After experiencing the isolation tank, I must say that the experience was not what I expected. With the majority of the senses deprived I thought I would experience a rush of ideas, image and revelations from my construction of the outside world. I envisioned having the type of projections that John C. Lily spoke of in, “Use of Projection –Display Techniques in Deep Self-analysis with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.” I thought my mind would make up for the absence of the tangible world through elaborate depictions of reality. It made sense, that as my senses were dulled by the nothingness that my mind would try to make up for the world that was not present. However, maybe I needed some LSD and some dolphins to get the level of craziness that Lilly wrote about because instead of falling into some vivid hallucinatory state, I felt extremely relaxed and mindless.
My experience was more like the sensory deprivation described in Scott Daly’s, “The Ganzfeld as a Canvas for Neurophysiology.” Daly describes sensory deprivation as putting the body’s receptors in a “resting state and send no information up the pathways to the high centers of the brain” (172). I quickly was able to adjust to the odd environment of the isolation tank despite my desire for the water to be warmer and the air to feel fresher. Once I was comfortable in the tank I found my self intentionally grasping for visions or thought, but I would them hard to complete as a wave of tranquility swept my mind away from the world beyond the tank. I easily slipped between conscious and unconscious stated unable to complete a thought or form a memory. According to Daly, during sensory deprivation, “There is no perceptual event, other than the awareness of darkness” (172). This easily sums up my experience in the isolation tank as my mind was only aware of the darkness and I easily forgot about the outside world, unsuccessful of even try to fathom it. It felt like a deep meditation with great success. The objective of meditation is to clear the mind. This is often difficult even when sitting cross-legged in a silent room, however it seems like the complete lack of acoustic distance and lack of light (which would normally activate the rods of even closed eyes) inside the isolation tank contributed to its immediate effect of relaxation on me.
Inside the tank I eventually fell under a very deep state of unconsciousness, perhaps even sleep and when I awoke I panicked. I’m not quite sure why I panicked upon my awake, perhaps it was the thought that I had been in there for a lifetime, or maybe the fear that there was no more oxygen in the tank. Whatever the case I was taken by an overwhelming feeling that I had to get out. It felt like I couldn’t have been in the tank for longer than an hour, but to my surprise I had actually been in there for two hours. The mind-altering state experienced in the isolation tank was very similar to that experienced during the sound bath in the Integratron. These two similar experiences must be a result of the activated alpha waves in the brain, caused by such environments of sensory deprivation or particular sensory activation. During the sound bath it felt as through there was only one thing to focus on, the sound. During the isolation tank, the only thing my mind began to focus on was the darkness.
My experience in the isolation tank was far different from my experience during the Ganzfeld Field. During the Ganzfeld, my brain was extremely activated as I saw a series of images among the red fog. The white noise helped to focus on my projections and actually enhanced my visions. In the isolation take the silence did the opposite as well as the darkness that disabled any projections my mind attempted to create.
Nevertheless, the isolation tank was a trippy experience in which I lost complete sense of time and even space. Part of my panic was the fact that I had forgotten where I was and when the opening of my eyes brought no light, I became desperately hungry for stimuli. The isolation tank left me more appreciative of my surroundings and my ability to make sense of them and after I got out the world around me seemed a lot more fruitful for observation.
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