I turn off the shower and step into the dark. The water there is silken and viscous. Lying down, I feel nothing. The water is precisely body temperature; the bottom of the float tank is textureless, neither hard nor bumpy nor soft; the air is absolutely still, just shy of a vacuum; my contours are supported effortlessly and evenly by a supersaturated solution of magnesium sulfate and dihydrogen monoxide at a relative density of 1.3. If a waterbed’s outer covering surrounded each of its water molecules—it feels a bit like that.

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I am at Halcyon Floats, in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, which calls itself “Philly's longest-tenured [since 2014] and most experienced resource for sensory deprivation.” I’m here for the afternoon because I’ve been curious about sensory deprivation as an experience and as a trend and because I’ve been living in survival mode, in denial of having burned out years before this, and can’t shut up about how stressed I am. A patient and forbearing friend gifted me their Groupon for a free one-hour float.

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In the tank I first hear water: my nervous system acclimating to a new space. Splish… plink… dwop-dwop… My feet are there and there; my arms are about this far from the sides of the tank. If I fold my hands behind my head I feel as if I’m tipping toward vertical. I remind myself that this is impossible in ten inches of fluid.

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There is nothing to smell, nothing to taste. The only light is the light behind my closed eyes, a pinpoint of purple that appears whenever I meditate. My eyes open to pitch-black nothingness for the first time. For an instant, I am in a void: not just alone in the world—that’s

easy enough—but existing in a world made of nothing. That’s the unnerving part. Nothing to orient to. For a nanosecond I am nothing and nowhere.

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That is when I notice my heartbeat. Still alive, still tethered to that primordial engine that regulates all beings. My pulse is quick, exposing my anxiety and the incongruity of a stressed-out human in an alien-like spa full of pods like this one. I quiet my heart. I play with it, will it higher, up to 72 beats per minute or so. Down to 60…52… then lowest. Under 50, where even someone with a finely honed sense of time and its subdivisions (an inevitable byproduct of life as a musician) stops counting and just goes by feel.

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“Total sensory deprivation” does overstate the experience, though. There is always feeling—even quadriplegics and people living with multiple sclerosis feel some kind of tactile sensation. More important, proprioception and interoception—our sense of where we are in space and our ability to feel or sense internal sensations such as heartbeat—are always with us at varying levels of awakeness. It is next to impossible to lose a sense of where you are for more than a few moments. But here, it is all interoception and no proprioception. I could be in space right now. I could be in a womb.

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As listening, breathing, and feeling function as one, tangled thoughts unspool in tandem with muscle fibers that relax of their own accord. Deep listening returns the mind to a state barely beyond cilia swimming in goo. As it awakens and relaxes, thoughts seem to spill out gently, as if emptying, but really are the mind trying to hold on, to figure out, because even in near total darkness and near total silence in a body of water designed to simulate an out of body experience, the thoughts just keep on coming.

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Perhaps this formlessness and silence is where people go when they go looking for God: In the beginning was silence. Then, a sound. A hum of the great fundamental, reverberating the partials of an infinite harmonic series. And from that sound emerged a shape, an almost-form, and that almost-form fell into a denser place and created there another shape made of sound and light and just enough stardust to give it mass. And that mass held inside it the sound; it stayed tethered to its source. And this happened again and again, droplets of sound mixed with light and dust, and those droplets created new droplets, until it was raining a symphony that storms and swirls and rages still.

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Or is this state of deep listening and relaxed awareness merely the closest possible view of the map of what some might call beingness? Researchers at the Human Connectome Project at the University of Southern California have been mapping all the neural connections in the brain using data from thousands of functional MRIs – not only the function of individual neurons or groups of neurons, but all their points of connection. In other words: not just finding New York and Paris and Singapore and all the points in between, but all the routes to all the points. And they’ve found a fascinating thing. They have found that, while some connections are innate and common among all the brains studied, others are learned and shared only among people who share genetic material. Much like DNA is passed from generation to generation, so may be the connections within our brains, informing the way we think and gesture and possibly even believe. Is that what I’m listening for? When I lie in a magnesium bath in nearly total black silence, am I watching the brain’s neurons finding their way along the pathways in the dark, illuminated only by the briefest electrical flashes? If so, then the deeper the listening and the longer the floating, the stronger and more numerous the neural connections inside the brain.

