Initially, what I discovered was where exactly all my unhealed cuts were: Nothing like a thousand pounds of Epsom salt mixed into ten inches of water to remind you of that blister on the back of your foot....
Before entering my Ocean Float Room, I had been told that the experience would heighten my senses: The world would seem more vibrant, so I should think carefully about what I wanted to see, feel, hear, taste, and feel immediately after leaving. If I had it my way, I’d have eaten pizza and had sex, but sadly, it was a workday. I biked off into Brooklyn, which smelled extra like pee.
August 20, 2015
"And then I was alone. Naked, scrubbed clean, wounds lubed, facing the little white entryway that led to the Ocean Float Tank."
"It looked like the door to a kiln, or a wood-fire oven. I wondered: What awaited me on the other side during my hour of floating? What would I discover when stripped of all sensory information?"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
31 comments:
Really bad writing. Precious, cutesy, ironic, humblebrag/clever ... boring. I'm betting the author is in her twenties.
I like the idea that a woman with a sense of humor wants to have sex.
Water world. It opens the mind like an LSD trip.
But then you return to the world again. She needs a challenge.
Oh, please. It's not bad writing, much less "really bad' writing. It's perfectly competent. You may find the article boring or the writer annoying, but that is your subjective reaction, either to the subject matter, which may be of no interest to you or which you may consider new age nonsense, or to the writer's persona that you perceive from her words.
Well Robert, she got one thing right that NYC smells like pee.
Sensory deprivation tanks were a big thing back in the late 1970s & 1980s. Amusing to see them still in the news.
I recall the Hawaii 5-O episode where the Chinese spy Wo Fat put McGarrett into one, keeping him there until he began hallucinating.
The Chinese spy explained McGarrett's thrashing in the tank as "dreaming of hula girls" if I remember correctly.
Not to worry, McGarrett got out alive & sane, and he defeated his arch enemy.
Also, that 1980 William Hurt / Richard Dreyfus movie, wherein sensory deprivation led to complete recapitulation of phylogeny, Altered States, freaked me the heck out.
I did and hour in a sensory deprivation tank about 8 years ago. There's a place in Lincoln Park in Chicago. We were going to dinner after so I shaved about an hour before. First thing I did when I got in the tank was splash the salt water on my face which burned so bad I had to get out, rinse off, and start over; so I've experienced that part of the article.
Going in I thought it would be bullshit. But because of the darkness it started feeling like I was floating in a vast ocean, not an enclosed tank.
I was in there for an hour, and when they knocked on the tank door to say the time was up, it felt like I was inside for only ten minutes, and I didn't fall asleep.
It was worth doing once. And I could see that if you kept going back, you could probably get yourself to 'work' it a little more.
It's good writing. You may not like the tone or the attitude, but the writing is good.
This: "I was in the middle of a vision in which my boss was waving a broom and yelling at me with my mother’s voice."
Made me laugh.
(There is a sanitation issue that she declines to explore.)
Robert Cook -
Chill. Of course it's "subjective reaction." What else could it be.
I Survived My Terrifying Hour in a Sensory-Deprivation Tank
Why is it that so much of the content in NYC media has to either do with fear or the promise of fear?
Sensory deprivation tanks are scary!
Rednecks with guns in National Parks!
Amazon is demanding place to work!
It's like Tales From The Crypt for Manhattenites!
It's good writing. You may not like the tone or the attitude, but the writing is good.
I don't like the tone or the attitude, which is what makes it, IMO, bad writing. It's cliched and unoriginal. I've read more articles than I can count that have the same tone and attitude. They could have all been written by the same clever, ironic, 20-somethinng liberal arts grad.
Wait - you can't have pizza on a work day?
Heh. Reminds me of the joke the comedian/rapist used to tell re: cocaine...
I said to a guy, "Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful," and he said, "Because it intensifies your personality." I said, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?
Whenever I get into one of those moods where everything sucks, I define it as a problem with me that I need to fix.
Sometimes it can take a while.
Now imagine you are in Mommies womb. And Planned Parenthood needs your organs to sell for a luxory sports car for a Dr Mengele special. And no one cares.
Relax. It will be over soon.
