It\u2019s silent. Actually silent. Not the kind of silent that you get at night, where the house may creak or the wind may blow. Not even the kind of silent that\u2019s broken only by your own movements. I can feel myself move, but I can\u2019t hear it. Sound is just an enormous void; there\u2019s nothing there.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s weird, yeah, but it\u2019s also kind of cool. Where else can you feel that sort of isolation? You\u2019re always hearing something, even if it\u2019s just background noise, but in here? It really is empty. <\/span><\/p>\n On top of that, it\u2019s perfectly dark. Just like with the silence, the darkness is complete. There\u2019s not even the slightest hint of light. I can\u2019t make out so much as an outline. I lift my hand into the air over my eyes and see nothing. I only know it\u2019s there because I can feel the movement of my arm and the impact as drops of water fall from it onto my face. I cannot see any difference between opening and closing my eyes. <\/span><\/p>\n I can feel the water moving around me and if I push enough, I can bump into one of the walls of the tub, so the world isn\u2019t completely blank for me. I can reenter it to some degree. But if I lie still, the tactile stuff starts to fade. I can\u2019t tell what\u2019s in the water and what\u2019s in the air. I can\u2019t feel any part of my body unless I\u2019m actively moving it. Even breathing starts to fade into the background.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s an incredibly cool feeling, to be so completely alone. It\u2019s an isolation of your choosing, like going camping so you can see the stars instead of the smog. But with sensory deprivation, you\u2019re not just trading in one sight for another \u2013 you\u2019re trading in light for darkness. It\u2019s an escape from the entire world, not just the bits that bug you. <\/span><\/p>\n But here\u2019s the secret \u2013 you can choose to perceive a new world inside the tank. I can decide if I want to experience something new, something of my own creation. If I let it, my brain can fill in the gaps. It\u2019s difficult, yes. I have to be able to shut off everything in my mind and just let my brain do it\u2019s own thing. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that. <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s like a waking dream.<\/span><\/p>\n It starts out small, just snippets of voices cracking across your eardrums. You\u2019ve got to train yourself not to resist them, to let the sounds in even as your instinct is to freak out and try to find out where they\u2019re from. You\u2019re not gonna succeed; you are gonna panic.<\/span><\/p>\n They\u2019ll expand from there, once you get comfortable with the input from nowhere. Full sentences and even meaningful ideas will start to pepper your mind. There are voices you recognize, of course, friends and family and the like. I\u2019m never alone in there if I don\u2019t want to be. After a little while, I\u2019ll enter a sort of trance \u2013 all I have to do then is let my mind drift to someone I want to think about and I\u2019ll hear them speaking to me.<\/span><\/p>\n The eyes come next and they start out simple too, with flashes of light and color like clich\u00e9 screensavers. But if I keep myself relaxed, just breathing in and out, letting the sight flow, it starts to organize itself better. The light forms shapes. It goes from a pulsing blob of bright yellow to split squares and circles, with spots of orange, green, and purple scattered all around. It becomes dynamic and dramatic, overwhelming my mind, burying me in a sea of chaotic beauty, as all the while, my friends chatter cheerfully in my ears. <\/span><\/p>\n If you give it long enough, you hit a new stage too \u2013 the merging. The wall between sight and sound falls. I stop hearing voices and start hearing other things, things I can\u2019t even put into words. Sounds that spark explosions of color at the edges of my mind, sounds that open up gaping whirlpools in my imagination, storms of sound that rage like hurricanes, all smashing against one another and filling my mind with a tapestry of senses that pass beyond what I can even classify as a sense. <\/span><\/p>\n The world changes for me. It becomes something unutterably unique.<\/span><\/p>\n The wave I ride in that tank is breathtaking. It is an unparalleled trip, an unmatchable high. And all of it is right there, right now, hiding behind some jagged boulder in the trenches of my mind. All I have to do is flatten the landscape and clear the interference. Create an open, hospitable world. A canvas.<\/span><\/p>\n My brain will take me where I need to go. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s silent. Actually silent. Not the kind of silent that you get at night, where the house may creak or the wind may blow. Not even the kind of silent that\u2019s broken only by your own movements. I can feel myself move, but I can\u2019t hear it. Sound is just an enormous void; there\u2019s nothing … Continue reading Sensory Deprivation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4531,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/seeingvoices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}