Hello Fellow Floaters,
I’m Dr. Jason Gregg and I’ve recently been appointed the Research Director of Dreamwater Float Co’s (Dreampod) exciting new Dream Lab. Using my 40 years of experience in the field of human behaviour and assisted by cutting edge technology, we will be developing some innovative new applications that will greatly enhance your experience in what is already one of the industry’s best floatation tanks.
It was the 60’s and alternative realities were all the go back then. So it was for John Lilly, a highly skilled physician who tilted at the medical establishment and developed what would later spawn a whole industry, gathering tens of thousands of devoted floaters who still venerate his name today.
But paradoxically, Lilly himself rarely experienced the kind of enduring peace that is such an iconic feature of simple, unaided floating. Dogged with recurring bouts of crippling headaches most of his life, mere floating was never quite enough to satiate his search for relief.
He kept venturing beyond the safer limits and was known to regularly augment his tank experiences with heroic doses of drugs including LSD, psilocybin, DMT and most notably, Ketamine, a powerful agent used in anaesthesia and introduced to him by a colleague, Craig Enright.
In fact, these experiments twice almost cost Lilly his life and at times, certainly induced psychotic episodes and resulted in wildly disturbed visions of malevolent entities from the paranormal, eventually seeing him admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Today, the lore around Lilly lives on and his visionary research into restricted environments have certainly impacted anyone who has ever climbed into a tank to lay in a saturated saline solution in search of the self. For me, it was after a meeting in the 60’s with John Lilly that my own life began to take a direction that would eventually lead me to this point as the Director of Research at Dreampod.
In the years that followed Lilly’s seminal work, a whole industry has flourished, building better, sexier and more efficient tanks, with more and more people floating but all the while, the underlying concept of floating has varied little. Up until now that is.
It’s been decades since Lilly first supplemented his floats with something extra and now the web is crackling with breathless news about ‘floating, the next frontier’. Terms like ‘Active floating’, ‘binaural sounds’ and ‘brainwave entrainment’ are quickly creeping into the sales messages, and a whole range of must have in-tank applications are suddenly emerging as the breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for to take passive floating to the next exciting level.
Never mind the lack of scientific rigour, with the market for hypnosis and mediation CDs already saturated, the float industry appears ripe for anyone with a microphone, a recorder and a few buzz words – simply listen while you float and you can grow thin, smoke free and successful. Or perhaps not!
The very concept of floating along with that meditation CD or voice session downloaded from the Internet is flawed to the extreme and at best, it will only disrupt the natural process that makes floating so effective without it.
Fact Check; anything that includes the term ‘binaural’ entrainment implies two discrete tracks, isolated from one another and introduced separately into each ear so as to create a differential, following frequency in the brain. Except maybe with the use of waterproof headphones, rule out product that advertises ‘binaural’ entrainment, it simply won’t work, all hype, no substance.
Instead, the DreamScape Elements programs use a patented combination of unique sounds and a complex conductive method to create auditory-induced patterns in the water. These layers are received in the ear and gently deepen the learning condition, greatly enhancing the brain state change that occurs naturally as you float.
Instead of interrupting the natural process and distracting the floater, the DreamScape Elements session will sit in harmony with your own thoughts and feelings, acting as an inner guide towards a chosen therapeutic or behavioral outcome.
And every DreamScape Elements session will be researched and tested in the Dream Lab before it is released. Elements will work in any tank but are specifically designed to make special use of the Dream Pod computer management system to control additional features that are not possible in other brands.
In the end, in spite of his ventures into drug-induced altered states, Lilly’s fundamental work on sensory deprivation proved that less is definitely best, that by removing everything else, the human mind in isolation is capable of great healing and perfect resolution.
Anything we re-introduce into that perfect state must therefore be done with great care less we risk spoiling the magic.
– Dr. Jason Gregg, Director of Research, Dreamwater