Float Fix: Sensory deprivation in Idaho Falls

Years ago — and I mean many years ago, like 1980, when I was working an office job in Center City Philadelphia — I read an article about sensory deprivation tanks and their supposed benefits. These included the promise of getting nine hours’ worth of sleep in less than an hour, and not just light sleeping but Delta Sleep. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” to quote the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Basically, what a sensory deprivation tank involves is water at near body temperature with so much salt in it that you float nearly on top as you do on the Dead Sea in the Middle East or on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A genuine sensory deprivation tank is fully enclosed, so that when the door shuts you are in complete darkness.

David Hay, owner of Float Fix in Idaho Falls

For a claustrophobic, this would be a nightmare, so some of you might be ruling it out even as you read this, but it always sounded intriguing to me. So one day, I randomly googled “sensory deprivation idaho falls” and discovered that we indeed have Float Fix in the Three Rivers Health Center, 1421 First Street. It is part of David Hay’s massage business, in what used to be Essence of You and, long before that, the Hatch Mansion.

Eager to satisfy my curiosity after all these years, I set up an appointment. What Hay has set up is not total enclosed isolation, but a 9-foot-by-9-foot pool in a dark room, filled with 300 gallons of water and spiked with 900 pounds of magnesium salt. The lights are low, the decor soothing. It's very nice.

“We’re just flooded with sensory stuff these days,” said Hay, whose first experience with sensory deprivation was five years ago in Utah. For the first-timer, the real challenge is turning off the voice in your head. “If you can’t hear it anywhere else, you will in there,” he said.

The process goes like this: you go in, strip down, take a shower, put in earplugs, climb in and … float. If there is one thing I wish I’d had it would have been a floatation noodle to go under my ankles, so I could stop thinking about whether my legs were sinking and pulling me down. (I know this is silly in shallow water, but that’s the way I am.)

For a while, I had thoughts drifting from one place to another, but I think I did go to sleep eventually. In time, I was awakened by the sound of my own snoring, which was a clear tipoff I'd gotten some shuteye. When they knocked on the door after an hour I said, “Has it been an hour already?” — another good sign.

Hay said he’s only had one customer who couldn’t shut off his interior monologue, an 18-year-old who got out after ten minutes, took a shower and got dressed again. Likewise, there has only been one person they had trouble “bringing back,” an Iraq war veteran who, once he finally went out, really found the relaxation he’d been seeking.

A lot of customers are people passing through, but word is growing locally. “We get a lot of date nights. One of them will do the float while the other does a massage, and then they’ll switch,” Hay said.

If you want more information, call (208) 403-6392, or visit the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/Floatfix/.