I tried it
Womb Without a View
Looking for some alone time? Try a sensory deprivation tank. By Gillian Kendall
It was a typical weekend evening, and my partner and I were companionably complaining about bills: the mortgage, the damn insurance on everything, the vet expenses for our four aging animals. I told her, “I get tired of being a grownup.” Sometimes I want to be a kid again, with
someone else to not only pay the rent but also clothe and feed me, take me out for fun
and then, when I’ve had enough, take me home and put me to bed. I want to sleep in
a place both warm and dark, preferably a waterbed heated to body temperature—as
womblike as possible. I get that womb-y escape from isolation tanks. Also called float tanks and sensory depravation tanks, they are large, waterproof, soundproof boxe in which the user floats on a bed of water thick with Epsom salts, basking in dark, warm, private silence. I
first floated when I lived in downtown San Diego, a city so sunny and lively that it frayed my nerves. For relaxation, and out of curiosity, I took the plunge into isolation. It’s a little like death. After I had a calming drink of herbal tea in the anteroom, a soft-spoken receptionist led me to the changing room to get ready for my soak. There I stood alone in a large, dark bathroom
with piped-in, ultra-soft New Age music, getting ready to face infinity—for an hour, at least.
I shed my clothes, put in earplugs and applied Vaseline to any little cuts or scrapes on my
body, so the salt wouldn’t sting and interfere with my bliss. Then I opened the lid of a coffinlike box and peered inside. Strewn with Epsom salts, the water smelled like the ocean and looked like molten glass. Stepping in, I felt nothing at all—the water was exactly my body temperature—and once I leaned back, floating was inevitable. Well supported, I sank only slightly, my knees and breasts staying above the surface. With my face well above the waterline, I breathed in the steamy, salty air with gratitude. I couldn’t go under if I tried, and no one was going to
bother me for a long time. I took several minutes to close the top of the box, because
I knew that once the lid came down, it was going to be utterly dark and a little weird. (Claustrophobes, take note: There’s no lock on the lid and you can open it with a touch at any time.) But once I shut out the light, I wasn’t afraid of the dark so much as fascinated by the noise and color inside my own mind. What came to me was a slow, gradual peace, like going into a dreamless sleep. The day’s worries and my recent emotional upheavals melted away, leaving
me feeling safe and protected. In my timeout from life, I was free to think things through, to meditate or pray or do nothing at all. Also, I saw a light—not enough to interfere with my relaxation, but a sure, small beam of white, like a star, coming from the far end of the tank. I thought there must be a pinprick opening in the seal of the lid. Later on, when soft music wafted into the tank to suggest that my soak was over, I dressed and was reborn to the world of light and sound. As I drank a second cup of chamomile, I told the receptionist
about the light leak. “Oh, really?” he said. “I doubt it, but I’m always looking for an excuse to soak. I’ll go check it out.” Ten minutes later he came back grinning, drying his hair. “There’s no leak,” he said. “We get sent in there all the time to look for lights—red, gold, white—people
see all kinds of things. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t coming from outside.”
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