About a year ago, I was asked to check out 'flotation' by a friend who had tried it and said it was a unique experience. Anyway I booked myself for an hour at my local centre (Ledbury Road, London W11) to check it out.
At the centre I was given a menu of music and asked if I wanted any to be played to relax me into the session. I picked a piece of ambient musci with natural jungle sounds. I was then handed a towel, and shown into the room where the tank was. There was a showere in there and I was told to have on before and afer floating.
The tank itself is a bit like a solid plastic tent with a triangular door in the front, and is half-filled with water. I was also shown the light switch inside the tank, just at hand, and an inflatable pillow (I didn't feel I needed to use it). All that remained was to get into the tank and lie down. The music came on. I switched the light off and lay back. Almost as soon as it started I drifted off and within what seemed like minutes the music came in to signal the end of the hour. It seemed so fast I felt maybe I had not quite tuned into the experience. I did notice however that I was in a euphoric state and my whole body felt light as a feather as I walked home. I decided to book another session straight away.
About a week later I had my second float. As I lay suspended in darkness in the water (highly salted, like the Dead Sea, to make you float) I entered a dream state in which I seemed to be surrounded by colourful trees and beautiful animals. Again the session didn't seem long enough so I decided to try and go in more often. In my net experience I seemed to have difficulty relaxing and I had to turn the light on because the tank feltclaustrophobic. The next day I went in again, and I ended up floating for at least an hour a day for ten days consecutively.
During this time some back pains I had been suffering from disappeared completely and I also found that I could visualise lights in my body and move them to wherever I had muscular pain and the pain seemed to ease dramatically.
One day when I was floating I slipped into a dream that was a completely cosmic experience. I imagined that I was floating up through the different multicoloured layers of the earth's atmosphere until I reached the weightless void of outer space. Another time I dreamt that a huge rainbow came out of the earth and surrounded our atmosphere, but this was nothing compared with what was to come. I imagined that I was lying in a sarcophagus-shaped container and that I could travel wherever I wanted through space. It then occured to me that there were almost invisible amoeba-type portals below and above me, and as I watched myself by the little portals, I had the realisation that light did not necessarily travel in staight lines. It could travel in massive spirals, but the distances it travels are so huge that we cannot comprehend its curvature. This led to the idea that the portals in between the layers could be used to skip backwards or forwards through time, and were maybe a doorway to time travel which merely needed unlocking, something that could help us explore the limits of times and space. Not the physical journey that sci-fi programmes seem to point at but a purely mental journey which, with enough practice, could maybe feel totally real.
I sometimes think I reached a deep state of meditation with flotation which enabled me to astrally project, but I've never reached a similar state through meditation.
Flotation is definitely relaxing, and seemed to help me heal my back pains,
low energy and concentration levels. By the end of ten days of flotation
I was full of energy and didn't need to float again (for a while). I have
also heard of people successfully using flotation as an aid to cleaning themselves
out from drug addictions from cigarettes to heroin. I would recommend
it to anyone looking for an interesting new experience.