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Underground > Temple >

Has anyone ever used a Dreamachine?

16:51 / 22.07.04

I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with a Brion Gysin Dreamachine, and if so, what was your opinion of the experience?

16:54 / 22.07.04

Nah, the proper old ones, at Gen's house.

S'alright.

17:01 / 22.07.04

Sorry i ahve no experience but there is conflicting info on the net about the efficacy and accuracy of information regarding these devices. Some websites claim that you can build one with an old record player and some cardboard.....other sources say this is crap

I have no idea which is correct, not having bothered to attempt to build one but there are surprisingly quite a few websites that can be found detailing various designs

keywords: Gysin+dream machine

I was able to find at least 6 (that I bothered glancing over) sites that looked reasonable enough from Google

Joe

17:01 / 22.07.04

Thanks!

Any other type of experience to which you could compare it?

17:04 / 22.07.04

Thanks Joe!

The particular design I was looking at is in a Rapid Eye compilation, and it looked pretty simplistic. There definitely seems to be conflicting info as to what works and what doesn't.

Finding a working turntable around here might be a bit tricky, lol.

17:19 / 22.07.04

Y'know my mum buys the Sunday Post a Scottish Newspaper (why I do not know seeing that she is in Liverpool!)

Anyway, they often have crap '101 useful household items'

If memory serves me right, there have been ads for turntables that play 33, 45 and the required 78's

Other than that, the Daily Mirror has had adverts offering similar, I am sure that if you buy it for week, particularly the Sunday version, there should be a turntable in there

there is a shop in Liverppol called Richer (?) sounds, top of Bold Street, near the bombed out church...they would be able to get you one (sorry, I never checked where you are from) but I suppose most major cities have shops of a similar vein

the Sunday papers are probably your best bet as they are advertised at about 40 pound........within anybodies budget

I would be interested in how you get on as it is something that I have considered myself. PM me if you construct this thingie

Thanks

Joe

17:21 / 22.07.04

Shit ....just noticed you are in the US

Sorry!

presumably Radio Shack could help you? Listen to me....as if I know what I am talking about!

the furthest West I have been is Dublin!

(great city but expensive as marrying a woman called Trump)

18:06 / 22.07.04

I've got one of these bad boys here -

http://www.lucidity.com/novadreamer.html

Which I don't use as often as I should but I've had good results from them, not exactly what your talking about but interesting all the same I think.

I'd like to point out however that I didn't pay £450 for mine!

18:44 / 22.07.04

may we ask what type of results have you obtained. This is interesting

I have read about Gysin and Burroughs ONLY in the Book of Lies (Disinformation)

didn't really understand a lot of it, it was beyond me. Tried some of the tape recorder stuff to do some silly gambling experiment I had (it didn't work)

Might try it again but it gets bloody expensive repeating the experiment

Anyway, if you would care to share, I am sure I am not the only person who would be grateful

19:00 / 22.07.04

may we ask what type of results have you obtained. This is interesting

Once you get used to the dream sign and find the setting right for you (which isn't that easy it can often wake you up) it's success rate for lucid dreaming is high, two red led's flash when the sensors realise your dreaming and you learn to recognise flashing red lights as a dream sign.

You also get a dream speak with it which you can use to play you a recorded message as soon as you start dreaming.

I'm sure the glasses must be quite simple to make, where's Mordant?

19:04 / 22.07.04

THANKS

I will look into this further

but again, thanks for sharing.

Skeleton Camera

00:12 / 23.07.04

I built one in the last days of high school. It worked fairly well. Results? - rub your eyes (closed) very hard for a while and observe the swirling, checkered patterns - plus any images that appear. That was the main effect, but with the dream machine they appeared in technocolor. I fudged the math a little, however, and got a splitting headache after several uses. Make sure the measurements are VERY accurate.
It did make me more attentive and 'patiently conscious' at work afterwards, but that may have been psychosomatic (ie "Hey! I'm on a dream machine! WOooahahAHAHAaaaaaAAA...")

08:09 / 23.07.04

I'm not sure about the thing about the measurements, Seamus - I always wondered if that was bollocks or not, seems unlikely that you could calibrate alphawaves exactly off a old 78rpm record player. I thought this was hype.

I've built them a couple of times - got interesting vivid weirdo freeform visions, very fast and well lit -reflecting the nature of the machine. But nothing particular startling or amazing. Painting the inside of the tube red and yellow made things even more vivid. If you want to penetrate your inner worlds or actually make good use of visualisation, there are many other methods.

