Paul R. is a young architect whose soft southern drawl seems charmingly out of place in the high-intensity clamor of midtown Manhattan. Recently he shattered his shoulder in a bad skiing accident, and though his orthopedic surgeon was able to set the fracture it continued to cause Paul great pain. It was impossible for him to sleep without pain-killers, and often during the day he would find it hard to concentrate on his work because of the nagging ache. He could ease it with medication, but he didn’t like the way the pills made his mind fuzzy. Then he heard from his orthopedic surgeon that floating in an isolation tank could relieve pain, and he was eager to give it a try. When I first met Paul, he’d been floating regularly for several weeks.
“When I first floated it was quite astonishing to me,” he mused with a half smile. “I went into the tank with this excruciating pain, and when I came out the pain was gone. I slept that night without any drugs for the first time in weeks! And the next day at work my head was not only clear, I even felt more bouncy and mentally sharp than I ever did before I broke my shoulder.” He had been floating regularly in the evenings after work, but he felt he was emerging from the tank in such an energetic and creative mood that he was now eager to schedule some early morning pre-work floats, to try to reap the harvest of his increased sense of control, his energy, and the keen pleasure he takes in his work. “And the funny thing is that my doctor says my shoulder is healing by leaps and bounds, much faster now than it was before I started floating. I don’t know—you explain it.”
Chris, a fashion model in her late twenties, had been the victim of a rape attempt more than two years before she began floating. In fighting off her attacker she had been badly slashed, and while her physical wounds had quickly healed, deeper wounds remained. Frequent attacks of depression would leave her virtually immobilized. Anxiety brought her to the verge of panic several times a week. Though she cared about the man she’d been living with, she was not capable of full sexual response; this, she felt, was one of the reasons the relationship had finally broken apart. Another reason was her dependence on marijuana: The first thing she did every day before getting out of bed was light up a joint, and she stayed high all the time. “I just wanted to stay numb and dumb,” she said.
One of her photo assignments included shots of a health club with a floatation tank, and when the photographer went in for a float she decided to take a turn in the tank too. She emerged feeling better than she had in years and decided to explore the process further. She discovered that each float raised her spirits and increased her self-confidence, and that the effect carried over for several days. Her life became more fun and more productive than at any time since the attack. She discovered that she could return to the attack in her mind as she floated, visualizing the scene again and again, replaying it until it seemed to lose its power. “It was like a ghost,” she said, “always there, ready to come out and spook me at any time. But now, since I’ve replayed and revisualized the scene, it’s like I’ve seen through the ghost, and it can’t haunt me anymore.”
Aram is a criminal lawyer. He uses the tank for a specific purpose: When he’s ready to bring a case to trial, he familiarizes himself with all the aspects of the case and then goes into the tank for a long, thoughtful float. In the black silence he allows the various components of the case to circulate in his mind until they begin to fall into place—precedents, strategies, tactics. By the time he comes out of the tank he has a clear sense of what he must do, of how the case will proceed. Similarly, in some complex cases he prepares his summation speech to the jury by going into the tank for a long “rehearsal” float, deciding what he’s going to say and visualizing himself going through the speech. The results, he says, have been impressive; he feels more in control of himself, more relaxed, able like a good performer to sense how his act is going over with the audience. The bottom line, he says, is that he is a better lawyer.
Arthur is a midwestern psychologist, intense, very intelligent, somewhat introverted. He is a serious chess player, and he describes his experiences in the float tank with the dispassionate, considered approach he takes toward a game. “I had never been religious,” he told me. Raised in a non-religious Jewish family, he had always assumed that spiritual matters were mere excuses for wishful thinking. Middle-aged, he has never been married.
“What brought me to the tank was pure curiosity, nothing else.” He explained that it had seemed like something he, as a Ph.D. in psychology with several years of EEG research into sleep, should investigate. “I just wanted to see what would happen,” he said. “After about half an hour I began to start thinking about some areas of conflict in the relationship I have with the woman I’m in love with. And as time went on, the areas of conflict seemed to melt away and a sense of harmony took their place. I started to feel as if all problems could be resolved, as if the sense of underlying goodwill between me and this woman could overcome everything.”
As he described it, Arthur shook his head in a gesture of disbelief, smiling. “Ultimately it was a type of religious experience. I’m not religious, but if I were religious this would be a type of religious experience, a religious revelation: a sense of harmony between me and all other people. The reason I’ve become very enthusiastic about it is that the feelings I had in the float tank expressed themselves in terms of ideas, which stayed with me. The sense of harmony I imagined having with the woman, whom I had some areas of conflict with—that sense of harmony continued on, and in fact had a positive impact on my relationship with her. Because when I see her now I remember that sense of underlying harmony between me and her, whether or not it exists at the present time, but as a basic state that, if it isn’t present now, can easily return.”
