Um – what is an isolation tank, you ask?

“An isolation tank is a lightless, soundproof tank in which subjects float in salty water at skin temperature. They were first used by John C. Lilly in 1954 in order to test the effects of sensory deprivation. Such tanks are now also used for meditation and relaxation and in alternative medicine. Isolation tanks were originally called sensory deprivation tanks. Other synonyms for isolation tank include float tank, floating tank, floater tank, flotation tank, REST tank, flotation baths, John Lilly tank and sensory attenuation tank.”

-Wikipedia Entry on Isolation Tanks

Ironically, the film Altered States is even (loosely) based on the work of John Lilly, although I don’t think in real life he de-evolved into an ape and went on a rampage attacking people and eating raw animal flesh. :)

A few days ago I happened to find a nugget of gold at my local used bookstore. Sitting on the shelf, almost offensively in the new age section, I saw John Lilly’s definitive book on his research into isolation tanks, titled The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique.

Published all the way back in 1977, this book is a bit of mixture of 2 things – scholarly research into sensory deprivation via the isolation tank & how it effects the brain, and the philosophical underpinnings of the experiences and what it means as far as reality/mind.

About half the chapters convey a very scholarly approach on the topic at hand, covering everything from how to build a tank, to problems, obstacles, issues you might have in using the tank, to what to expect in the tank, to how they conducted their research, and so on. This is based on 20 years of research.

The other chapters are somewhat strange and occasionally hard to follow  – these are the chapters with Lilly espousing his ideas on reality, but (for me) too often draped in very scientific and mathematical terms.

It’s more than that though – he has this unique angle of how he writes & even a separate vocabulary of words and concepts that now, in 2008, sound quite odd to me. For instance, he regularly uses words such “biocomputer” , “metabelief”, “cybernetic” and “inperience”. External reality becomes e.r, and internal reality becomes i.r. Lilly constantly jumps his words together using a bracket or hyphen to connect similar concepts, resulting in very odd sentences such as “most other minds are not prepared to hear-understand-grasp what it means to explore-experiment-be-immersed-in such states.”

But don’t get me wrong here – it sounds like I’m putting down Lilly, and I’m not. He’s become a sort of personal hero to me, as I feel drawn to his passion for wanting to understand and his bravery and dedication towards using himself as a research subject, even at the cost of his own personal life and professional life.

I truly think he was tortured by his search for understanding, and this passion was the guiding principle of all his actions, no matter what the cost.

On page 72, he writes:

“Many of my former colleagues disavowed me…I understand their belief systems and the power such system have over our minds. I do not recriminate them, nor do I blame formers friends for not maintaining contact with me.

In my search (for “What is Reality?”), I have driven myself (and hence, close associates-relative-friends) to the brink of the loss of all communicational contacts for months at a time…. I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentually equipped to enter these domains.”

These chapters on reality contain some of the most fascinating pieces in the book, with Lilly mapping out stages and ranges of consciousness/experience and exploring the old mind / brain / body problem (but in a way that I felt he was adding to the argument, and not just rehashing the same old ideas).

Finally, at the end of the book, we get to read logs of peoples experiences in the tank!

This is maybe the best part of the book.

Really, I had no idea just how far out you can go through sensory deprivation inside one of these tanks.

Some of the experience reports are so far out there, I have to wonder if they were conducting the experiment in combination with a psychedelic substance. (Lilly and friends were no stranger to LSD and other drugs, by the way!)

I want to quote at length from these logs, because I think the reports of the actual experience make for a more immediate understanding of what isolation tanks are all about.

Take a look at these excerpts:

“Gradually I seemed to make a head-on 180 degree roll so that I was facing down into an impenetrable night. Dawn broke from the eastern horizon, illuminating a vast desert of glittering sand a hundred feet below me. The sand became transparent and directly below me was a polished black granite monolith……in the center…was encased a sculptor of Jill. The effigy was of monumental size… when her eyes met mine, two lines of graphite streaked across the desert, straight to the source of sunrise beyond the distant mountains.”

“Immediately experienced floating out of body shell. Roamed and sauntered through a kind of cosmic park, full of density but infinite boundaries. People’s images occasionally came in and out of this…. Then as wondered on this, sudden enlightenment  – there is no such things as separate consciousness.”

