Spinning in infinity / He says, "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" I lean my head back into the salt water, in the deep dark, immersing my long hair in the slippery water, careful, careful, don't let it get in my eyes or mouth—it's 10 inches of water with a concentration of 40% Epsom salts. The tank or "pod" is coffin-shaped and it's close and humid in there, but I don't panic, I just check it out, floating easily—they were right, my head won't sink, it can't, my face is safe. My ears are submerged, but that's good because the silence is even deeper--a bit of heart and lung noise from me, but that's it. Okay, where are the boundaries of the tank? I don't have to try to find them because I keep lightly banging into them. If I push off from one side, even with my little finger, at some point in the near future I'll drift into the other side. The secret is to stop moving and allow my skin to find its equilibrium with the water temperature, which is about 97 degrees F. Then the water disappears, just as sight and sound have vanished, and the spinning feeling is there, a vertigo that I imagine is outer space, until I accidentally drift into the side again with just my little finger, but it's enough to briefly ruin the illusion.
My neck keeps hurting, and Jordan, one of Float On's employees, tells me afterward that neck pain is common during the first floats as the body learns to let go of that everyday tension. I start to unwind my physical tension--it takes a while for some release to come--and then I let my mind go even more. It's blackness and blessed quiet, inside me and outside me. For a while, I wonder and feel a bit disappointed that I'm not having some mental light show with rainbows and unicorns and lasers, the visual trip that comes with the brain's theta waves. I think of the stories of Salvador Dali taking naps with a spoon in his hand; when he dropped the spoon, that meant he had just entered the hypnagogic state, just beginning to dream lucidly, and so he would get up and paint when his imagination was strongest. I thought that was the "goal" of my float when I suddenly realized that the blackness and quiet, the alpha waves, were my first gift. And I relaxed even more.