12:56 / 23.07.04

There was "make your own" kit I had about ten years ago; came with the cardboard tube, an interesting little book and a Hafler Trio cd. The CD sounds freakishly similiar to a fridge's humming, and I never could get the dreammachine to hold together for more than a couple of minutes. I had much better success with one of the goggle sets Bear mentioned, although the ones we had were designed for use while awake.

I did play with a properly-constructed dreamachine at a rave once with interesting hallucinatory results, but it's hard to say how much of that was purely environmental.

trouser the trouserian

13:14 / 23.07.04

A few years back I attended a dream-machine workshop at the Oxford Thelemic Symposium - the guy doing it had some very large machines set up and various sets of goggles. I tried out one of the goggles and was treated to a rather nice kaleidoscopic vision of brightly-coloured cubes slowly rotating around.
I've also experienced the 'flicker-effect' when walking past a slatted fence through which bright sunlight was shining. This can happen on motorways if trees are planted at too regular intervals, and has been known to contribute to accidents. In 1993, a TV advert for Golden Wonder crisps was withdrawn after 3 people suffered epileptic fits brought on by the ad's use of rapidly flashing images.

15:32 / 23.07.04

edinburgh floatarium have a proper dreammachine, i tried to buy it off them a few years back, but they weren't having it.

the hire prices are fairly ridiculous:

15 minutes £10
30 minutes £15
45 minutes £20

Skeleton Camera

17:53 / 23.07.04

Illmatic - I'm inclined to your skepticism as well, particularly after trying it. I just knew my measurements were off and were I to build another I'd be more accurate.

But the other ways to visualize or hallucinate seem easier - even something as simple as rubbing your shut eyes, which I've had some fascinating visions as a result of.

07:20 / 24.07.04

I was confused at first here - we seem to be talking about a Gysin dream machine, yes? I've never seen a description of this before and it looks very interesting. I initially (and a few other posters I reckon) thought the OP was referring to a lucidity device.

Has anyone had expeience of using the latter?

08:02 / 24.07.04

Sorry it's my fault from mentioning the lucid device, didn't mean to confuse the topic.

10:56 / 24.07.04

An easier way is to simply use an adjustable strobe light and BLAST it into your closed eyelids. I was once hooked up to an EEG machine with a strobe set up in such a way, they hit the right frequency and BAM! I was flying over a landscape littered with broken stone cubes the size of mountains...
Absence is right about the risk of epilepsy, though. Pokemon cartoons have sent kids into seizures, and the police have a weapon called a photic driver, which causes one in every twenty people in a crowd to go into a fit, whether they have a history of epilepsy or not...
I think most commercial strobes are fixed so you can't hit the seizure-inducing frequencies, anyway. Or at least they are marked against using those ranges.

A beautiful tunnel of ghosts

15:13 / 25.07.04

I bought the book 'Flickers of the Dream-machine' several years ago and built a Dream-Machine using the book's design. The template provided for the cylinder was configured to work with a turntable at 45rpm, rather than the original 78rpm, although I received a 78rpm turntable for Christmas a few years ago and have been using that at 45rpm.

Portable turntables can often be bought from collectors, who can have multiple copies of some models and can be contacted through the classified advertisements in you local or national newspaper.

I've used the Dream-Machine several times since I built it, recently in concert with binaural beats, although I've had very limited success with it.

I'm currently designing a new cylinder from design specifications that I discovered on a couple of web sites, and hope that this will increase my chance of success, although my experience of psychotropics has to date never included visual images.

Illmatic - I'll be testing cylinders with several different coloured interiors following your suggestion - thank you very much.

Boy in a Suitcase

16:00 / 26.07.04

I made one from a set of directions Gen gave me (the ones issued by TOPY press in the 80s) and used it with a 45rpm player, got some weird effects from it but nothing amazing. Of course, it provided a good prop at the fabled "Psychedelic Make-out" party I later had at my house where one room was set up as a Northern Soul danceroom and the next (my bedroom cleared of furniture) was turned into, yes, a psychedelic make-out room with dreammachine in corner, strobes, random colored flashy things, bean bags, the "Nuggets" box set playing on the stereo, about 20 people getting it on at any given time and a giant chalk vever on the floor hosting all the energy for the Carnivale. Ahhh yassss.

14:43 / 27.07.04

I've had shots of other people's ones, usually at parties. There exists a website that you can goto and I can't remember what you call it but it comes under chaos magick-dream machine on the ole web search. Epileptic experimentation. Y'know the frequency of the things and that. Good stuff, even strobe can act pretty cool when you close yer eyes.