“Although nothing happened in the first two sessions, hallucinations were experienced nearly every time thereafter…. They would continue for hours. I was always aware that I was hallucinating and part of my mind was nearly always making observations. There were the usual out of body…hallucinations…. When I moved my hands (actually in the water) I would see them move and sky appear between the fingers. I have later had imaginary flights over scenery. “

“I lost boundaries and time sense, immediately disappeared and I experience total peace and a feeling of unity…. What I experienced was a continuous void that was not boring, yet empty, not engaging, yet full.”

“Moving into an absolute void (experienced as consciousness of the interstellar space.) Timelessness. No difference between minutes and millions of years. Ending up the experience with feelings of regeneration, purification, refreshment, clarify.”

(This last quote is from Stan Grof. You may recognize his name. Interesting, I also saw Andrew Weil in the name of tank loggers, along with Richard Feynman (Yes, the Richard Feynman of quantum physicists fame. He spent something like 35 hours in the tank for Lilly’s research), and Ralph Metzner. )

…..

I really cannot believe how “far out” these logs read though. Many times over, I get the impression that floating in the tank, consciousness becomes like that of a dream. Sometimes people can direct the hallucinations, creating a sort of waking life lucid dream hallucination. This just blows my mind!

Why don’t more people know about this?

Why isn’t the use of these tanks more common?

I am now on the hunt for a tank in my area, as I really want to try out the experience* for myself!

*or as John Lilly would say, inperience.

The story revolves around a young scientist named Eddie Jessup, whose interest in his work overshadows everything else, including not only his marriage to but even his own well-being.

I read that the actors experimented with ketamine while making this film. I thought this was strange but awesome of them. Later on I discovered why they did it; ALTERED STATES is based on the life and work of scientist, writer, and ketamine-enthusiast John Lilly.

I did some searching and found an incredibly fascinating interview with John Lily interview on the Erowid archives, originally appearing in Omni magazine, about his life and his work and a bit on the film Altered States.

Learning more about Lily’s personality, life, and work made me appreciate this film even more. He, just like the character in Altered States, was driven nearly to madness, and almost to his death, for his passionate and all-consuming interest in exploring his own mind with drugs. This was no joke to him. I was astonished to learn that Lily once spent 100 days straight on ketamine.

Despite the fact that this makes him sound like a crackpot, he was a real scientist with a number of mainstream accomplishments under his belt. He is credited with inventing the sensory deprivation tank in order to learn if the brain needed external stimuli to “stay awake.” He also devoted much research into inventing a technique for communication between humans and dolphins. (I would very much like to know where this research went; in the interview, nearly 25 years ago, he states that we’re about five years away from breaking the language barrier between humans and dolphins.) He also published many books over the years on his own experiences and scientific research.

….

I loved ALTERED STATES from the very beginning – the sense deprivation tank, the crazy drug trips, the religious nature of his hallucinations (including burning crosses, visions of hell, and scenes from the Book of Revelations). I also enjoyed spotting the side references to Charles Tart, Timothy Leary, and amanita muscaria. (And being that I was born in 1980, I’m sure I missed quite a few other things key to 60′s and 70′s drug culture.)

The plot moves along pretty quickly and goes something like this:

• After attending a shamanic religious ritual and tripping with a bunch of Indians, Eddie brings back a few grams of the drug for scientific analysis.

• Once he combines this unknown drug with the sensory deprivation tank, the movie really kicks up it’s psychedelic heels and takes you for a crazy ride.

• At this point, these trips in the tank have become much more than just journeys of the mind. The combination of the sensory deprivation tank with this unknown drug allow him to tap into the genetic history contained within every cell of his body. First he regresses into a primal, pre-human ape-like creature. Ultimately, by the end of the film, he regresses back to the very beginning of existence itself, terrified by the overwhelming nothing that he becomes one with, and saved from it only by his love for his wife, Emily.

Some of the imagery is fitting for a horror film and I certainly don’t recommend anyone trip while watching this fun. Ultimately this film is a throwback to a post-60’s scientific culture when scientists were allowed to experiment with mind-altering substances in the lab. If you’ll excuse some of the cheesy dialogue and the under-developed romance between Eddie and Emily, you’ll find a fascinating film about drugs, the brain, and the nature of reality.

Sidenote: I’ve not had the chance to get inside a sensory deprivation tank but would really enjoy doing so. I would love to hear from you if you’ve had a chance to use one. I’d also be curious to know where it is and how you were able to use it. Maybe you’d want to write something about your experience and we can post it on the blog?

