Floatation tank: watching yourself sleep

I first introduced floatation and meditation into my life a few years ago, and have watched myself progress through many personal lessons and developments. I have seen radical shifts in my mood, my emotional intelligence and my general awareness — and a lot of this I owe to the insights and serenity I have been able to experience in the tank.

Although deep relaxation is not guaranteed every float, it is a natural response to the environment, and I have found a variety of meditations helpful in allowing me to relax and let the natural process take place.

Focusing my attention on the breath, the heartbeat, or a single thought are basic and have been instrumental — but recently a more interesting move has been the observation of focus itself. Unlike conscious attention, which you can more or less direct at will, our unconscious attention — our consciousness, or state of mind — is not so easy to control, but it can be watched as it gradually drifts from the busiest of brain states to a state of deep relaxation.

I recommend this simple exercise, which can be done anytime — even as you're falling asleep at night — but, due to the natural impact of the float tank on your system, is easiest experienced in the tank.

Whilst floating in the pod, adrift in the thick, warm, silky water, simply watch your mind. A gentle focus on the breath can be useful.

As the relaxation response begins to kick in, your mind becomes more quiet, and you start to get glimpses of real focus, or presence, between thoughts. Notice these glimpses. They feel different — you're not just thinking of focusing on the breath, but slowly, for milliseconds at a time, your entire experience actually becomes the breath.

Thus, as you settle down, not only does your body respond, but you can watch it responding — watch the progression of your thoughts slowing. It's as if your mind is slowly falling, dropping through layers of activity, one by one.

Over time these pockets of focus expand, your mind becomes ever more quiet, and fewer thoughts arise. Watch; marvel at the spaciousness. Notice how different this is from waking moments. But careful — if you begin to marvel too much, you will stimulate the frontal cortex and, slowly but surely, begin to drift upwards.

For many, this is about as deep as it goes at first, but it doesn't stop you from being able to watch the progression, and there's no limit to how deep you can go with time. It is a beautiful process — not only because it shows that you can actually attain levels of awareness, but because you've been doing it every night for your entire life. Just now you're taking note: the descent through these brain states is part of the process of falling asleep and waking up. We pass through these states every day.

The most fascinating part of this exercise is seeing how far down you can watch yourself. For me, there's a point where I know I've reached a deep level of consciousness, close to falling asleep — but as soon as I try to know that I know, I start to drift back up. I first noticed it when taking naps. The change from midday activity to sleep is a long descent through levels of brain activity; as I ascended from various states, I noticed the sounds of the day solidifying around me, and realised that at some point I'd stopped hearing them.

This, to me, has become a sort of game — a challenge to see how far I can go. Perhaps one day I'll go beyond where I can watch myself, and sink deeper and deeper into the experience. Maybe I can watch myself all the way to sleeping, and beyond. The Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman wrote about this in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, which is where I got the idea — his father once asked him to imagine Martians who never slept, and to describe for them exactly how the mind turns off, whether thoughts simply stop, or slow down less and less rapidly until they fade.

Your awareness is real

Not only is this a fun and interesting exercise, it is itself a type of meditation. It is, by definition, self-awareness.

I believe that when we don't know where we are, so to speak, we're prone to living unintentionally. We can hurt both ourselves and others, making negative decisions over and over. This is why, for me, one of the most fulfilling benefits of meditation is what is sometimes called the expansion of the "gap" — the space between a thought or event arising and your emotional reaction to it. After some time meditating, your everyday experience becomes more spacious, more "gap-ful", and awareness expands not only to your thoughts but also to your feelings and beyond.

What this exercise (and floating in general) taught me is that I can observe how "gap-ful" I'm being in any given moment — or, in other words, how reactive. This is a skill I've come to call "finding myself", whether I'm lost in thought, caught up in my emotions, or somewhere else entirely. It doesn't mean I have complete control over my awareness — far from it. It simply means I'm able to go through my day and know where I am most of the time.

A simple example: when you're deep in a book (or your phone), you may have noticed that after reading or scrolling for a while, you finally look up and suddenly hear the clock ticking. Was that ticking the whole time? When did my sister come in?! Awareness in these moments means you can almost feel your attention being gently drawn from the ideas on the page back into your physical reality. While reading, you weren't aware of the texture of the chair on your arm, or the taste of your breath. Those signals were coming in, but your attention wasn't there to focus on them.

This can explain why it's so hard to transition away from work. If I'm in the middle of writing a sentence and my partner comes in with some tea, she would probably feel appreciated if I turned, looked her in the eyes and said thank you. But I'm caught up in my work, and I know that in about fifteen seconds I'll need to get back into the sentence, so my brain is reluctant to close the drawer on the idea.

This isn't just me — you do it too. Every time someone tries to talk to you while you're writing, or halfway down your feed, how much of you is really there? The practice, for me, is to feel it — to strive to take notice in those moments. The benefit is that I can either pull myself further into reality with her, or explain later that when I'm absorbed in work it's almost impossible to notice anything else. Without that knowledge and dialogue, she might think I'm ungrateful or don't value her — when the reality is that I want nothing more than to be fully present with her in every moment.

This is one simple way in which floating has helped my life, and I believe it can help yours too. Good luck.

— By Camilo