I continue "tanking." This is the diary entry of my fifth and six venture into a sensory deprivation or floatation tank. I float at stillwaters.
I'm experiencing much more control and the 90 minute sessions are taking the pressure off having time to get things done. It's possible that sometimes it may take me as much as 30 minutes to get to a totally relaxed state so I like the added time to guarantee an hour of mind play.
Visions seen in the floats:
Goddess Kali
Either the goddess of "death and destruction" or "time and change," have it your way. There she was with rust black (as if cooked) skin standing on one leg facing me with crazed bulging eyes. Muscular yet round and shiny. Behind her head and shoulders was a floating circular feather fan of ivory, ebony and seemingly bloodstained surfaces. Her exposed breasts had necklaces and longer strands of ivory, ebony and blood red coral adorning them. Her genitals were large, red, wet and swollen! She eyed me with vanity, disgust and lust.
Spider Web Pagoda
In a bright morning forest of aspen I found a simple pagoda of raw pine. Hanging from the center instead of a gong or a Buddha sculpture was a finely carved wooden mandala. As thin as a couple millimeters at points, it resembled an intricate spiders web with embedded symbols and vaguely kanji characters. Touching it was out of the question because it was so frail and so infinitely detailed.
Future Magma Power Station
The atmosphere of this earth-like place was thicker, the clouds were lower and fog drifted close to the ground and through the trees. Flying over a pine forest I noticed a white dome structure. I came closer and noticed shiny metal pipings coming off the dome and branching off in different directions. Gaining x-ray vision, I saw inside that it was a geothermic power station sitting over an artificially drilled hole in the earths crust. Magma from the earths core had risen in the hole and the power station was mining and routing that energy to other locations.
Mega Tree Creature
Still flying over the same 'planet,' I noticed a strange formation of coniferous trees. It turned out to be an entire forest that was one interconnected tree. Like a cell in the body with a nucleus, the central part was made of sequoia sized trees having branches that connected with other trees. A thick interwoven branch structure that spread out from the center to smaller normal sized trees and ones that hadn't yet connected with the main structure. Maybe they did in the root system.
Earth Sheltered City
Flying yet further over this 'planet,' I saw a city. I found the humans. From the air it looked like a hill that had been cut with canals into a grid. When I landed in one of these street canals I realized that all the buildings were merely roofed with 4ft of soil but kept the same contour of the original natural land shape. The buildings were modern with glass walls but there was substantial custom metal structure to hold up the heavy soil roof. These structures appeared to be metal and organically shaped. There were streets and plazas that let in plenty of light. I was thinking about the constant 55 degrees 4ft underground and how this was a sort of open air cave architecture.
Harley Davidson Spacecraft
I had some leather pants with buckles and some giant greasy boots that came up to my knees on. I walked a catwalk through a galley in the center of the craft and observed the walls that beveled out and away to the sides. Every surface seemed to be filled to the gills with chrome pipes, caps, bolts, wires, and finned structures. Everything had a purpose as if this was a combustion based spaceship! The temperature was hot. There was a dull thud of repeating bass vibrating through everything from outside. I felt there was an element of indulgence. This was a showpiece craft that was one of a kind.
Illustration credit: Syd Mead
Lucus said he was inspired by the San Francisco dock loading structures for his Empire Strikes Back snow walkers. I'm thinking it was Syd, master futurist.
