Perfect Dome of Sound

The desert is a mysterious place with a lot of arrows, filled with paradox, where New Age meets Good News in strange ways. It is lonely beautiful, alien, harsh, and surreal. This is why I love it so.


On Easter we headed to Integratron to celebrate a birthday six months late. An auspicious day to celebrate birth, re-birth and prolongation of life. 5 of us ventured out into the desert to see if we could live just a bit longer. The Integratron compound is a place with many lounging spaces and a colorful hammock village, and a mirror to reflect upon once your experience ends. We hammocked until it was time to get our sound bath, taking advantage of the bright desert light for photographs.

I had read a little about the story behind this place summarized in my last post. This exposition was told to us as we were laying face up on yoga mats interrupted by odd interjections of laughter by our host. I decided that if I continued to listen to him I would laugh too and no one else was laughing, they were listening intently excited for the healing properties that would enter us through the symphony of quartz bowls that would soon be played.

Our experience was through a pop up sound bath, which you share the experience with strangers, well those who are not in your group. They do not do pop up sound baths often because of two things and they said these rules as a warning, that if this happened, they would re-think ever doing a sound bath again and only do sound baths in group form.

1) Turn off your cell phone
2) no snoring, because it ruins other people's experiences by interrupting the pure sound of the quartz bowls.

My friend and I have differing views on whether or not you can help sleeping or snoring, but I feel like if it is going to ruin others experiences, I don't want to be that person. The ruiner. Not other people feel that way. Like the bear shaped man who fell into a similarly bear-like slumber during our session.

Determined to not be that person, hell, I don't even know that I snore, I found another way to experience integratron, with my eyes open. I stared up in the skylight and as those bowls rang out and filled my body that needed saving with sound it shook my right side. I watched the clouds drift by changing shape, turn into lines and dots, pull and compress.

I am not sure that I will live 50 more years, those things we can never tell, but I may remember at 130 what happened to me on Easter 2012. What I did leave with was a higher sensitivity to sound, voices, water trickling, shuffling of feet on the rocks of the parking lot louder. When we ate lunch at Pappy and Harriets and when a child lost their shit because they were leaving, it was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard and when I was at home listening to music as I fell asleep, it was one of the most beautiful things ever.