Floating in the Void: My Deprivation Tank OBE and Why I’m Questioning If I’m Actually Me
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Honestly, I signed up for a sensory deprivation tank mostly to see if I could finally get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. Being a new mom in Lubbock means my circadian rhythm is basically a suggestion at this point. But instead of napping, I floated there for an hour and half my nervous system just decided to clock out. Like, full-on out-of-body experience. I was watching the ceiling tiles from a point about six inches above my own shoulders, completely weightless, while my actual body just… powered down.
My graphic designer brain keeps trying to render it in layers—base mesh, opacity masks, you name it—but you can’t just Ctrl+Z your way out of that kind of shift. I’ve read enough Jung to know that when you strip away external stimuli, the psyche starts projecting its own architecture. Carl Jung wrote extensively about how the ego loosens its grip during sensory withdrawal, and that tracks with what happened. But reading about dissociation and actually watching yourself from the third row is wildly different. It wasn’t scary, just… intensely quiet. And weirdly clarifying.
In tarot terms, I’m pretty sure I just sat in the energy of The Hanged Man for sixty minutes. Total surrender. You can’t force an OBE, you just have to stop fighting the void long enough for it to swallow you whole. My brain kept trying to anchor to mundane stuff—did I remember to pack the diaper bag?—but the tank just gently dissolved those thoughts into static.
Now I’m sitting here with a three-month-old who hasn’t even figured out object permanence yet, and I’m trying to wrap my head around what this means for how I raise them. If the “self” is just a curated collection of sensory inputs and narrative habits, what am I actually passing on? I don’t want to raise a little dogmatist, but I also don’t want to hand them a spiritual blank slate and say “figure it out.”
I’m still processing the whole thing. Part of me thinks it’s just mild dissociation from chronic sleep deprivation and a tank full of Epsom salts. Another part thinks consciousness is way less tethered to the skull than we’re led to believe. Either way, it left a weird quiet in my chest that I haven’t shaken. Has anyone else tried the tank and walked away questioning their own ontological footing? Or am I just overthinking because I run on three hours of sleep and aggressively cold coffee?
(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: DMT and Spirituality: The Molecule of God, or Psychedelic Experience? | Mystic Wiki.)
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