THE DREAMACHINE (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine in the mid-1960s, after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain. (Wikipedia) In a letter to Brion Gysin in 1960, Sommerville, who had been living in the Beat Hotel in Paris, wrote:
I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colours on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of colour are pounding to get in. After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but it was well worth getting through, for I found that when it stopped I was high above earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being dragged or tired had dropped away.”
In an article for Olympia No. 2 in Paris Feb. 1962, Sommerville states: ”(...) Our ancestors saw the creatures of the constellations in the apparently unorganised distribution of the stars. It has been shown experimentally through the viewing of random white dots on a screen that man tends to find patterns and picture where objectively there is none: his mental process shapes what it sees. Externals resonators, such as flicker, tune in with our internal rhythms and lead to their extension.”
The Dream Machine(figure out if it’s one word or two, don’t keep jumping around, unless this is still his quote.) began as a simple means to investigate phenomena whose description excited our imaginations - our faculty of image-making, which flicker was said to stimulate. In this way, and though from a very different, far more scientific, perspective, the dreamachine experiments can be connected to the Gestalt effect...
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