The story begins, as so many do, in the International Bar on the occasion of this writer s 30th birthday. My Hot Press colleagues had just handed me a gift token for 90 minutes in a flotation tank in the Harvest Moon Centre, 24 Lower Baggot Street, an establishment claiming to be the next step in stress management .
Stress management? Granted, your reporter s workload had been formidable that month, but no more than anybody else thrust under the sword of Damocles that is the fortnightly HP deadline. Paranoia set in. Was I really that ratty? Furrowed of brow and bent of posture? Old before my time? Nevertheless, I was rather touched. The message was loud and clear: Chill the fuck out, dude!
I should qualify these preliminaries by explaining that, notwithstanding the odd ambient fetish, this writer has always had a deep-rooted allergy to all practices vaguely new-age or trippy dippy. Adjectives like centred , peaceful and calm fill me with an almost superstitious horror. Coupled to this, I ve never been a water-lover, and the very thought of spending more than five minutes in the sea or a swimming pool reduces me to a five-year-old snivelling crybaby who won t put his head under the H20. I never even drink the stuff, unless it s been diluted with something less toxic, like whiskey. And while it s pathetic for a creature to be unnerved by a substance which composes 70% of not only the planet it lives on, but its own body, some phobias are not easily rationalised out of existence.
So I wasn t exactly gung-ho about the notion of an hour-and-a-half in a flotation tank. I like my life punctuated by the shrilling of mobile phones, yowling of rug-rats and the perpetual challenge of snatching copy from the yawning jaws of deadlines. For three months I toyed with the token, before finally galvanising myself into action by figuring that I might as well write about the experience. Therefore, it was with decidedly mixed feelings that I entered the Harvest Moon Centre on a February afternoon to redeem my token for a return trip to neverwhere.
What little I knew about flotation could ve been written on the head of a pin. I dimly remembered Terence Trent D Arby s evangelical descriptions of the process at the time of the release of his sorely misunderstood second album Neither Fish Nor Flesh. I d seen Ken Russell s Altered States of course, in which William Hurt ingests some bad Mexican mushrooms, spends a couple of days in a flotation tank and regresses into the state of a hairy cro-magnon Metallica roadie.
But also, there was another, more practical factor to take into consideration: how does one forge a couple of thousand words of an experience based on silence, darkness and inertia? I dimly remembered the classic Edgar Allen Poe short-story The Premature Burial, a masterful exercise in panicky inner-dialogue, a creepy-crawly probe into one man s freaked-to-fuck head-space. Accordingly, the phrase watery grave kept knelling through my head like a terrible Angelus bell.
Dr. John C. Lilly developed the isolation/flotation tank in 1954 to explore the effects of sensory deprivation on the mind. The good doctor could scarcely have imagined that his research would be appropriated by self-help cabals intent on applying the benefits of REST (Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy) to addled, frazzled 90s stress victims. Which is where the Harvest Moon Centre comes in, offering such services as flotation therapy, aromatherapy, reflexology, bio-energy healing, acupuncture, shiatsu, aura reading and cranio sacral therapy, amongst many others.
Hot Press snapper Cathal Dawson was waiting for me at the centre when I arrived, a little late, and more than a little hassled. We had already discussed the difficulties of getting the visuals together for the piece, concluding that we d take shots before the session, so my flotation would not be disrupted by flashbulbs going off. Lisa from the centre had informed me that floaters must be naked in order to maximise the womb-like qualities of the experience, which was well and good, but being about 8000 ab-crunches away from nudie centrefold status, this writer had some reservations about going in his pelt for the benefit of HP readers. With that in mind, I had earlier instructed Mr. Dawson to crop the shots personally. Oh, I m sure Simon (Roche HP art director) can take care of that in the office, he assured me. Fuck that, I replied. I m not having the entire art department poring over my finer details. We eventually arrived at a compromise: I would do the shots in my briefs, and then complete the actual session au naturale.
The flotation tank itself is an enclosed bath about the size of a small car, painted a reassuring shade of ecological green and filled to 10 inches with a highly concentrated solution of warm water and Epsom salts, twice the density of the Dead Sea, enabling even the most clumsy floater (i.e. me) to coast effortlessly. A small light at the head of the tank provides the only illumination, and the floater turns this off upon lying down in the tank. One showers before and after, the water is filtered between each session, and the salt kills all bacteria, so questions of hygiene are thoroughly addressed. you wish, and folk are alerted to the end of their session by a discreet knock.
Once the shots were taken and Cathal had left, I took a deep breath, removed my undergarments, closed the door of the chamber, lay down in the water, and extinguished the light.
Jesus, it was dark. Darker than dark. Black black black I had never experienced such blackness. (Well, there was that time my brothers locked me in the coal scuttle, but I d rather not bring that up right now.) I tried to relax in the water, but old non-swimmer habits die hard. It was some time before I was comfortable enough to fully lay my head back and submerge my ears. They filled with salty water. I couldn t hear anything, got a brief case of the headfreaks, sat up, cleared them, and tried again. That was better.
Sensory deprivation is something of a misnomer. Rather, the experience might be better characterised as the deprivation of external senses, because, although primary functions like sight and hearing are pretty much shut down and there ain t much to smell or taste in there, the process actually hones and sharpens what faculties one has left, namely those of thought, memory and, initially at least, touch. To wit, one is made acutely aware of one s own fundamental bodily functions. Like breathing.
