Way back in school I read about William Burroughs' use of the "dream machine" invented by a writer named Brion Gysin. The machine is a kind of lampshade with regular holes that was placed on a turntable with a light inside, resulting in a regular flashing light. A kind of easy strobe. The machine would be watched in a dark room with your eyes closed. The flashes are timed to match the brainwaves known as Alpha waves, about 8-12Hz. These are the waves associated with restful yet awake states, such as relaxing before falling asleep or meditating, which are produced by synchronous signaling of cells in the thamamus. They are interfered by sleep and by any kind of optical stimulus. However the low intensity stimulus seems to create a kind of feedback which causes the optical system to perform unusually. When you look at this flashing light you may experience hallucinated patterns, colors, and even more complicated images. These hallucinations are not supposed to be accompanied by any mood or consciousness changes, although I think it tends to reduce sleepiness and increase concentration, although this may be attributed to the meditative state that one naturally enters when keeping one's eyes shut for an extended period.

I made two dream machine videos of flashing at 8 and 10 Hz, and uploaded them to the gwazdor YouTube page, along with a simple instruction video.

I found that YouTube is not ideal for this kind of video. Any interuption of continuity, even a short flicker, is awfully distracting, and YouTube has trouble with smooth playback. In addition, even though I have learned all the information made public about YouTube's flash compression, and seem to be doing everything right, there are some flickers due to mismatched framerates. Well, I guess I should be happy that chaos is everywhere.

Despite this, I think that these videos work pretty well, even with the flickering they are functional. The best way to view them is to let them load completely before playing. Of course on large screen in a dark room. The instructions are there...

Then, I realized after all that that there is already a great dreammachine on-line, which works much better than mine. Oh well. So I recommend it.

dreammachine

And like I said, 1 in 10,000 adults have seizures when looking at videos like this, so don't watch if you don't want to take a risk. It might cause injury, emotional or mental problems, seizures, addiction or death. I'm not liable or responsable for any consequences of watching these videos.

And because my videos suck, I'll not put the links here.

But I'd love to hear if these work for anyone else; what did you "see"? 11Hz is the best for me. I'd love to tell you what I saw, but you know I can go on and on.

I am also interested in whether anyone else finds the dreammachine state to have an addictive element. And I would like to know whether anyone else feels somehow more clearheaded or awake after a few minutes of this type of experience.

Thanks.