The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs‘s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter’s book, The Living Brain.^[1][2]

In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing.^[2]

A dreamachine is “viewed” with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain’s electrical oscillations. The “viewer” experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the “viewer” feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state.^[3] This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one’s eyes.^[1]

A dreamachine may be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders. It is thought that one out of 10,000 adults will experience a seizure while viewing the device; about twice as many children will have a similar ill effect.^[4]

The Dreamachine linked below is more or less just a website that produces a strobe effect when you click start. You select the frequency (a low frequency of 5 made me feel like I was going to die and I couldn’t handle it).

Once your frequency is selected you click start, close your eyes and get close to the monitor. I suggest doing this with the lights off in your room. If nothing seems to be working and you don’t feel “surrounded by light” try adjusting the frequency. The white color seemed to work best for me. Once you set it right, see what happens and observe if you see anything in front of you. It is actually really odd.

All in all be careful, this thing can trigger a seizure if you have photosensitive epilepsy. Not even kidding when I said I felt like I was going to have a heart attack when I hit 5hz. Not responsible for anything that happens as a result of this!

The Dreamachine can be found here. http://www.netliberty.net/dreamachine.html