Within seconds, I was hyper-conscious of the fact that my tobacco-scarred respiration had become conspicuously loud, so loud that I felt like a microbe swimming around the inside of Darth Vader s helmet. I kept thinking of Primal Scream s Eko Dek, and the intro to Jah Wobble s mix of Higher Than The Sun . But slowly, I got a grip, steadied my breathing, sucked air in deep, then let it out again. Repeat ad infinitum. Easy. I stubbornly clung to what few sensations I had left. The mild sting of the salt against a tiny razor cut on my jaw. The pinhole of light coming through a microscopic crack in the door, which I soon lost sight of, almost powerless to control the amiable drift of my body. Deprived of light, my eyes began manufacturing a kind of alternating rapid/slo-mo strobe effect, just to keep the synapses ticking over.
I had been advised to try to lie back as if going to sleep for the night. This seemed to work. I inexorably relaxed into the water, and soon became overcome with the freedom of antigravity. Apparently, the effects of gravity take up as much as 90% of all central nervous system activity, and is the single largest cause of ailments such as a bad back (which this writer suffers from), painful joints (of which this writer has smoked a few) and muscular tensions.
Theoretically, when the brain and muscoskeletal system are free from dealing with earth s pesky pull, they can utilise those energies in the direction of the mind, spirit and expanded awareness of internal states.
This pretty much all seemed to happen. The weightlessness was genuinely exhilarating, and with the water the same temperature as my skin, I could no longer differentiate which parts of the body were submerged or not. I patted my stomach, and was surprised to find that it was above water, lined with a thin film of salt. An old 70 s soul song wafted through my brain: Float, float on, float on, float on . . .
A lot of the success of the flotation process depends on how willing you are to let go of the earth s surly bonds. This writer found that the hardest thing to abandon was the compulsion to mark the passage of time. I had this overpowering urge to check my watch, but I wasn t wearing it, and couldn t have seen the damn thing anyway. It was impossible to tell if five minutes had passed, or 50. It s a weird one; most of us invest so much importance in time-keeping, and when the concept is removed, we re like babies deprived of their soothers. So, the minutes ceded into no-minutes, and floated on down the Nile.
I tried speaking. My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere deep in my gut. This is weird, I said, the only other sound being the soporific sloshing of the water against the sides of the tank. Presently, my body seemed to become totally integrated with the water and I was reduced (increased?) to one big gelatinous mass of messy mind. A floating brain, with optional torso. And that brain, so used to processing and analysing information, began to mutiny against the silence, channeling static blasts of psychic garbage through my inner ear in order to keep me from going mad with the ecstasy of it all. This was gas stuff altogether snatches of old Seinfeld dialogue, the Offspring single, sundry bits of nonsensical irrelevancies all swirling around my consciousness like crap in a whirpool. But once this ridiculous gush subsided, I was left with an exquisite blank. The Poe story briefly reared its ugly head, but also, I remembered lying in bed at night as a child, pretending I had been trapped in a coffin, masochistically enjoying the imagined panic.
Several minutes, or decades later, I decided I should perhaps do something constructive, like indulge in a spot of amateur regression therapy, trying to remember what it was like in the womb. But try as I might, all I could manage was a meditation on the pulse of my own heartbeat, zoning in and out of inner-earshot. So much for subliminal pre-natal memory excavation. I gave it up as a bad job and concentrated on not concentrating on anything.
Presently, the usual thought patterns lapsed into a form of lucid dreaming, a more animated version of the kind of gorgeously opiated babble one sometimes experiences when nodding off from exhaustion. This was even more ludicrous stuff than before, little of which I can remember verbatim, even less of which bears repeating. By now, my mind was drifting through some twilight zone between waking and sleeping, a grand-eloquent disorientation, a mildly ecstatic form of divers bends. I later learned that during flotation, the brain relaxes, shifting gears down from beta to alpha and then theta waves. Theta waves are associated with vivid memories, free association, sudden insights, creative inspiration. Most people fall asleep during this hypnogogic state, but floaters tend to quickly enter it while staying awake, leaving them free to navigate the vagaries of inner space.
But despite all this, I never did discover the secrets of the universe, kiss the face of God, or rewrite Beethoven s ninth for saxophone and musical saw. What I did do was have a damn fine rest in some pretty impenetrable peace and quiet. Stress relief? Stress didn t exist. Every remote iota of resistance had been flushed out of my body. By the final stage, it had even become a little boring. Eventually, a knock on the door signalled that it was time for me to come back to the real world. I sat up, hit the light, and prepared to check out of the weirdest hotel room on earth. Surprisingly, there was little or no decompression when I opened the hatch I readjusted quickly. I m back, I hollered, to let the staff know I was on the case, then quickly showered and dressed.
Outside, in the pointless bustle of Baggot Street, I felt mildly blissed, still swaddled in the vague residue of the experience. Cramming onto the DART home didn t even phase me. And for the next day or so, though I wasn t exactly any more relaxed than usual, my powers of concentration did seem somewhat heightened.
So did the experience affect me in any real fashion? Yes, but not in the way I expected. I didn t hallucinate the third secret of Fatima, but I did rediscover the importance of silence, inertia and darkness, and was made painfully aware of how hard it is to achieve these states in day to day existence. But ultimately, if the session had any tangible repercussions, it substantially reduced this writer s fear of water.
Flotation has been cited as valuable when used in conjunction with programmes for the training and rehabilitation of athletes, and also the reduction of weight, tobacco and alcohol consumption. With this in mind, the gentleman on the desk said something quite telling to me as I was leaving. I always go for a float before a night out, he testified. It calms me right down for the night.
I can think of a few bouncers who might also benefit from the experience. n