In the days after that first float, he began to feel the long-term effect. “I often returned to the feelings and ideas I’d had of this religious sense of unity of the universe, harmony, the oneness of the human race. It was an idea that kept coming back to me on frequent occasions.”
On his next float Arthur experienced another “religious revelation,” and was filled with thoughts about members of his family from whom he’d been alienated for years. Again, he felt a sense of “underlying harmony and unity that I could achieve: a confidence in myself, that if I acted in accordance with the way I am able to act, I could achieve a harmony with people with whom I had difficulty being in a harmonious state.”
Arthur stressed the long-term effect of the tank experiences: “I would say a permanent impact—it gives me a vision of what life could be like.” Now he finds he can recapture the experiences any time he wishes, because they were “strong, vivid.” I asked him what he thought was the mechanism of this sudden religious awakening, and he explained: “I would say it’s because I was communicating with myself in the tank in a way I never did before. It was a unique experience, essentially not comparable to anything else. It’s impossible to imagine what a sexual experience is like until you’ve experienced it—same thing with a float. It’s a unique event of its type. Also, in a way it had the same euphoric effect on me that sex does—of feeling a deep sense of harmony with the world, a sense of peacefulness and contentment. Very life affirming…. I plan to keep floating as long as I keep getting these positive results.”
Four stories, four orientations: physical body, emotions, intellect, spirit. In truth, these realms cannot be untangled from each other. But they’re useful categories for demonstrating an important fact about floating: In each of these realms the tank’s effects are clear, immediate, and unmistakable. No one has any doubts that it is the tank’s effects, and not something else, that they are feeling. The experience of gravity-free, restricted environmental stimulation changes you, and while some of the changes are in the brain, the tank’s effects are no more “only in your mind” than are the results of eating a sumptuous dinner when you are very hungry. The changes are real, quantifiable, documented by an impressive amount of rigorous scientific research, controlled studies, statistical analyses of data, not to mention all the ordinary floaters I’ve spoken to. And in every case I’m aware of, the changes have been beneficial.
Granted, this is quite a claim. There are today numerous techniques people can use that purport to change them for the better, among them running, meditation, biofeedback, psychotherapy, est, health spas, at least a million wonderful diets, stop-smoking clinics, Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers, and more quasi-religious groups and training seminars than you can shake a stick at. The problem with these and scores of other techniques is that they often don’t work. Yes, each of them helps many people, but often the success stories are in the minority, while many who have spent hundreds of dollars, or worked hard and disciplined themselves, find that for one reason or another the technique just doesn’t seem to work for them. Some lucky people get a runner’s high after four or five miles; others just get blisters and tired. Many find they don’t have the patience to stick to their meditation long enough to reap all the benefits they’ve heard about. Some go to this or that seminar only to find that somehow they don’t “get it,” or if they do, that “it” doesn’t seem to help them much.
Floating, however, works for just about everyone (the only exceptions, according to the many doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other health professionals I spoke to, seem to be people with very severe biochemical depression who should see a doctor, and highly obsessive-compulsive people, who will probably have no desire to go into the tank anyway). There is no training required, no secret wisdom, no guru or special decoder ring, no weeks of discipline. In fact, you could probably go into a float tank determined that you were going to resist the effects, and you would still emerge changed.
Why is the tank so effective? There are many theories about the mechanisms by which float tanks achieve their results, and today there is an explosion of research into that very question going on in university, hospital, and clinic laboratories around the world. One unmistakable message delivered at the First International Conference on REST and Self-Regulation at Denver, in March 1983, was that we now know more about floating than ever before but we still don’t know much, and that there are momentous, potentially revolutionary discoveries to be made. The scientists want more data, larger studies, before they offer conclusive statements. They are wary, knowing that the evidence presented at the convention is startling enough to be susceptible to sensational claims: Manipulate and strengthen your own immune system! Cure sickness! Instant access to the brain’s right hemisphere! Dramatic improvements in memory, learning, thinking, creativity! Activate your own pleasure centers! This is, after all, pretty sensational stuff. No one knows quite where it might lead. So for the time being the scientists, full of speculations and wild surmises, devise more studies, more experiments, each approaching the problem from his own direction with his own paradigm or explanation. Their explanations, each of them based on a solid foundation of hard evidence and experimental research, fall into a number of categories which are quite distinct. In the rest of Part II are summaries of the most interesting and important of these explanations. Later in the book, when we look at specific ways the float experience can be put to use in your life, I will refer to—and at times expand upon—these brief summaries.