Dreamachine – the collective experience built to blow your mind

Enter the Dreamachine, a visitor experience like no other. You and around 30 other guests are invited to sit in a circle, eyes closed, as pulsing music and a series of white lights flashing to the beat begin to intensify. Everyone discovers their own, unique show of colours dancing behind their eyelids.

The Dreamachine immersive experience travelled the UK last summer, visiting London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast as part of the Unboxed festival: a celebration of the UK's creativity and the convergence of art and science. Beyond the immediate event, the scientific team involved with Dreamachine – including Anil Seth, Professor of Neuroscience from the University of Sussex – hope that data gathered from visitors could have far-reaching implications for how we understand the mind and human consciousness.

It all began with a flicker of sunlight

The 21st-century Dreamachine is the brainchild of Collective Act: a collaboration of artists, scientists, philosophers, composers and technologists who create large-scale public projects across the globe. However, it was artist and inventor Brian Gysin who created the original Dreamachine in the 1950s. On a bus journey to Marseille, the sunlight flickering through the trees caused Gysin to slip into a dreamlike state where patterns and colours danced behind his eyelids. Inspired by this, he sought to invent a new technology capable of inducing the same effect and made it available to the public.  

Collaborating with Ian Sommerville, a Cambridge maths student, the original contraption was composed of a spinning cylindrical device and a suspended light bulb rotating on a record player. The device was designed to project light at the same frequency as the brain's alpha waves: the waves which are most present when we are relaxed but awake. Gysin's vision was to make people more self-knowledgeable, and in awe of the vivid visual illusions created in their own minds. Instead of the passive consumption of mass-produced media, people could voyage to their unconscious to create their own movies.

The new Dreamachine experience 

In much the same spirit, Collective Act's Dreamachine was developed to take audiences on a magical journey into their own minds and spark insight, reflection and curiosity. The surprised faces that emerged from the experience suggested 'mission accomplished'. People reported patterns, shapes, places, people, and a kaleidoscope of colours. Some blind and partially-sighted people even reported seeing colour for the first time. Visitors described feeling emotions from peacefulness to euphoria, with the majority reporting a sense of connection, love and compassion. For some, the experience was transformative, changing their outlook on life and increasing their sense of wellbeing. After gathering over 15,000 drawn and written reflections on the experience, Dreamachine has now produced one of the largest collections of publicly generated artworks in the world.

At the heart of the programme was director Jennifer Crook's notion that the experience should be one that is collective as well as personal. The space, beautifully imagined by the architecture group Assemble, was designed to be as conducive to a transcendental experience as possible, with an awareness that each change in the environment could alter the experience generated by the Dreamachine. The visitor journey was carefully thought through; after being guided into the Dreamachine, they were, on leaving, invited to reflect on their experience collectively around a table.

Having arrived as strangers, adults of all ages and walks of life were drawn together, candidly sharing personal stories and deep inner reflections on what it means to see, be and exist. Despite an experience that happens in your own head, there was a strong feeling of 'oneness', as if visitors were connected by an invisible thread, bonded by a renewed respect for the beauty of their minds and the mystery of existence.

Beyond the immersive experience, the Dreamachine programme is also a large-scale scientific and philosophical investigation into the nature of the mind and perception. As explained on the Science Boards displayed at Dreamachine, even with the modern tools of neuroscience, how and why white light causes these vivid experiences remains mysterious. Historically, there has always been an interest in exploring altered states of consciousness, dating back to ancient Shamanic and Native American cultures which used rhythm and flickering light to access trance-like states.

The phenomena, now known as stroboscopically-induced visual hallucinations, was first scientifically investigated in the 1950s by British neuroscientist Dr Grey Walter. Dr Walter observed that flickering light on closed eyes could alter people's conscious experience, and found, using EEG, that doing so not only activated brain areas associated to vision but the whole cerebral cortex.

Back to the present day, leading the investigation into the science and philosophy of the Dreamachine are Anil Seth and Dr David Schwartzman from the University of Sussex and Professor of Philosophy Fiona Macpherson of the University of Glasgow. Seth's laboratory has been investigating stroboscopically-induced visual hallucinations for many years and the reports submitted by Dreamachine visitors will be a great addition to this research.

So far, a hypothesis is that the hallucinations are the result of a combination of the brain being in a state where it is not expecting any visual input (due to the eyes being closed), which neurophysiologically corresponds to increased alpha, and in addition, receiving a strong visual input. As for what determines the content of the hallucination, Seth hypothesises that it has to do with the intrinsic structure of the visual cortex: in a state where the brain receives stimulation of an undifferentiated nature, the visual cortex itself could serve as the input. We could be experiencing the actual structure of our brain in the Dreamachine.

An out-of-body experience

Part of the Dreamachine programme has also been to run a large-scale Perception Census, which is described as the first major citizen science project investigating perceptual diversity. The Perception Census is a series of fun and interactive games and illusions which explore how we experience the world, be it how we perceive time, sound, or how our imagination works. Open until mid-2023, nearly 20,000 people around the world have already taken part in the census. Some fascinating preliminary findings are already published; one being that 31 per cent of participants report experiencing an out-of-body experience.

The team behind the Dreamachine hope that shedding light on our perceptual diversity could be transformational for our society in much the same way that recognising our externally visible diversity has been. As Seth says, 'there is no single way of perceiving the world against which others can be compared and found wanting. Being aware of how differently people can see the world should make us more humble about our perspectives, and in turn, cultivate greater empathy for others. It also simply makes the world a richer, more wonderful place, as everything we see has as many ways to be seen as there are people to see.'

There has also been a school outreach programme, reaching over one million students. For the team behind Dreamachine however, this is just the beginning. They believe that they have only just scratched the surface of what is possible. As a result of so many visitors reporting an increased feeling of wellbeing from the experience, the University of Sussex team are developing a research programme to investigate the potential to use the technology as a therapeutic intervention. Like Gysin, Crook hopes the Dreamachine can change the world, becoming a new kind of secular temple where people can come together for conscious changing experiences. Currently preparing for an international tour, this dream is well on its way to being realised.

Reviewed by Rose de Castellane. Rose worked for the Dreamachine Programme at Woolwich Public Market as one of the Front of House team members. She is now a freelance journalist.

Visit the website for more information and to participate in the perception census.