Now, I don't normally go in for all that 'hippy-dippy' shit (it's mostly a loads of baws) but when my flatmate went for a float a month or so ago, he said it was fuckin' awesome, and that was good enough for me. I turned up at Floatworks at 12.30 today feeling unusually nervous (it was probably a combination of the fear of the unknown, the heavy breakcore in my CD player and London 'Motherfuckin' Fuckers' Transport - how I loathe the Underground), and was invited to take my shoes off, don a pair of plastic flip-flops, take a seat and fill in some forms. Jeesus, fuckin' flip-flops - this was more hippy-ish than I was expecting.
The forms were just your standard affair, but there was a nice wee bit informing you not to be fucked up on drink or drugs. No no, for today you will be experiencing 'pure' alteration of your consciousness, so you don't wanna be half-cocked already. They gave me a wee booklet to read, and also a menu. 'A menu for what?' you may ask - a menu for....the music! They play music for the first 10 minutes, to ease you into the whole thing, and you get to choose which dreamy, trancey, ambient dirge gets piped into your pod. I only mention this because one of the tracks had, and I shit you not, 'Suitable for vegetarians and vegans', written next it. What the fuck?! I seriously couldn't work out if this was a joke or not. Maybe all the other tracks were made by banging the skulls of minks together while stamping on a pig, I really wouldn't want to hazard a guess.
Okay, onto the float itself. The 'pod' that you get into looks like a Fisher Price version of the thing Neo wakes up in, after being expelled from the Matrix. You get in to the, really quite shallow, water, lie down, press a few buttons to shut the door and turn off the light, and then that's you stuck with nothing but yourself for company for the next hour. The water is jam-packed with salts 'n' shit, so the way you float on the surface is really cool; the water and air are kept at body temperature, so it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins; it's completely silent - the only thing you can hear is the sound of the blood pulsing through your body and and your own, slightly alien sounding, breathing; it feels much more spacious than it actually is - a few times I totally got lost and didn't know what way I was orientated.
Lying there felt a bit like trying to fall asleep - there were random thoughts whizzing about my brain for what felt like hours, but when that subsided (I may actually have fell asleep for a few minutes, it was hard to tell) I started to really enjoy it. I didn't experience any visions, but I'm sure there were a few auditory hallucinations - voices and stuff, which is pretty cool. It makes your body feel really weird, because you feel like you're floating in nothingness - it totally fixed a lot of wee niggling things I had going on, and my fucked back feels a lot better (though hunching over this computer to write this is possibly negating that).
When the hour was up I got up out of the tub and showered all the shit off me, got dressed, paid the nice people, then wandered out into the cold London afternoon, feeling kind of odd. The only way I can describe it is.....well, it was like an 'anti-hangover'. You know that way when you have a slight hangover and everything just feels shit and a bit wrong? Well this was the opposite of that - things just felt right. Maybe it's 'cos it's the first time I've been truly relaxed in years - I mean how often can a 21st Century Westerner really say they just went an hour with absolutely no stimuli whatsoever?
I wandered along the South Bank, Joanna Newsom on the headphones, knowing smirk on the face. A train went by me on the bridge, it had 'Jim is bent' scrawled on it in foot high letters. All was good and right in the world. I still feel kinda peachy right now.
(Oh, and 'No' - I didn't piss in the floatation tank)
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