Dream Machine

WARNING! Do not use this app if you are epileptic!

The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli.

A dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain's electrical oscillations. Users experience increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the user feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that using a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state - the state which occurs prior to entering the dreams.

This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes.
A dreamachine may be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders.

Normally, an awake person's brain functions at between 4 and 8 electrical pulses per second (hertz, or hz). When the Dreamachine's 10 flickers per second strike closed lids, however, the optic nerve sends a 10 hz pulse signal into the cortical tissue. Because the amplitude of the newly introduced signal is greater than that of the waking brain's normal frequency, the waking brain now operates at 10 hz, the synaptic rate associated with the edge of dreams.