Report on My Quick Adventure into Nothingness (also, I bought some pretty rocks at the spa)

The sensory deprivation float tank is about 8 feet long and, say, 5 ½ feet wide. Basically, it looks like a small, rubber-lined bank vault. There’s only a single foot of water—with 1300 lbs. of salt dissolved in it.

So of course the very first thing I do is plop a drop of extremely salty water straight into my left eye.

It stung for a while. But not forever.

ut in vita, etiam in piscinam

As in life, in the tank…

A close personal relationship with the concept of impermanence is your best friend in a sensory deprivation tank.

Whatever you experience that is wonderful or disturbing, exciting or dull, invigorating or sedating—it will not last.

But keeping track of that is a problem, because the first thing to go is your sense of time.

The feeling of weightlessness is fascinating and I have to admit that my imagination failed to predict how much of the certainty of having a body is gravity dependent. Take away the gravity and in mere moments, for all intents and purposes, you are a brain in a vat.

The highest hurdle, and another thing I would not have predicted, was my aphantasia. Or rather, the complete immersion in it. (Pun intended.)  When I’m awake, I’m as reliant on vision as any other person. Memory and invention are different for me because there’s nothing like vision in it. But out and about, all the information of visual content is available for whatever I need invention and memory for.

And when I’m asleep, I either don’t mind the Void because I’m unconscious, or I’m dreaming—in pictures like everyone else.

Being awake and 100% in the dark, eyes open or closed, is inviting little cattle-prod jolts of adrenaline. I even tried what most of you freaks can do effortlessly—I tried to have images with my thoughts. It didn’t work. At all.

I now understand much better how completely aphantasic I am. And it was jarring.

But I remembered to remember that no feeling or thought lasts forever, or even for very long. Not without a lot of tending and ruminating and insisting on living in a moment that has already gone or has yet to come.

So I played tug-o-war with my little seed of panic that wanted to flower, and in some amount of time that was either a few minutes or approximately one thousand years, I realized that the blank slate-ness of my mind’s eye wasn’t bothering me anymore.

But why was there the sound of arctic winds sweeping an expansive ice field? A) I had earplugs in and the vault was soundproof anyway. And B) I wasn’t in the arctic.

I had become so unhitched to the sense of being a physical entity that my own breathing translated as an external sound. And a big cosmic bellowsy one, at that.

It was pretty funny.

As the last man standing, my sense of smell tried to take over and either became sharpened so that I could smell the essentially odorless water, or I hallucinated the odd smell of bitter limes. Doesn’t matter which, really. It was all interesting.

I dozed off at some point and was awakened by music, the signal that my float was over. A bereft oh please, not quite yet played at odds with a little thrill at the idea of seeing something, anything—even my basket of clothes next to the shower in the suite outside the door. But I’m no rebel. I got out.

The relaxation and therapeutic effects of ninety minutes of weightlessness delivered an all-over sense of ahhhhhhh that has lasted into today. I’ll definitely do this again.

But now I really want one of you people to do this and tell me what happened to you visually. How is it for people who can “see” in their thoughts? Or how does it strike other aphantasics?