Inner Space

In the 1980s, I used to disappear for ninety minutes at a time.

I did it at SpaceTime Tanks, an inner space observatory built not for looking farther into the universe, but for looking in the other direction.

There were four flotation tanks. I tried them all.

Tank 2 was mine.

I cannot explain why. The tanks may have been nearly identical, the water prepared to the same density, the temperature set within the same narrow range. The darkness inside one should have been no different from the darkness inside another.

Still, like Goldilocks moving from bed to bed, I knew when something did not fit. Tank 1 never quite settled around me. Tank 3 felt subtly wrong. Tank 4 seemed to belong to someone else, though no one had assigned it.

Tank 2 received me.

For two years, I managed SpaceTime, and during much of that time I floated every day. Usually for ninety minutes, an interval I associated with one complete cycle of sleep, long enough for the mind to exhaust its first objections and move into less familiar territory.

The tank contained shallow water saturated with Epsom salt, enough to support the body without effort. Close the door, turn off the light, lie back, and the water did the rest. It carried the hips, the shoulders, the back of the head. The water and air were warmed until the skin had less information to report. After a while, it became difficult to say where the body ended and the tank began.

Gravity, which had been holding you all day without introduction, loosened its grip.

The flotation tank had grown from the work of John C. Lilly, a physician and neurophysiologist who began experimenting with isolation in the 1950s. Lilly wanted to know what consciousness would do when relieved of as much external stimulation as possible. Would the mind become inert without the world continually entering through the senses, or did it contain a world of its own?

His early apparatus was more severe than the commercial tanks that followed. The later versions replaced cumbersome equipment with warm, highly salted water in a darkened enclosure. What began as a scientific instrument became, over time, a means of relaxation, meditation, self-experiment, and escape. Lilly himself moved beyond the scientific boundaries of his original work, becoming as controversial as he was influential.

The phrase most often used was sensory deprivation.

It never felt quite right to me.

The senses were not taken away.

The competition was.

Outside the tank, perception is a crowded room. Light arrives from every direction. Sound asks to be interpreted. Clothing presses against the body. The eyes keep measuring distance. Muscles make thousands of small corrections to gravity. The skin monitors temperature. A chair announces itself beneath you. A floor pushes back.

Even in bed, the body negotiates with sheets, pillows, traffic, weather, and the other person breathing beside you.

Inside the tank, most of that negotiation stopped.

At first, the mind objected.

It reviewed the day. It improved old arguments. It produced lists of things that needed to be done as soon as the door opened. An itch appeared on the nose with the urgency of a medical event. The neck searched for support although the water was already supporting it. A knee wondered whether it should bend. The ears strained to hear a sound that was not there.

The mind, accustomed to being fed, began raiding the cupboards.

Then something changed.

The body stopped insisting on its outline. The tank disappeared, though I knew it remained around me. Time became unreliable. Minutes expanded. Longer passages vanished without leaving a mark.

I was not asleep, exactly.

I was not awake in the usual way either.

I was present, but presence had been emptied of scenery.

As a photographer, I have spent much of my life looking outward. Photography depends on the visible world. Light strikes a surface and returns carrying information. A face. A building. A tide line. A single leaf moving while the rest of the tree is still.

The photographer notices, selects, frames, excludes.

The camera points away from the body.

Even when an image is personal, the mechanism is outward-facing. Something must stand before the lens. Something must reflect light. Something must be separated from everything surrounding it long enough to be seen.

But what is the lens for the inner landscape?

What is the equivalent of framing when there is no edge?

Inside Tank 2, there was nothing to photograph. No horizon. No foreground or background. No depth of field. No decisive moment that could be isolated from the moments around it. There was only the mind noticing itself, and even that description makes the observer sound more stable than it was.

Thoughts did not line up to have their portraits taken.

They surfaced, changed shape, and disappeared.

A room from childhood might return with the precise angle of its afternoon light. Then a voice. Then the sensation of falling. Then a sentence spoken years later by someone whose face I could no longer clearly summon.

Sometimes there were colors, though the tank was entirely dark.

Sometimes there was movement, though my body was still.

Sometimes nothing happened, and the nothing was not empty.

This is difficult territory for anyone trained to observe. We trust what can be revisited and examined from several angles. We value focus, evidence, detail. The photographer can move closer, change lenses, wait for better light. The subject may resist, but it occupies a place in the material world.

The inner landscape offers no such cooperation.

It cannot be revisited under identical conditions. It cannot be shown to another person as proof. There is no contact sheet. No negative. No metadata recording when a thought began or what aperture allowed it to enter.

You emerge with impressions.

A feeling that some interior distance has been crossed.

A certainty that something was seen, accompanied by an inability to say exactly what it was.

During the hours I was not floating, I worked at the front desk.

That was where I learned to recognize people by the sound they made coming down the hall.

I remember the traders from the Chicago Board Options Exchange. I could hear them before I saw them, fresh from the trading floor and still carrying its velocity in their bodies. They had spent the day shouting orders for sugar or coffee, pushing their voices above hundreds of other voices, working in a system where hesitation could have a price.

They entered SpaceTime still vibrating.

