Spread across 900 acres of Utah sandstone, Amangiri was where the artist formerly known as Prince intended to spend thirty days escaping his dependence on Vicodin and hydrocodone.

Instead, as the staff prepared for his arrival, news came that Prince had accidentally overdosed after taking counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl.

The day before, in April 2016, we had arrived on a tiny prop plane from Arizona, helmed by a single pilot.

"Don't worry," he offered as we loaded our bags.

"I have two kids at home; I don't want to die in a plane crash any more than you do."

With a spa spanning 25,000 square feet, Amangiri was the type of place one might go to separate the body from the spirit.

There were Hozho four-handed massages, salt and clay treatments, steam rooms and rain showers, craniosacral massages and light therapy.

There was also a new treatment, one that promised the ability to physically release the mind, to dissociate into dream states, to hallucinate naturally, to lose all sense of time: a sensory deprivation float tank.

Of course, Amangiri offered no ordinary float tank.

There was a cave behind a 165-million-year-old sandstone escarpment. Inside, beneath the low rock ceiling, one could float in a few feet of Dead Sea-level saline water, heated to the temperature of the human body.

Upon entry, I'm smudged with a sage stick (for energetic and symbolic cleansing) and then left alone in near pitch-black darkness to crawl into the pool for a thirty-minute experience.

After a few minutes of settling in, relaxation arrives like a neonatal embrace. The mind bends. I sense space and smell colors and taste words.

There is no clock, and no understanding of pace; time dissolves from seconds into minutes into hours into years.

It feels like the afterlife.

Eventually, reality seeps in: how long have I been in here? Five minutes or twenty-five? Is it almost over?

Needing to maintain my body's connection to reality, I begin to count in sixty-second intervals.

One minute at a time, stacking to measure how long remained.

Five minutes.

Now ten.

Fifteen.

_{(I can still think)}

Panic.

My breath arrives in short spastic bursts.

At twenty I call out for help. At thirty, cloaked in fear, I begin to unravel: I wonder if maybe I'm not at Amangiri at all. Not even in Utah.

Not on Earth - if there even was an Earth.

Maybe there never was an Amangiri.

Maybe Prince never existed. Nor the color purple.

Maybe I'd already died somewhere between Arizona and Utah and this cave was simply the way station where my consciousness waited to be reassigned.

Maybe I'd become a butterfly or soon a frog in a pond and...

BANG!

A door flies open and light floods the room. I sit up, night-blind and terrified.

A silhouette crowds the doorway.

"Oh my God," blurts the twenty-something attendant.

"I forgot about you - my timer never went off," she admits with an awkward laugh, then leaves me to simmer through the reintegration into the reality that reality still exists.

On my way out: "Are you ok?" as if preparing to fill out a liability form.

In a feeble effort to make good - and maybe as a reminder that there are second chances, but only if you're around to take them, and perhaps because a luxury resort must have a protocol for existential negligence - she asks whether I'd like a credit to do it all over again tomorrow.