![]() ![]() I couldn’t figure out how many minutes or hours I’d been in the tank, and that’s when I realized there was no panic button in here, and everything became a jumble of death-barf-panic-sepsis-what-is-sepsis thoughts. A voice from somewhere else in my brain started commenting on those thoughts, and judging me for not being able to stop thinking them, thereby forming more very loud thoughts. I started thinking about how many thoughts my brain was able to form in mere seconds. ![]() Was I going to die barfing? And is this what it would have felt like to be ON THE TITANIC ? They took her away to the infirmary, and we never saw her again. Now I was having a flashback to some girl at camp when I was 10: She’d gotten river water in her ears and for whatever reason it made her barf every day. ![]() My whisper guide had pointed out some vinegar that I was supposed to use to flush my ears in case saltwater got into them and I hadn’t asked what would happen if saltwater did remain in my ear. Then a little bead of saltwater rolled into my ear and I started to panic. I adjusted my leg, flooding another cut with saltwater, and suddenly all I could focus on was an intense burning spreading through my ankle as the saltwater entered the wound. I couldn’t hear anything save for my own breathing and the drip of the tank’s filter system. Lying in the darkness, I couldn’t see anything. I decided to turn off all the lights and enter full sensory-deprivation mode, which is when things started to go to hell. I felt like I was headed someplace spiritual, someplace deeper. My body floated around like a little buoy. Once I was situated - an inflatable neck pillow supporting my head, the water cradling my floating body like a warm-liquid Barcalounger - I tried to focus on my breathing and the LED stars. Initially, what I discovered was where exactly all my unhealed cuts were: Nothing like a thousand pounds of Epsom salt mixed into ten inches of water to remind you of that blister on the back of your foot. I wondered: What awaited me on the other side during my hour of floating? What would I discover when stripped of all sensory information? It looked like the door to a kiln, or a wood-fire oven. Naked, scrubbed clean, wounds lubed, facing the little white entryway that led to the Ocean Float Tank. The attendant whisper-instructed me to get naked, take a shower, put Vaseline on any open wounds, and prepare to float my way into samadhi.Īnd then I was alone. In practice, this meant something like a liquid-filled mausoleum - a small, enclosed watery space that was still reminiscent of a container for dead people. The rooms have six-foot-high ceilings adorned with twinkling LED constellations I’d be able to stand up fully. Ocean Float Rooms, the attendant whisper-boasted, were better for first-timers. My journey, I was whisper-told, would start in one of the spa’s “Ocean Float Rooms,” as opposed to the claustrophobia-inducing coffinlike pod that most people think of when they imagine a sensory-deprivation experience. The modern incarnation I encountered was a Zen-like space in Cobble Hill, where you must take off your shoes and everybody whisper-speaks peaceful things at you before you begin your journey. It was called “Samadhi” - Sanskrit for higher consciousness. Lilly developed the first consumer-friendly tank. The first commercial “float spa” opened in 1979 in Beverly Hills, California, a few years after the inventor Dr. I’m a fan of Brooklyn trends with New Age roots (see also: crystals, tarot), and before they floated off into relative obscurity, the benefits of sensory-deprivation tanks were widely lauded (“ Float the pounds away!” “Find God!” “Most people liked it!”) if not totally scientifically grounded. These all sounded like ringing endorsements to me. Most thanked the Universe for the life-changing hour - and the saltwater for softening their skin. Some people wrote that it was just better than taking a crapload of MDMA-spiked shrooms. The more colorful reports compared the experience to dying, being reborn, or dying and then being reborn multiple times in the hour. ![]() Some people said they’d hallucinated and had out-of-body experiences. So, as I waited in the Lift/Next Level lobby, I was curious to read the non-cartoon accounts written in the spa’s “guest book.” Some visitors described experiencing intense relaxation, a state that was almost sleep but not. Before I visited Brooklyn’s new Lift/Next Level “float spa,” my entire understanding of sensory-deprivation tanks was limited to an episode of The Simpsons: In “Make Room for Lisa,” Lisa Simpson floats in a coffin-size tub and hallucinates that she’s entered the body of her cat, Snowball. ![]()
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