To this end, he has invented a technique to stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain via magnetic pulses. The resulting device is known as the “God Helmet”, and in his lab people wearing it have experienced all sorts of wild and paranormal sensations - invisible presences, alien abductions, meeting the devil, out of body experiences and so on.

Since no one else in the room sees or experiences these things, this certainly lends evidence to the idea that the experiences are taking place in the brain and not in physical reality.

Personally, I have little problem accepting that out of body experiences (and associated phenomenon) take place within the brain. I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong – in fact I would LOVE to be proven wrong – but I’ve just not seen any solid evidence that points to the OBE as actually being a physically real experience.

Either way, I would love to be a subject in one of these tests and I fully support research into understanding what’s happening in the brain when we have mystical, out of body, and near-death experiences.

Question:

If we know how to physically manipulate the brain in order to experience out of body sensations, near-death experiences, the presence of (invisible) beings, aliens, demons, and angels, etc – does this mean that there is no value to these experiences?

Recently I saw the movie eXistenZ by David Cronenburg. It’s about a fully-encompassing virtual reality game, where of course, something screwy happens and you begin to question what’s real and what’s not.

To play, you have to surgically install a “bio-port” at the base of the spine that the game plugs into. Conceivably, the game interacts with the brain via the nervous system via the spine. Users then “plug in” and are transported into full-scale virtual world in which they can interact with others and the environment, just like they would in the real world. Pretty neat.

Ultimately, eXistenZ suffers the same fate of so many other science fictions film; cheesy characters, bad acting, with predictable scenes all along the way.

But 45 minutes into the film it actually goes from “this is starting to suck” to “okay this is getting interesting” once they go into the game known as eXistenZ.

Anyhow, the movie got me thinking about lucid dreaming and virtual reality, and how similar the two experiences are.

There’s a scene in existenz where they’re speaking in front of a game character about the fact that they’re in a game, and guy just stands there, wobbling back in forth, in a “game loop,” not understanding what they’re saying. This cracked me up and reminds me so much of just the general weirdness that the existence of a dream character entails, and how strange it can be to tell a dream character that they are just part of your dream.

Beyond this little snippet though, the overall experience of being in an “unreal” environment that fully encompasses all the senses is what makes lucid dreaming and virtual reality so very similar. Obviously, lucid dreaming is a kind of virtual reality, and I think it rightfully fuels an interest in the development of virtual reality systems.

However, I don’t think the reverse will be true.

Virtual reality, once possible, could very likely have a negative effect on the growing culture of lucid dreaming.

Because, let’s face it – lucid dreaming is hard!

If you could simply enter into a virtual world at the touch of a button, wouldn’t you do it?

And wouldn’t it be awesome?!

Ah…but it’s just a fantasy right?

Well, I really don’t think so. If global warming or a nuclear war doesn’t ruin everything, we could develop the technology for virtual reality systems here in a few decades.

If this sounds ridiculous – and it probably does, considering, well, futurists are always wrong – go grab a snack, get comfortable, put on your thinking cap and then read this presentation by Ray Kurzweil titled The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century.

Ray Kurzweil is one of a few dozen figureheads who speak about the exponential acceleration of technology, and how this is going to result in a “Singularity.”

This term has become somewhat of fuzzy concept with lots of different meanings, but it’s safe to say it includes the point where we create an Artificial Intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. Once this AI is created, it will create increasingly more capable AI’s, who in turn do the same, and so on, creating a point at which the future simply whisps off into a singularity beyond our capacity to even imagine.

Whew!

(Yeah, that’s a lot to take in. I realize it sounds pretty absurd if you’re hearing it for the first time. If you’d like to learn more, get ready to have your mind blown so hard that it’s gonna splatter on a nearby wall and check out The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil and Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau. Radical Evolution is a more unbiased look at what’s coming and I recommend reading it first for anyone not already familiar with Kurzweil’s ideas.)

Anyhow:

What’s this got to do with lucid dreaming?

Nothing in particular, just that I think those of us who are fascinated with the idea of being in a lucid dreaming world where we can do whatever we want will likely find it fascinating that we’ll be able to replicate this concept virtually, without going to sleep, without any special skills, without supplements, and without techniques, cheaply and easily here a few decades.

Supposedly.

For me personally -

If I could enter into a virtual world at the click of a button, I bet I’d eventually spend much less time exploring the world of dreams.

What would you do?

