So the way it worked when I went was, I reserved a time slot—I want to say it was at least over an hour long, I don’t honestly remember but it may have even been multiple hours—and then I showed up a few minutes before I was scheduled to start.

The facility’s employees explained how it worked to me, and then they took me to my own special isolated room. It basically looked like a hotel bathroom; there was a contact case and saline for my contacts on a small IKEA-type tabletop, some towels, some earplugs, and a shower cubicle with little soaps and body washes I was told didn’t have harmful chemicals in them. The only things that set it apart were the inclusion of a clock on the wall the door was on, that the shower had no walls or bathtub, so it was like a YMCA shower without a curtain wall, and that on the wall opposite the door I entered from, there was a step up to a big stainless steel door—which I understood to be the actual sensory deprivation chamber.

I was told that I had a fifteen minute buffer built into the start and end of the timeslot so I could change and rinse off before and after getting into the chamber. So, as instructed, I stripped down to nudies, put in the foam earplugs while I was still dry, and showered well, using all three of the soaps they gave me to get dead cells and chemicals and paraffins and filth off of myself before going and marinating. I then took out my contacts, readied myself, and once my fifteen minute buffer was over, I stepped into the chamber.

The way it worked was, basically, it was a little rectangular chamber, probably about five feet wide and eight feet from the entrance to furthest point. This little chamber had walls made of (I think) thick glass, and it had a floor kind of like a wide bathtub filled to about calf-height with water that was so hyper-saturated with epsom salt, you would float on it without touching the walls or bottom of the tub. And all of this was nested within a greater room filled with absolute darkness, which I’m sure houses filtration and monitoring systems to pump the water out once someone’s done.

I stepped in, and the water was lukewarm—it was about body temperature. The room itself was warm and humid, and smelled like epsom salt for some reason, but not in an aggressive or uncomfortable way; I guess it kind of smelled like “clean”, more than anything. I shut the door behind me and it was totally dark. You could close your eyes or not, it didn’t matter. I turned around to face the door, sat down, and then lied back and floated, trying to relax as much as possible with my hands by my sides. I seem to remember kind of probing the space at first, but once I realized doing so (as well as moving at all) was kind of ruining the effect, I stopped.

It was truly a very interesting and peaceful experience. I didn’t, like, see God or anything, but I think managed to slip a few times into a sort of trance state, as awareness of my senses slowly slipped from my body and my mind had to compensate. It was like I was getting short episodes of a very deep meditative experience, forgetting about my body and becoming just thoughts for awhile, until it all would come to a crashing halt due to intruding thoughts involving my subjective perception of, like, my hands, or the water, or something.

When my time was up, as I was told would happen, an employee entered my shower room and knocked a few times on the chamber door, waiting for a response to indicate I heard them. I swear I thought I had hallucinated it for a few seconds, until I heard it again a little clearer, and with myself fully awake again. I knocked back, and waited a few seconds for them to leave the chamber; then, I stood up and got out of the chamber, showered the epsom salt off of myself, dried off and got dressed, put my contacts back in, and finally re-emerged to the loud shitty noisy city traffic above, suddenly keenly aware of all the noise I was totally ignoring not a few hours earlier.

I then went down to the pier and had a burger and watched the sun go down. It was a lovely time and I’d do it again.

Basically that. It’s meant to be a noiseless, temperature free space, where you’re meant to feel separate from everything.