look like a Guantanamo detainee or confirmed eccentric. We chewed on the problem for a while until my sister remembered how, during a particularly stressful period in her life, she’d conked out and had a fantastic nap in a weightless-flotation sensory deprivation tank.
We knew it wasn’t my husband’s thing, but we were at a loss. We reckoned he’d probably use the certificate - two floats for $99, I think it was, a holiday special - because he hates wasting money and doesn’t want anybody else doing it either. We hoped that he’d use his gift out of politeness and surprise himself by having a nice, relaxing kip in the pod, emerging a changed man - at least for the afternoon.
Besides, my sister fancied two minutes in the float centre over two miserable hours trawling an overcrowded shopping mall in search of a present for a man who has everything because he wants for nothing.
I went with her to the flotation centre, which was bathed in blue and purple light and decorated with Asian esoterica and statues of magic mushrooms. The packets of CBD gummies and books about psychedelic therapy for sale in reception seemed to say that although the staff might be precluded from saying so for legal reasons, hallucinogenic drugs were warmly recommended as an integral part of the optimal float experience.
I’ve always been afraid to take LSD or psilocybin. I’ve been tempted to microdose when grappling with writer’s block or a creative impasse, but usually my mind is too active all by itself. When it refuses to calm down at the end of the day, I numb it out with Netflix and podcasts. When I recall some of the dreams it’s cooked up for my delectation, I find it difficult to fathom that hallucinogenics could send me anything trippier. When I’ve been alternately tormented and stimulated my whole life by thoughts that speed and swerve between lanes like traffic on a multi-lane Autobahn at rush hour, it’s hard to think of anything worse than being alone with one’s pure consciousness for an hour and a half.
Better him than me, I thought, as we returned to the car park with the envelope in hand.
When Christmas Day came, we realised we’d underestimated the extent of my husband’s disinclination to float. He opened the envelope and withdrew the brochure, which depicted a bikini-clad model lying on her back in salt water, her luxuriant hair splayed mermaid-like around her. Looking surprised and mildly distressed, my husband thanked my sister profusely for her kindness - he’s not a Neanderthal, after all - but as soon as we had a private moment he began negotiations.
What he wanted more than anything for Christmas, it turns out, was for me to take one for the team and relieve him of his moral obligation to float.
Perhaps it was Scroogelike of me, but I initially refused. ‘Be open to having a new experience,’ I said. ‘What harm could it do? You can’t decide you don’t like it before you’ve done it.’
To my credit, I realised the hypocrisy of what I was saying a millisecond or two before he pointed it out to me. Unfortunately, my sister had given him two floats instead of one. The solution was as fair as it was inevitable.
As the new year dawned, we found ourselves outside the still-locked door of the flotation centre, the first customers of the day. So popular was this facility that it had been challenging to find two appointments at the same time. My husband, woken from his dry bed so that he could get some sleep in a wet coffin, was grumpy. Deeply apprehensive about the quality time I was about to spend with my hyperactive brain, I was doing everything I could to feel more relaxed about relaxation. In a who-can-look-more-miserable contest, we would have been neck and neck.
Just as we were about to bottle out and return to the car, the door opened and we were ushered in.
My husband said he wasn’t fussed, so I chose the bigger and curvier flotation pod, leaving him to the smaller, more angular compartment. We said goodbye to one another and closed the doors to our respective rooms. The preparation felt like readying myself for a religious rite, or perhaps some kind of surgery. I showered off any excess oils from my body. I plugged my ears with knobs of silicone. I daubed petroleum jelly on scratches my kitten had left on my thigh, lest the salt water sting them and interfere with my bliss. I didn’t want to soak my nice swimsuit in salt water for 90 minutes, so I slid into this eerily glowing egg as naked as the day I was born.
The hatch hissed closed and the light snapped off, encasing me in darkness. I eased myself backwards, and the peculiar buoyancy of the water bore me up. Realising there was really no effort required to stay afloat, I arranged my arms into the cactus position I adopt for cool-down after a Pilates class and promptly began assessing just how likely I thought it was that I would lose my mind in here.
Here I am, engaged in an act of altruism, I thought resentfully. I’m only here to encourage him to have a new experience, and he only ever thinks about one thing at a time. He doesn’t watch films on transatlantic flights because he can shut his eyes and power down like some Star Wars android. He can attain a state of no thought as easily as a Nepalese monk with meditation skills honed through decades in some mountaintop temple. He’s going to be fine. It’s me who’s going to suffer. I’ll go insane.
At least, I reflected, such a strange martyrdom would be a kind of gift to my descendants: an interesting tale to delight future generations, sparing them the ignominy of having boring ancestors. Your great-grandmother was never the same after she came out. She was perfectly normal when she went into the tank, but it turned her into a raving lunatic. She spent the rest of her life locked in an asylum.
I have a good friend who recently returned from a Vipassana meditation retreat. He was prohibited from speaking the whole time, save for brief duty-of-care morning check-ins with a staff member. On a couple of occasions, being British, he reflexively apologised for something. Other than this handful of exceptions, he was utterly silent for ten days. He said it was both the best and worst thing he’d ever done and that he almost left three times, but in the end he was brave and dedicated and stuck it out.
