re: Anybody ever done the sensory deprivation tank thing?

I avg about 3 to 4 hours a night. And I love Count Chocula cereal too!

That's terrible. My stepdad had a heartattack when he was like 40. Back then, he slept 4 hours a night and went to work early and came home late.

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Can you try to explain it?

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I'll put something together when I have a few min.

People need different amounts of sleep. You also need less sleep as you get older. I need regular 7-8 hours to function at my peak, wish I needed less.

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Can you try to explain it?

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After reading this, I know it sounds weird, but this is as accurate as I can be. I promise that I’m not one of those weirdo alternative types and I believe that everyone’s experience will be different to a degree.

The goal as described in the name of the tank is to remove all external stimuli from all of your senses. The tank is filled with a solution of super concentrated Epsom salt so your body is very buoyant and you float much higher than normal so it’s really comfortable. You're in water that is the same temp as your skin with the ambient air also being the same temperature. Because the water/air/skin are all the same temp, you start to lose sense of where each starts/stops and lose the feeling that you are floating because there are no longer any tactile clues. It's also pitch black and very quiet inside, so you don't get any external visual or auditory stimulus either. Without any external stimuli, all you hear for a while is your own breathing and heartbeat, and after a while you can kind of zone that out too. After about 20 minutes (I guess?), I suddenly felt like I was tumbling, not knowing which was was up, sort of like being in space, I would guess. Once that settled down, it was pretty trippy, like a stream of consciousness, sometimes visual - lights, colors, images from my past, images of my family, sometimes auditory - I felt like I could hear the blood in the vessels around my ear and the sound of my breathing would sound like a low rumble, and sometimes physical - feelings of warmth, like being in the sun. There were also times when I snapped out of a deep nothingness where there was no activity at all, that was a cool feeling, like my brain was completely off, but I wasn’t sleeping. You also become hyper aware of any stimuli after a while. A slight muscle twitch in your hand can create a small ripple that feels like a tidal wave in a washing machine; someone in an office next door hit a nail with a hammer 4 times and it felt like it was in the room. I lost all track of time and had no idea how long I had been inside. While most of it was pretty random, there was an element of control to it as well.

My wife had some similar experiences, but other different ones - hers seemed a little more trippy and experiential with the feeling of really being in space and reliving some of the best times of her life as though she were really there again.

For us, it was a cool experience to do something different and out of the norm and we talked about it all day and into the night. I’m glad we tried it.

I love that this was used as torture by the soviets and now americans are doing it for shits and giggles....

Danny White used to do this before games when he played qb for Dallas.