When I invited my friend Sarah to join me in trying sensory deprivation tanks, as invented in 1954 by a so-called “consciousness researcher” named John C. Lilly, I saw a flash of understanding on her big-eyed face. She pulled up, on her phone, a vintage movie poster with the words: UNWITTINGLY, HE TRAINED A DOLPHIN TO KILL THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”
“This film,” she said. “It’s based on John C. Lilly.”
“We’re going to float in tanks that were invented by a guy who trained dolphin assassins?”
The film took some creative license,* Sarah assured me. But the short answer was yes.
The so-called Float Spa’s website didn’t acknowledge this connection at all, just promised stress relief and mental clarity, although it did credit John C. Lilly—not for his dolphin training, which came later, but for his research on consciousness, which sensory deprivation tanks are designed to explore. The concept, which trended big in the 1980s and has lingered in the cultural ether ever since, involves floating naked in a pitch-black room, suspended in saltwater that’s the same temperature as the air, which is the same temperature as your skin, so it feels like you’re levitating. No sound, no touch, no vision for an hour straight. What’s it like to exist as just a body, just thoughts?
Basically, a float tank is forced meditation—and there’s plenty of evidence that that’s helpful with about a million things, from reducing stress and anxiety to offsetting cognitive decline. But is it worth $90 an hour to be forced to meditate? And is meditation even something that can be imposed from the outside in? I was skeptical, mainly because last month I tried cryotherapy, which involved standing for three minutes in a -200 degrees Fahrenheit freezer, and the owner of that spa—which literally specializes in discomfort!—told me she doesn’t offer float tanks because everyone hates them. “You’re in water, in the dark,” she told me. “Just think about it.”
Put it that way, and sensory deprivation sounded like a panic attack waiting to happen.
Anyway, Sarah and I got to the Float Spa in an Illinois strip mall almost late, because we’d stopped for McDonald’s on the way, figuring that the only thing worse than floating in darkness was floating in darkness hungry. The walls of the lobby were covered, weirdly, in plastic grass, apart from a bulletin board with post-its from clients that said things like “Let it BE to let it GO” and “Do ayahuasca. You won’t regret it.” By the ceiling, a television screen played footage of a river in Yosemite. At least I think it was Yosemite, based on the granite boulders around. I wished I were floating there, I thought, watching the screen. Somewhere important, and much more spectacular than this.
The owner gave us a brief tour—here’s where you shower, here’s earplugs, here’s vaseline, and a Q-tip to cover open wounds—and then directed me and Sarah to separate changing rooms. The air was thick, humid—like a pool locker room, but without the chlorine and BO. I showered, inserted the earplugs, and stepped into a private enamel-lined tank, which was about eight feet square with a foot of warm water at the bottom. The floor was intensely slippery; I dropped to my hands and knees. One hard push would have sent me sliding air-hockey style across the room.
Somewhere nearby, through the wall, Sarah was entering her tank, too. I wondered how she was feeling. It occurred to me, in the blue glow of a hidden light, that this was exactly the kind of bizarre situation in which one might have the idea to make dolphins into political assassins. Then I hit a button on the wall, plunging into blackness, and tried to float away.
It’s hard to relax every single bit of your body. Without the pressure of a surface below me, I kept finding micro-muscles that were tense, parts of my ankles or shoulders or butt. When I moved, the water lapped, little tongues all over my skin. When I melted still and took deep breaths, my whole body rose with each inhale.
Noticing this took some medium amount of time. If time existed. Which it didn’t, really. Not here.
Why did I think this was sensory deprivation? There was so much to observe in my head, my breath. I slipped into waking dreams, scenes drifting before and around me that dissolved like mist when I tried to think enough to describe them with words. I felt loved ones, gratitude, beauty, grace. I was simultaneously asleep and alert.
I developed, in the dark, a kind of entitlement to sensationlessness. At one point, I felt genuinely affronted when the edge of my pinky brushed gently on the wall. And when the hour was up, some expanse of existence later, and an instrumental version of It’s a Wonderful Life drifted from an unseen speaker, it seemed a great intrusion on my mind, which was now my home. Or maybe it had been my home the whole time, and this sound—this sensation—was an unwanted stranger at my door.
The dressing room had flattering lighting. I found Sarah on the other side, sipping a paper cup of mint tea. Her eyelids hung at half mast.
“That was great,” she said dreamily. “I was like, ‘I’m a baby! I haven’t even been born yet!’ I secretly believe that’s the best part of human existence. But apparently even when you haven’t been born yet, you’re still confused about some stuff.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that there’s no fall from grace into consciousness as a person. I think you’re just dealing with consciousness the whole time.”
“That’s smart,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot smarter in the past hour.”
She made me a cup of tea, too, from a hot water dispenser by the grass wall. The grass didn’t strike me as weird anymore. It was earnest, and earnestness was beautiful. Just us little humans trying our best.
Some women emerged from the other tanks. They were friends, too. We all were. We felt great about each other. They said they came every month. “It organizes my mind like nothing else,” one reported; after learning to rest in a float tank, she didn’t need sleep aids at night anymore. But it wasn’t for everyone. “We brought another friend,” she said, “and she was crawling up the walls. Literally. We came out and she was like, ‘Whoa, did you feel around the whole wall?! I was like, no, I was in a trance.”
I watched the river on the TV screen. This was a different river now, the water a rippling snowmelt gray that flowed wide and shallow through pine. And while I looked forward to the many more times in my life when I would stand next to such rivers and cross them and swim and sit on rocks in the sun, I didn’t feel the same longing to enter the screen. I thought only: How nice that such places exist in the world. How nice to exist in the world myself.
*In real life, Lilly wasn’t training dolphins to kill people. He did, however, take LSD with them, attempt to teach them to speak English, and build a co-living house where dolphins and humans could room together as equals.