And so I present to you a very short but interesting interview with Joe Griffin.
Is there a relationship between the mechanism behind dreams and the mechanism behind individual psychedelic experiences? Could the content of the “trip” be determined in the same way our dreams are i.e. from the days un-fulfilled emotional arousals to the nervous system?

There is an undoubted influence arising from specific expectations of the psychedelic experience. As to whether current unfullfilled expectations have a huge influence on the content, I very much doubt. It is not an area, though, that I have personally researched.

Is there a connection between having many dreams each night and then waking up with headaches? Could I actually be causing my headaches by intensifying or prolonging the REM state with my intention to have, remember, and control my dreams?

The intention of controlling dreams is unlikely to cause a major increase in the number of dreams and length of time spent dreaming. If headaches were to be caused by such research it would be more likely be due to sleep disruption interfering with the stress reduction benefits of dreaming.

(Note: I thought of this question after watching this video on dreams and depression.)

Can you explain what you mean when you equate the effects of lucid dreaming and hypnosis? Are you saying that the experience achieved through lucid dreaming can be achieved through hypnosis?

It has been suggested that lucid dreaming might provide the ideal setting to reprogramme neurotic reactions. My suggestion is that thesame benefit can be obtined more easily from hypnosis. In principle I think that anything that can be experienced in lucid dreaming is potentially also experiencable in hypnosis.

…………

I think many lucid dreamers visiting this blog might argue this last point.

What do you think?

Can your experiences in the dream world be replicated through hypnosis?

I guess it’s old news since the patent is from 2003, but I see that Stephen LaBerge, the most famous lucid dream researcher and lucid dream author in the world, has a patent on “substances that enhance recall and lucidity during dreaming.”

Patent number 20040266659, to be exact.

Here’s a summary of his patent, in his own words:

“This invention relates to the field of Lucid Dreaming and the enhancement of dream recall and dream lucidity through memory enhancing drugs, including the class of substances that comprise Acetylcholine Esterase inhibitors (AChEls). Lucid dreaming involves dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming. AChE inhibitors (AchEl’s) inhibit the normal metabolic inactivation of Acetylcholine (ACh) by inhibiting the enzyme, Acetylcholine Esterase (AChE), leading to accumulation of Ach. AchEl’s are most commonly used to enhance memory, particularly in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Ach is also well known to be important in REM and thus is suggested herein to enhance dreaming and lucidity.”

Whoa! What did that just say?

(This makes me think of the movie Lawnmower Man, where the doctor gives Jobe drugs and then makes him a genius by combining it with virtual reality games.)

Pretty amazing stuff. If there’s anyone out there who could invent a lucid dreaming pill, I’d put my money on LaBerge.

You can read all the details of Stephen LaBerges lucid dreaming drugs patent here.

This got me curious – what other patents are there related to dreaming and lucid dreaming?

Quite a few actually.

We’ve got a patent for Equipment and methods used to induce lucid dreaming in sleeping persons, with LaBerges name attached to this one too.

This looks like a patent for the Nova Dreamer device, which detects REM and flashes a light with the idea that it will show up in the dream, and the dreamer will recognize this signal and know he or she is dreaming.

On a similiar but-this-probably-won’t-really-work idea, someone filed a patent titled Dream State Teaching Machine, which detects Rapid Eye Movement and then plays a prerecorded message in your ears via headphones, with the idea that you’ll hear it and become lucid.

There’s a not-too-exciting Dream Detection & Method System patent. Eh, next.

Ohhh – what’s this? Somehow someone got away with filing a patent for a Device that Records Dream Recollections ; also known as a tape recorder, or in this case, a digital recorder. What makes this different than a normal recording device? Not sure. Maybe because it looks like an alarm clock and sits by your bed?

Then this last one I found is pretty neat:

It’s called an “Apparatus for facilitating analysis of dream activity.” In more exciting terms, it detects your REM states, signals a sound to wake you when an REM period is over, and contains a voice activated recorder. The device is attached above your bed on the wall; the idea then is that it gently wakes you up once your dream is over and you can record your dream without even getting out of bed simply by using the voice-activated recorder.

I’d use it!

Rob was kind enough to chat with me via email and answer some questions I had after reading the book and that’s what I’m here to bring you today.