I thought of him when, about ten minutes into my relaxation experience - though who could tell, time meant nothing in there - I started to think, screw this. If my friend could power courageously through a week and a half of silence, the idea that I couldn’t hack ninety minutes in a largely stimulus-free space seemed ridiculous, and I was embarrassed to show such weakness. So, like so many other things in life, it was shame that kept me stuck in there.
I say it was largely stimulus-free, because this was relative nothingness, not nothingness proper. When I went into the pod, I was hoping I might have some hallucinations. The brochure said it could happen in those conditions. For me, a risk-averse person who’s never accumulated any amusing, youthful-folly drug stories with which to regale my friends, could I experience an episode of drug-free sensory wackiness to tell folks about? Knowing me, I rather expected my mind would indeed be so desperate for entertainment that it would project something into the blackness. Nothing scary, just something mild, like Northern-Lights-esque smeary colour; some fleeting wiggly amoeba shapes; a starburst or two.
But no, there was only dark. The temperature and consistency of the fluid surrounding me were such that I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the water began. It was dead quiet, peaceful, perfectly warm.
It was awful.
If my friend hadn’t told me about his Vipassana I would have been out of there, would have met my husband in the lounge when he emerged and pretended I’d just arrived myself. But I persisted, and while I did so, my mind strafed me cruelly and relentlessly with scattershot, arbitrary recollections of the past, anxieties about the future, and observations about my present terrible circumstances. But I can identify the point at which things slowed down, when my perceptions began to change.
Something strange on my upper back made itself known, and the full beam of my attention suddenly swung onto this sensation with intense curiosity. The thing was minuscule, smaller than the head of a pin. I wiggled slightly, and to my surprise this feeling or object began to slowly travel along, rolling along my back. I realised that a tiny bubble was making stately and determined progress along my immersed skin towards the surface of the water.
Marvin, my mind said, acknowledging the bubble with something like recognition, which oddly, did not seem odd. Marvin the bubble.
Shortly thereafter, something happened to my breath, or at least to my cognisance of it. From the moment I’d entered the pod, I’d been attending closely to my breath in hopes of warding off panic. Square breathing, I’d said to myself, and again and again, I’d counted through the steps. Four counts, in through the nose. Four counts, hold it. Eight counts, out slowly through the mouth. But shortly after Marvin arrived on the scene and attracted my attention, my breathing became preternaturally loud. Like a regular, relentless surf my inhalations and exhalations roared in and out, filling my ears in a way that was totalising but not overwhelming.
It was as though I had the ocean in my head, and then it was as though I was the ocean.
Neither before nor after did I read any of the mystic, psychedelic books that sat on the coffee table in the lounge or on the shelves in reception, although I did see some Technicolour illustrations and cryptic notes in the visitor guest book. Just now, though, I went to Google and typed ‘sensation of being at one with the universe what is it called.’
At the top of the search results was the Wikipedia entry for something called ‘oceanic feeling.’
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase ‘oceanic feeling’ to refer to ‘a sensation of eternity,’ a feeling of ‘being one with the external world as a whole,’ inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.
I don’t know why I typed what I did into the search engine, because while I was in the pod I wasn’t thinking, I am having a sensation of being at one with the universe. Logically, I should have put ‘hearing breath like the ocean when in flotation tank.’ It’s strange that I didn’t enter anything about ocean sounds in the search engine but that I was looped back there anyway. Oceanic feeling. I’d never heard the phrase before.
Nothing special happened immediately after my float, after my oceanic feeling. I survived - we both did. I reunited with my husband in the lounge, where hot herbal tea was complimentary but you had to pay for home-brewed kombucha. I asked if he’d slept, he asked if I’d panicked, and the answer to both questions was no. We didn’t drown, and we didn’t lose our minds, and we went home and told people it was different but nothing special.
But maybe I had an accidental mystical experience in the floatation tank, without looking for one and without so much as a CBD gummy to help me on my way. And thinking about it, maybe 90 minutes of sensory deprivation, my connection with Marvin the bubble, and a quarter of an hour suffused with an oceanic feeling flipped some kind of switch in me. Since that day, hand on heart, I’ve been more creatively inspired and productive than at any time in the previous five years.
Is that a coincidence? Probably. But what if it isn’t? What if, especially in these days of overstimulation, sensory deprivation isn’t deprivation at all, but instead a fuller and richer gift than we imagine it could be?
Timothy Leary, with a little help from the great philosopher of media Marshall McLuhan, coined the slogan turn on, tune in, drop out. I’d never looked into what this really meant but assumed it was merely a hippie synonym for ‘get really stoned and lie around doing nothing for society.’
But in his autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary explained that although it was often mistaken to mean exactly this, the true intentions behind the phrase were more profound.
‘Turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. ‘Drop out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.
I’m still reluctant to stick a tab on my tongue or ingest a magic mushroom, but I have to admit that this vocabulary makes sense to me as a creative, as a psychologist. These are aims and values I share, things I want. And something about my experience in the tank, even though it had been the last thing I wanted to do, got me closer to some of that.
I’ve booked another float this coming weekend. Once again, the hatch will slowly close between me and the outside world, with all its strident, incessant stimuli. Once again, with flotation as my only aid, I will turn on, tune in, and drop out.