Has anyone here spent any time in a sensory deprivation tank? After going in one myself, the conclusion here makes a lot of sense.
While you're floating, you don't feel like you're actively processing everything that's going on around you as you do in a normal environment where all senses are available to you. While floating, it feels like you're spectating your mind as it processes things.
So when you shut off all your senses and let go, you enter this observation mode where information is being processed but it doesn't feel like you are doing it. It seems like the same thing is happening while we sleep only we're not as lucid.
I'm interested to see if others have had similar experiences.
In (I think) a slightly related topic, I sometimes listen to white noise when sleeping on the bus. I've noticed that I'll hear voices as I drift off to sleep - they sort of coalesce from the static and as I start focusing on the voices they disappear. I think it's my brain trying to make sense of the input, and as I start going to sleep the "reigns go free".
Sort of eerie. (No, I don't hear voices when I'm not listening to white noise).
This happens to me with the sound of running water even when I am fully awake, especially when I am expecting an important sound. For example, if I am in the shower and expecting an important call on the phone, I often get a feeling that the phone is ringing. But it's just my brain trying to be super alert and picking up noise as signals. If I turn off the water, the sounds go off.
I think that is hypnagogia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia. And it doesn't necessarily require environmental noise to be triggered. There's a lot of material out there on it being linked to lucid dreaming.
I have had this experience and many others in float tanks...
you become 'the witness' more clearly than usual, but such is always the case...instead of being 'trapped' in your ego/limited rationalmindstressedbodyunawarespirit, you are 'shifted' to your pure expanded enlightened spirit true being
While you're floating, you don't feel like you're actively processing everything that's going on around you as you do in a normal environment where all senses are available to you. While floating, it feels like you're spectating your mind as it processes things.
So when you shut off all your senses and let go, you enter this observation mode where information is being processed but it doesn't feel like you are doing it. It seems like the same thing is happening while we sleep only we're not as lucid.
I'm interested to see if others have had similar experiences.