When I saw this task the first thing I thought was “Isolation tank!”This is something I have wanted to try for a while now, and this seemed like the perfect reason. I don’t have the ability to create a full-blown isolation tank, but my parents do have a hot tub in the backyard. I decided to give it a shot and see what happened.

I set the heater on the tub to stay between 98 and 99 degrees in order to stay as close to body temp as possible. Next I got out an old snorkel set and a pen and paper for notes. Finally, I took my clothes off and got ready to jump in the hot tub (with a short diversion for relativity). I decided to do three rounds of sensory deprivation with a short break in between to take notes on “where I went”.I wrapped the notebook in a towel and perched it on the corner of the hot tub before closing the lid and getting into the water.

My results for the three sessions were as follows:

#1

For the first round it took my brain a while to settle down and for me to find the least interactive position. In the end I tried a different position for each session.For the first one I was floating on my back in a spread out fetal position. After I got into the right mindset and physical set up, I tried to focus on my breathing to the exclusion of everything else. After a few minutes of that, I tried to remove even my breathing from my awareness in order to totally remove myself from reality. Eventually I more or less got that to work and started to let my mind wander.

The first image that came to me was of a glowing orb floating above my stomach, with my arms and legs curled around it. The orb then turned into the planet Earth, glowing with some sort of inner light. After I spent several minutes huddled around the planet, it started to change. Eventually it became hot and was covered with molten lava, more and more so, until it became uncomfortably hot. I uncurled my body, and in doing so I pushed myself off into space.I was flying through space for some time before it became thick and hard to move through. Some time in the middle of this I came back into myself and came to the surface.


#2
The second round took less time to get into, but I had to work to get the images of the first session out of my head in order to start fresh. When I finally did, I got an image of myself dressed in bright red robes and sitting on the top of a stone pyramid. I eventually got the perspective to change in order to see my environs. The tower was several hundred feet high and surrounded by jungle. I seem to have been in the midst of some Aztec-ish culture, in the position of a priest or leader. All around me there were games and ceremonies going on.This was the shortest of the three periods, and the images ended almost as soon as I really figured out where I was and what was going on.

#3
This was the most intense of the three rounds, and the easiest one to get into the right mindset for. I started off perched on a rock in the midst of total blackness.After several moments the darkness began to divide into sky and ocean, though it got no less shadowy. Suddenly, the sky became a reddish pink color, overlaid with darker red veins. It looked like the inside of your eyelids when there is a bright light shining through it.I had just started to get a grasp of this change, when I noticed shapes approaching in the sky. As they got closer, they took the shape of great, black moth-like creatures.By the time they started to come overhead, their full size became apparent; they seemed impossibly huge. In my notes, I described them as the size of countries, and there was at least four or five of them in the flock. Once they had flown past me and into the distance, my small stone island began to sink into the liquid below me. As my feet touched the dark liquid, it began to writhe and churn. When I had sunk all the way into it, I realized that the liquid was either full of, or made up of, small worms. As I sunk down they continued to squirm all around my body (this was a bit intense and upsetting as you might imagine). Eventually, the worms started to thin out until and the liquid around me started to feel less compressed around me. In the end it all thinned out and returned to the state of total black vastness in which I had started.

I was tempted to continue onto a fourth round since the third was so interesting, but in the end I decided to hold to my original concept of only three sessions.