Month: August 2017

I watched a Christopher Nolan* movie recently on the long flight home – holy-moly, who understands or follows any of his plots on first viewing as they weave in and out, forward and back in undefined flash-forwards and backs? – and one of the main characters ejected from a doomed space station in a streamlined, white pod that zoomed through the atmosphere before plunging into the ocean.

I didn’t actually plunge but tentatively tried “a float’ in a space-aged pod to recover from my walk in Europe. Sleek and gently oval in shape, the pod is loaded with 500Kg of Epsom salts and the water gently heated to body temperature, allowing you to float and relax while the magnesium salts permeate the skin and relax tired muscles.

Remarkable therapeutic benefits, relieving stress, pain, fatigue, arthritis and fibromyalgia, are just some of the benefits claimed for the float and I was keen to try. Who wouldn’t? Described by some as otherworldly, a pure, blissful experience accompanied by deep feelings of lightens and grace.

Anyway, I turned up for this new adventure and there it was – the pod from the Nolan movie that had crashed into the ocean, only this one was sleeker and more inviting, a smooth, eggshell shape, yawning temptingly before me, soft internal pastel lights changing automatically.

I stepped into knee deep, warm water, pulled the (escape) hatch down, and lay back on the subtly shifting water as it adjusted so perfectly that I was barely aware of floating.

With the hatch down, it was stygian black – I couldn’t actually say ‘inside’, because I had no sense of the space around me, where right or left were, and which way was up or down – and alone, I floated or drifted in complete silence and darkness not knowing if my eyes were open or closed. There was no current, no movement until I thrashed around trying to centre myself, as if that were important.

I suddenly realised that everything I was experiencing then came from within me. There was no distraction, no outside stimuli to lead my wandering mind, nothing to look at, and nothing to hear or see. Deprived of most of the usual senses, I hung there passively, doing nothing.

Things are so black that I could imagine seeing vivid, other worldly scenes but all I saw was nothing. It reminded me of a comic scene where one character says, appreciatively, ‘ah, the sound of silence’ and the other character responds, ‘what? I don’t hear anything.’

I giggled then and listened to the sound of my heart and the blood pulsing in my body and then it was all over and I stepped out into the “chill-out” room with a cup of herbal tea. Did I feel lighter, more vibrant, was I boosted, were my dopamine and endorphin levels brimming over?

Not knowing what my endorphin or dopamine levels were before, it was difficult to say if they were raised after the float but I certainly felt pleased with myself for no apparent reason, and there might even have been a bounce to my step and my hair definitely felt fluffy!

 

* Christopher Nolan directed Inception, Momento, Batman Begins, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Dunkirk, among others