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I floated in the REST Lab sensory deprivation tank yesterday. It was a truly amazing experience and I consider myself to be very lucky to have been able to take part. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tank (or who haven’t seen Altered States), a sensory deprivation tank is a 7 foot by 4 foot enclosed capsule that is full of water that has been saturated with epsom salt. Basically, you float on top of the water in total darkness, while the environment is kept at a very humid 98 degrees. Due to the fact that your ears usually sink below the water, all you can hear is your heart beating. The womb-like nature of the tank is very relaxing; however, what’s more exciting are the radically altered perceptions of space and the visual hallucinations.

Most of the time in the tank, I was just relaxing and enjoying the total quiet and comfort of being quasi-weightless (I’ve since read that drinking coffee before a tank float can mess up your ability to have more far-out experiences, so I’ll try that next time). I didn’t really start to relax until the end of the float, and that’s when things got really cool. Due to it being completely dark, you lose track of your surroundings but in really unusual ways. Despite “knowing” that I was in a 7 by 4 chamber, the tank felt at least three to four times that size (sometimes, it felt rather infinite). At one point, I decided to test this, so I put my feet on one wall of the tank and my hands on the opposite. Rather than reaching the conclusion that “ah ha! the tank is shorter than my body,” I started to experience my body elongating and stretching (in a pleasantly weird way) to meet what my brain was telling me must have been the dimensions of the tank.

Later on, I started having mild visual hallucinations. Everything I saw was in black and white and very shadowy and gauzy. I never specifically saw people in all the detail you would usually associate with seeing someone; it was more a silhouette, but I still knew who they were. Other than a few people, mostly things were very geometric (a lot of starburst imagery, vibrating concentric circles, and contracting and expanding organic tissues). Actually, the experience looked like a black and white version of Dog Star Man. I also remember, at one point, watching a mushroom cloud morph into a tree. There was also a moment were I felt a crowd of shadowy people running past me. I realize that a lot of this sounds “crazy,” but it was really cool. It was also weird when I noticed that the usual visual noise one sees when one closes one’s eyes start becoming a lot more organized and purposeful. The whole experience was more subtle than I expected.

All in all, it was a really great time. While I’ve focused on the “weird” elements in this post, the thing I came away with from my tank float was a sense of real peace. I was more relaxed after getting out of the tank than I have been in years. Music sounded better (which was a really pleasant side-effect). Honestly, I’m still feeling relaxed from it and, given the week I’m having, I am really glad I got to float. Without that period of relaxation, I’m not sure I would be as equipped to get through things in an even marginally healthy fashion. However, that’s beside the point.

I’m hoping to be able to float again, soon, as I have some things I’d like to try. I’m going to skip the coffee next time, as I said. Also, I noticed that one thing I really enjoyed while in the tank was splashing my fingers and toes in the water and listening to the sound it made. They have a speaker system wired up in the tank, so I may try to pipe in rain sounds or some other natural water sounds the next time I float, to see what happens (another person I’ve talked to about floating mentioned that Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven is really interesting float music). Apparently, the relationship between sound and tank experiences is something of interest to a number of the tank-affiliated researchers, so we’ll see what happens.

Image Credit: 3 February 2007: Flotation, not Flirtation by .