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I can’t be sure that this state is any better than the typical modern state of stress and relative disarray, or why anyone would want to stay here longer than an hour or two at a time. As any Zen monk will tell you, there isn’t much point in mastering the mind unless you can apply it to hitting a bullseye or creating a work of art or music with just the right amount of wabi sabi to indicate that the perfection of the universe is made more perfect when it is touched by an imperfect hand. And besides, it appears that neon freeway map of the brain will keep building new roads whether anyone notices or not. Those connections will keep impelling us to create new things in the world. It is the nature of the human brain to keep innovating, just as it is its nature to make music and, occasionally, to try to see itself. This is blameless. It’s human nature to grope and grasp. Perhaps the greatest power of the human brain is its ability to seek patterns and tell stories in order to explain itself.

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Did you know that when you crack your wrists while you are submerged in a supersaturated solution of Epsom salt and water, it sound-feels like snapping a live electrical wire? Or what I imagine that feels like when I’ve seen it happen in the wild, like when lightning flashes uncomfortably close or a power line falls in the middle of a storm? There is the sound: silver filament whipped against marble. And there is the feel: mild shock, like static in a dry winter. It’s probably the alarm of the sensation, but the jolt up my spine and into my head feels as if a live current has zipped through me. I wonder if it’s always this way, if this ricochet of impulses is constantly running in the background, animating us, and we’re missing it because we’ve created such a noisy world. We’ve drowned ourselves out. I hear a grade-school teacher from my past, or a fictional librarian, or some composite character complain that we kids are being so loud she can’t hear herself think. It’s one of the things we do, we humans.

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As I float away from it all, I feel myself inhale and exhale. My breathing apparatus is finely tuned and highly trained—I’ve run marathons; I dance for hours on end; I use my breath to play music and sing—and yet, without gravity to resist, I discover new pockets of lung tissue to fill, and air flows freely from my body as from a bellows for what feels like minutes at a time. I hear-feel the long in and out. Soon the air in the tank is breathing me, and it speaks not as a breeze but as a roar.

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I listen and become aware of a future version of me writing about this moment. I imagine that future me from inside this watery cocoon and can only imagine her writing from an intensely first-person point of view. I am aware of an unwritten rule about writing personal essays that a mentor recently shared with me: Never begin an essay with the first person singular. Always begin by looking outward, setting a scene, presenting the compelling conflict, hinting at a guiding question. When I took that in, I started seeing writers breaking this rule all the time. I saw even more disguising their opening “I” with qualifying phrases like “When the doors closed I…” or “It might have been my imagination, but I…” Still, I held to this rule that, upon examination, seems more like pet peeve and projection than an ironclad characteristic of good writing, and measured my writing by it. I wonder if I measured my entire worth by it, by my ability to make as much of my experience as possible not about me.

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And as that future me, writing now and remembering this, I am aware of all the “I” in here. I wonder if it’s good enough. I worry that it is too self-involved to be interesting or valuable. I I I I I. It’s supposed to bore me, even offend me. But as I write, and rewrite, and rewrite, I am neither bored nor offended. But I am self-conscious. I feel naked, and a bit unsafe, exposed. I hear old messages: Who do I think I am? What I think doesn’t matter. And I mustn’t feel offended by that, either, lest I sound like a victim, which as a person of some privilege in the big scheme of things, I certainly am not. Shh.

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Just shy of my allotted 90 minutes, I am antsy. Body is awake, and the mind, now joyful, wants matter to play in. I curve my body into the shape of a C, first to the right, then to the left, back and forth until I start to feel like a fish flopping about in the shallows. I turn myself around, 180 degrees from my two-minutes-ago self. I search for light and find a glow beginning to magnify through the glass door. A magnet in my body gravitates toward it. The movement is making me warm, the water uncomfortably tepid. Time’s almost up. I prepare to rebirth myself back into reality, but not without first wondering if I have glimpsed a miniscule village of electricity in a massive web of connectomes, hanging in the sea from the sky.