Rahajm:
Funny. Especially cuz most people who use cocaine ARE assholes!
Complaining about the tone is not the same as saying something is "bad writing," that is to say, "badly written."
The most beautiful writing in the world can convey a disagreeable tone or attitude. Or, rather, an attitude the writer intends but that the reader may dislike...which is, again, NOT "bad writing." It's writing you don't like.
Sensory deprivation played a big role in busting open a spy ring in "The Cardinal of the Kremlin". When I first read that book in middle school, I didn't quite get it. Later, I went on several Clancy binges in high school once I had learned more of the geopolitics involved, and it all started to make sense. His description of the sensory deprivation techniques used by the Soviets was vaguely terrifying.
traditionalguy said...
Now imagine you are in Mommies womb. And Planned Parenthood needs your organs to sell for a luxory sports car for a Dr Mengele special. And no one cares.
We taxpayers fund them.
Republicans should counter their WarOnWomen with WarOnBabies.
mikee said...
Sensory deprivation tanks were a big thing back in the late 1970s & 1980s. Amusing to see them still in the news.
I recall the Hawaii 5-O episode where the Chinese spy Wo Fat put McGarrett into one, keeping him there until he began hallucinating.
I remember that exact episode. IIRC, it was the pilot episode of the original series. Yep, just looked it up on IMDB.
Sensory deprivation was also used as a torture device in one of Tom Clancy's novels, perhaps "Cardinal of the Kremlin."
Sounds like fun. Or not. Salt water and psoriasis might not be a good combination.
"Sounds like fun. Or not."
There are things one can experience that may be pleasurable if one chooses to experience them voluntarily and which can be awful, even torture, if subjected to them involuntarily.
I was about 8 years old when the Hawaii 5-O episode came on. I was fascinated with the idea. Deprived of all sensory perceptions, you would be totally alone with your thoughts. I thought that would be fun, set your imagination free. Poor writer girl, bless her heart -- guess some people are afraid of their own thoughts.
Sensory deprivation is not just about making someone be alone with his or her thoughts, it deprives the person of all sensory perception, insofar as possible. This is why the water is salinated--to make one float so one loses awareness of one's own weight and corporeality--and heated to body temperature--to prevent one from feeling differences in temperature that allows one to be aware of where one's own body ends and the water begins. One floats in a dark, silent tank, eyes and ears blocked, hearing and seeing and feeling nothing. Physicality evaporates. One becomes just a bodiless consciousness floating in a silent void.
I've never done it, but I'd like to.
Years ago I was visiting an ex-girlfriend who was apartment-sitting around the block from me, and the owner of the apartment had installed a sensory deprivation tank in a small room of the apartment.
Sensuous deprivation is the next big thing.
Mr. Cook at 3:06 - If your comment responded to mine, I think we are talking past one another. When, "Physicality evaporates," and "One becomes just a bodiless consciousness floating in a silent void " all that is left to perceive is your own thoughts. The character of one's sensory perception experience would then be shaped by your attitude. Going in fearful or positive would likely lead to a corresponding experience.
Someone must have done sensory deprivation tanking while high on LSD. For science!
Beach Brutus:
I was merely making the distinction between the isolation of a sensory deprivation tank and other types of isolation, such as solitary confinement in prison, where one is also left along with one's thoughts, while retaining all sensory awareness. The two experiences will be very different, however positively or negatively they might respectively be experienced.
It isn't New Age; it's newage, which rhymes with dressage and collage.
It's truly amazing - millennials are repeating the mistakes of their grandparents. First they start to dress like grandpa and nana, and now they're "experimenting" with sensory deprivation tanks. Imagining being burned out at 21, and then discovering you've been a retro tie-dyed nerd rather than a hipster all along.
Actually newage should rhyme with sewage, makes more sense that way.
People who think spending a few hours in a warm salty bath amounts to experiencing something transcendent remind me of Thoreau who thought living in a cabin on the shore of a suburban pond amounted to living "close to Nature." Emboldened by his ability to grow carrots and eat them, Thoreau struck out on an extended hike into the White Mountains, where he learned just how mundane his Walden days really were.
Post a Comment