Table of Contents

watch the video
Watch Part 1 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”
Watch Part 2 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”

read the interview
part 1 – on the book itself and the animation
part 2 – what the bleep style thinking & the bicameral mind
part 3 – ghosts & science fiction
part 4 – drugs and the ten dimensions
part 5 – ten dimensions and a lot of dreams

go exploring
Imagining the 10th Dimension – main page
Tenth Dimension forum – Rob is often here chatting with visitors
Rob’s Blog – Lots of additional writing here by Rob on a variety of subjects

buy the book

Click anywhere on the image below to start this clip.

Click here for Part Two of this clip.

Click here for interview index page.

Click anywhere on the image below to start this clip.

Click here for Part One of this clip.

Click here for interview index page.

The basic idea is something I started to believe as a child – that the other realities that could have existed based upon alternate actions and chance do actually exist – I pictured my life like one of those dandelions gone to seed, with the straight stalk representing the now-locked in past, the base of the flower representing me, and all of those slender lines blooming out from there representing possible futures. Selecting one of those lines then, was like zooming in, where the one line now became part of my past and a new bloom appeared ahead of me – a very fractal, enfolding sort of an image.

By the time I was in my twenties I had worked out the steps up to seven as presented in the animation, and thought it was fascinating that so many mystics and ancient religions pointed to seven as the ultimate number for enlightenment or ascendancy. For years I would show my logical progression to people with pen and paper and a spiel very similar to the one in the animation, some people would think it was cool but many just didn’t get it. This always bothered me, I felt like I had something people in the world would be interested in, but I had never found a way to get it to that audience.

In 2004 I went in for a routine laparoscopic surgery which went wrong, a vein on my liver was accidentally sliced open and I almost bled to death on the operating table. This took me months to recover from, but as I was waking up from my morphine dreams my “way of imagining the dimensions” was one of the first things I wanted to talk about. Despite being barely conscious, there some part of my mind saying “this was something you were supposed to get done, telling people about this new way of imagining the dimensions”. My eldest son, Todd, 22 at the time, confessed later that he assumed it was just the drugs talking.

Then in spring 2005 I was in Australia, my wife had been invited to attend a series of multimedia conferences and I was tagging along because I had never seen that side of the planet. I had picked up a copy of Michio Kaku’s “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension” for bedtime reading. At some point during the trip it occurred to me that there was a way to extend the point in the seventh dimension representing our universe to the other different-initial-conditions universes in the multiverse, and that the logic could then be extended up to a point in the tenth dimension, which was where string theorists said the superstrings that create our reality originate from.

During the long plane ride back to Canada, I developed blood clots in my legs which eventually migrated to my lungs. A month or so later I ended up at the emergency ward, so short of breath I couldn’t even fall asleep, and suspecting heart problems had caused the clots in my lungs they placed me in the Cardiac Surveillance Ward for two weeks. It was during that lovely stay in the beautiful private room with a very comfortable bed and kind nurses trained not to upset the potential heart attack victim, that I wrote the first draft of my book on my laptop. The first draft was about a hundred pages, outlined everything in the first ten chapters of the book. I spent the following year polishing the book in my spare time (while continuing my day job as composer for film and television and studio owner). The book was published early July 06, just as the website became popular.

How long did it take for you and your creative collaborators to create the animated sequence explaining your concept of the 10 dimensions? And is that really your voice on the video?

Trent Haus is President and Jason Orban is vice president of OH!Media, they were responsible for the website, and all the graphics in the book. Jason did the graphics design for the flash animation based upon my scratchy little pencil drawings and text descriptions of what I was imagining. We were working on the book graphics and the website graphics at the same time, so as we locked in the look of the still frames that would appear in the book, Jason was being given the go-ahead to animate them.

So the timetable was that I storyboarded out what I was thinking about back when I started writing the book in June 2005. I recorded myself reading the narration at my studio (Talking Dog), designed the sound effects, and gave rough mixes of the audio track in late August to Jason and Trent. A few things had to be changed in the timing of sound effects once the animation was up on its feet, but mostly that all stayed the same. Trent and Jason gave me a good deal on the project, but they were also busy with other projects… so completing the animation got pushed to the back burner for them a number of times by other projects. It didn’t help that I was very picky, as I kept asking for tweaks to make sure the overall look was as clean and simple as it could be. I signed off on the animation in April 2006, the rest of the site was mostly ready by then except we were having some trouble with a custom-designed forum. Eventually we switched it to the standard phpBB forum everyone uses and the site and the animation were finally ready to show to the world by end of June 2006.