Jessup eventually transforms into a proto human ape who rampages through Boston and ends up in a zoo, where he kills and eats a lamb. Having ingested a powerful hallucinogen obtained from an indigenous Mexican tribe, he climbs inside an isolation tank to explore the origins of human evolution stored in his DNA. The movie, based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, tells the story of Harvard brain researcher Edward Jessup (William Hurt). Like many of its customers, we were curious about experiencing a tank similar to the one portrayed in the 1980 sci-fi classic Altered States. Friends and I sought out a then-new Chicago spa called SpaceTime Tanks, which is still in operation today. My one previous “float” occurred in the mid-1980s while I was a student at Northwestern University. But, unlike in the womb, you can add a musical soundtrack. You float naked and weightless in complete darkness, enveloped in a salty solution, hearing only the sound of your own breathing and heartbeat. In the course of a few hours, I lost track of the boundaries of my body and did a mental reboot of my five senses.Ī flotation tank - also known as an isolation tank, sensory-deprivation tank or “restricted environmental stimulation therapy” tank - is perhaps the closest possible simulation of being in the womb. Recently I drove to Shelburne’s Satori Float and Mind Spa and tried out Vermont’s first flotation tank commercially available to the public.

Satori spa