In the early 1960s, NASA lightly entertained the notion of sending women to space. The women of the Mercury 13 program were subjected to rigorous physical tests, not least among them a prolonged soak in a lightless tank of water. The established tap-out time for the test was the three-hour mark, when previous subjects had reported the onset of hallucinations. Mercury 13 candidates blew past that, floating for nine, 10 hours before concerned staff intervened. Legend has it that the mothers among them asked if they could come back the next day.
Several decades later, everyone I told about my impending 90-minute float in a sensory deprivation tank professed enthusiasm for the idea. Well, everyone but the friend who texted, “I hate mindfulness so it sounds like torture.” Even though most of us want to wrest our lives away from the little casino in our pockets, casinos are notoriously hard to leave. Mindfulness is often proposed as the solution to the 21st-century condition (including, unironically, by purveyors of mindfulness apps), but finding it can feel like yet another obligation on an already-impossible list of work and wellness goals.
Still, once you’ve decided to add float therapy to that list, choosing where to go may feel like a breeze, with just one purveyor in city limits: Ripple Float and Wellness Center. Located on the ground floor of the Omni Hotel, the spa also offers cryotherapy, massage and infrared sauna sessions. Clientele include sports teams, touring musicians, wedding parties and stressed-out students. Services can be bundled into the “full wellness package” (saving an effective 20% at $199), accessed through monthly memberships (also offering lower rates) or purchased a la carte. In that last case, $69 gets you an hour and a half suspended atop 10 inches of water mixed with the thousand pounds of Epsom salt that produce its otherworldly buoyancy.
After an orientation video and a few waivers, the staff send you on a journey that may feel like equal parts Alice in Wonderland and Stanley Kubrick. You go into a shower that looks perfectly normal except for the white hatch in the back. Once you’ve rinsed off any makeup, lotion and grime, you deliver your clean, naked body through the hatch and into a gleaming chamber—bigger than the clamshell shown in the video, thankfully—and surrender to the water.
The floating chamber is eight feet long and four and a half feet wide with a seven-foot ceiling. Air, water and body are all roughly the same mid-90s temperature. The spa provides a selection of ear plugs as well as menus of light and sound. I’d chosen “calm blues” (the color, not the musical genre) and an ambient float track of “consistent deep tones, wind & distant crickets.” (Also available: classical music, white noise, other nature sounds and chanting). Two large buttons near the door control light and music volume respectively. There is an intercom for emergencies. But isn’t the point of sensory deprivation to leave choices behind? About two minutes in, I turned off the lights and sound.
Curiouser and curiouser. Accurate perception of left versus right was the first sense to go, followed quickly by just about every other axis. I was the needle of a wonky compass. To establish trust with the water, I started off using the provided foam halo for head support but realized however-many minutes in that I truly didn’t need it. It was most relaxing to lean back into the water to my hairline with my arms extended above my head. I eventually stopped worrying whether my brain was making good hypotheses about time and space and enjoyed the (possibly fictional) sensations of tipping and drifting. It became difficult to tell if my eyes were open or closed, but I could almost see stars, galaxies. Reportedly, some people fall asleep (seems wasteful, but you do you). This probably is a good space for practitioners of meditation, but that was not my goal. I was happy enough to engage with whatever thoughts arose. Perhaps this was a version of monkey mind, but if so, at least they were circus monkeys, not your usual nit-pickers. My mind was not so much emptied as decluttered: a room I could get back to using for its intended purpose.
Compass needles, monkeys, clean rooms. The float rendered metaphors porous and susceptible to mixing. I was in the Milky Way. I was in the womb. That scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the astronaut baby and the monolith was starting to make sense. And although time is a construct, at the end of 90 Earth minutes (I would’ve guessed it had been 20), the blue light returned and a gentle recorded voice announced the end of the session.
Leaving the pod, I felt truly sorry for newborns. At least I already knew about light and gravity and jackhammers on Temple Street.
After my float, I completed what general manager Stephen Baldino referred to as a “day at the beach” by moving from salt water to the infrared sauna. It was nice: a private booth hovering around 140 degrees, again with choice of light color. The sauna was equipped with a tablet that could summon music or even Netflix, but that didn’t feel quite right. So I read a novel for the duration of the 45-minute session, which wasn’t nearly as sweaty as a traditional sauna experience.
The device you’re using to read this can take you to a moonshot’s worth of data, both researched and anecdotal, about the possible boons of these therapies (memory enhancement, reduced blood pressure and inflammation, relief from pain and insomnia and PTSD, etc., etc). But short of having specific medical reasons to try them, maybe it’s better not to think so much. Some of us just need to loosen our grip on space, time and to-do lists. Wally Funk’s ability to float in the dark did not convince NASA to send her to space in the ’60s, but maybe it sustained her dream until she caught a ride with Blue Origin in 2021.
What I found that afternoon at Ripple was more than the sum of its potential physical benefits. It was a kind of concentrated sabbatical, and two Earth days later, my feet haven’t fully come back to ground.
Written and photographed by Sarah Harris Wallman.