After their floats, they would lower themselves gently into our comfortable couch, as though gravity had become something newly deserving of respect. One of them might pick up the stuffed dolphin and hold it against his chest like a long-lost teddy bear. Then they would sit without speaking, staring into the saltwater aquarium I had installed during my first week managing the facility.

The aquarium had seemed like a simple addition. Something quiet for people to look at while they returned.

But after a float, nothing was merely decorative.

A fish moving slowly through water could hold a person’s complete attention. Bubbles rose. Plants shifted in the current. Light moved across the glass.

These men had spent their day reacting to fluctuations measured in fractions, reading markets, anticipating movement, trying to stay ahead of everyone else’s attention. Now they sat motionless, watching a world that required nothing from them.

No orders to place.

No advantage to seize.

No need to speak first or loudest.

I began to understand that the float did not necessarily empty the mind. It changed the scale of what the mind could receive. A stuffed dolphin became a source of comfort. An aquarium became a landscape. A couch became a place to land.

The traders were only one part of SpaceTime.

Pregnant women came because the water carried what their bodies had been carrying all day. For ninety minutes, weight became suspension. The pressure eased. Their backs released. They could lie in a position no bed or chair could offer them and allow the salt water to take over the work of support.

Veterans came for solace.

I did not know what they experienced behind the closed doors. I knew only how some arrived: alert, contained, carrying a watchfulness that did not switch off merely because the room was quiet. Inside the tank, there was no position to hold, no room to scan, no sound to interpret.

People struggling with addiction came for reprieve.

Not recovery. Not cure.

Something smaller and more honest.

The agitation might soften. The body might stop arguing with itself. Eight hundred pounds of salt held them in the darkness and seemed to draw from them what, outside the tank, only time could take.

For ninety minutes, appetite might loosen its grip.

The next hour did not have to be survived all at once.

Relief.

Solace.

Reprieve.

The words were different because the burdens were different, but the water made no distinction. It held every body by the same physical principle.

That was one of the quiet truths of the place.

Everyone arrived carrying something.

The tanks did not ask for a diagnosis or a history. They did not care whether the weight was physical, remembered, chemical, financial, or unnamed. The water met the body it was given.

For ninety minutes, that body did not have to hold itself up.

There was no correct way to float.

Some people opened the door after ten minutes. Some fell asleep. Some became anxious when the familiar boundaries began to blur. Some emerged talking quickly, eager to report what had happened. Others walked into the reception room quietly and sat as if speech might break something that had not yet settled.

My job was practical.

Keep the water balanced.

Keep the rooms clean.

Provide towels.

Explain the tank without promising what it would mean.

The practical work mattered because transcendence, when people go looking for it, still requires plumbing. The water had to be filtered. The salt left traces on floors and fixtures. Towels accumulated. Bodies entered the solution and bodies left it behind. However far the mind traveled, someone had to prepare the room for the next person.

Then, when the work allowed, I went back to Tank 2.

I closed the door.

I waited for the body to disappear.

Photography taught me that noticing is an outward discipline. Floating suggested that it might also have an inward form.

Not introspection as endless self-analysis. Not the self as the most important subject in the room. Something closer to observation without an object.

To notice a thought without immediately following it.

To recognize an emotion before constructing a story around it.

To feel the mind reaching for distraction when none was available.

We speak about perspective as though it always requires distance.

Step back.

See the larger picture.

Change your angle.

Look from somewhere else.

But perspective can also come from removing distance altogether.

Inside the tank, there was nowhere else to stand. There was no outside position from which to arrange the scene. The observer and the observed occupied the same dark water.

That may be why Tank 2 fit me.

Or perhaps it did not fit me at all. Perhaps it was simply the place where, through repetition, I learned to stop measuring the fit.

Ninety minutes later, the light came on.

The enclosure returned gradually. The edge of the tank. The surface of the water. My hands. My knees. Salt shining on the skin. The solid floor waiting below.

Each time I stood, gravity reintroduced itself.

Each time I opened the door, the visible world rushed back in.

The hallway seemed brighter. Sounds had more shape. Ordinary surfaces announced themselves: tile, glass, paint, metal, condensation. I had gone inward and returned with no photograph, no artifact, nothing I could hold up for another person to examine.

Only a slight change in aperture.

Perhaps inner space was never private in the way I first imagined.

The tank removed other bodies from view, but it did not remove them from the world. Outside the door were the traders, the pregnant women, the veterans, the addicts, each entering alone, each carrying something no one else could fully see.

Inside, the distinctions mattered less. Eight hundred pounds of salt held every body by the same principle. The water did not know occupation from history, injury from appetite, fear from fatigue.

It simply met the weight it was given.

We speak of looking inward as though it leads us farther from one another.

Perhaps the opposite is true.

Stay there long enough and the self becomes less exceptional. Beneath the noise and the practiced explanations, there is the body trying to rest, the mind trying to make sense of itself, the old human wish to be relieved, briefly, of what it has been asked to carry.

No one left the tank free of gravity.

The traders returned to the floor. The pregnant women returned to the growing weight of their children. The veterans returned to memory. The addicts returned to time.

But for ninety minutes, each had floated alone in the same darkness.

And perhaps that is one way we find one another: not by seeing into another person’s inner life, but by remembering that they have one.