When I was seventeen, I planned a bold experiment in sensory deprivation. When I finally did it, while I was at home alone over a long Memorial Day weekend, I got some surprising results. Afterward, I wrote a personal diary of transformative out-of-the-body experience. In 1982, with slight revisions, I published the very first book with the title "Body Play". Here is the diary as it first appeared in print in 1982.

It started in earnest the night I lashed myself against the coal bin wall. I was seventeen then. I'd fasted for two days - reduced myself to an emaciated robot by dancing for hours with fifty pounds of logging chain around my arms, legs, and torso. I was seeking an experience, a happening that no other human I knew personally had ever had. Even if it meant death!

It was 2:00 A.M. I stood with my back against the cold wooden wall and laced ropes between fence staples driven at three inch intervals around the outline of my body. I pulled the rope deep into my legs from the ankles up to my numb, belted waist. Tied them tight. I felt helpless, glued against the wall. When my chest, arms, legs, and head were also quite helpless, I just waited in the darkness and silence not knowing what to expect. I was resolved to stay that way until something happened. My body ached for relief, for sleep, but it could not slip away because of the tight discomfort of the ropes.

Soon a pleasant, warm kind of numbness crept up my legs and arms. They dissolved into nothingness. But when the numbness also began to work up my spine into the breathing center, I panicked! I ffought for breath. It was like drowning. Waves of terror passed through the parts of me that were still "alive". A massive effort to free my arms and escape only resulted in a feeble "creak" from the restraining ropes. I was trapped, unable to loose myself - self-sentenced to whatever came next.