From KCRW, this is nocturn. So I had a spotter on the surface who showed me to the cave and said, okay you're going to enter this cave now and I'll see you in 24 hours.

If I don't see you in 24 hours, I'm going to come find you.

And so I hoisted my backpack on my shoulder and headed into the darkness.

And at this point I had my headlamp on and I found what looked like a comfortable

place to camp, set everything up, laid out my sleeping bag,

sat with good posture and crossed my legs and took a deep breath

and turned out my light.

Shortly after I cut my headlamp in this cave,

I found myself sitting in complete utter darkness.

At first, it didn't really feel so different.

It was something along the lines of waking up in an unfamiliar room in the middle of the night.

And then what happened is that I blinked.

And I could detect absolutely no evidence of the fact that I had blinked.

I could feel that my eyelid had come down over my eye, that my eyelashes touched, but there was no evidence that this act had taken place, and that set my mind spinning.

I was like, oh wow, this is different and this is going to be intense.

And over the course of the next so many hours, I slipped into this experience, this relationship

with my body that I'd never really had before, where I could feel every twitch and I could feel even the tiniest functions in my body.

I could feel my heart clenching and unclinching.

I could feel my lungs filling up with air.

And it was the sensation of being like turned inside out.

It was a sense of being raw where every aspect of my sensory apparatus was on full alert.

And I remember this moment where a drop of water fell from the ceiling and landed on my forehead.

...