As most passionate music lovers can attest, if you want to be a serious connoisseur of music, you need to buy a turntable.
Aside from sounding better, vinyl LPs are infinitely cooler than their compact disc kin. They've got that giant album artwork and that comforting, ever-present vinyl smell. They're also a heck of a lot cheaper.
There's something else, though, about record players - a hidden secret that few owners know. The turntable is the key component in constructing one of the 20th century's most fascinating, mysterious inventions.
In 1959, beat artist Brion Gysin - a good friend of "Naked Lunch" author William S. Burroughs - and Ian Sommerville built the first Dreamachine.
It's a simple device: a tube, 3 feet tall with slits cut into the sides that sits on top of a turntable. A light bulb is lowered into the middle of the tube and the turntable is turned on to spin at 78 RPMs. The user then turns off extraneous lights and sits a few inches from the spinning tube with his eyes closed.
After about 20 to 25 minutes - less time for someone who has grown accustomed to it - the user enters a blissful state of lucid dreaming. The variety of visions can be all over the map. Spiritual or mystical experiences are common.
The Dreamachine accomplishes this experience by stimulating the brain's optic nerve with a constant frequency of 8 to 13 pulses a second.
It's a perfectly natural, 100 percent legal, nonaddictive high that's only dangerous to those with epilepsy or an aversion to rapidly flashing lights.
I built my Dreamachine around the beginning of the summer. It was quite the task - rounding up the supplies, buying the turntable at a Muncie pawn shop for more than I'd hoped to pay, drawing and cutting the pattern on the 36-by-36-inch piece of heavy poster board. It's a project to which one should devote quite a few hours, at least. Detailed instructions and patterns for the slits can be found at www.noah.org/science/dreamachine.
It's definitely worth the effort, though. Having used the Dreamachine regularly - one to three times a week for several months now - I've received what had been promised: improved mood, greater creativity and more developed mystical thinking.
Gysin said, "You are the artist when you approach a Dreamachine with your eyes closed. What the Dreamachine incites you to see is yours ... your own. The brilliant interior visions you so suddenly see whirling around inside your head are produced by your own brain activity. ... What you are seeing is perhaps a broader vision than you may have had before of your own incalculable treasure, the "Jungian" sort of symbols, which we share with all normally constituted humanity."
My personal Dreamachine visions have been particularly exhilarating. There have been warm encounters with gods and holy figures: Jesus, Buddha, the Judeo-Christian god, Hindu and ancient Greek gods.
Other dreams focus on wild journeys around the planet, allowing me to transform from one creature or object to another. One second, I'm a Peregrine Falcon in a dive, the next I'm the wind flying across the plains, then I'm a humpback whale in the ocean.
The interpretation I'm leaning toward is that these visions are illustrative of the mystical view that all beings, creatures, objects and energies are all expressions of one unified whole.
But, hey, that's just a guess.
Maybe the Dreamachine will show you something totally different.
Write to David at
Swimminginbrokenglass@gmail.com
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