By Mark Allen
New York Times News Service
At first glance it looked like something in the window of a TriBeCa furniture store, an oversize lamp from the early '60s maybe. But when Kate Chapman flicked a switch and the 3-foot high latticework cylinder in front of me began to spin, it was clear that we were dealing with more than just another piece of midcentury flotsam.
The machine started to cast strobelike patterns of bright light on our faces, and when I closed my eyes as instructed, there they were, the dazzling multicolored forms that I'd been told about: mandalas and crosses and even Mandelbrot fractals, dancing across my eyelids.
I was sitting on the floor of Chapman's Brooklyn loft, and she was demonstrating her prized household appliance, a 1996 Dreamachine originally made for William S. Burroughs. Besides the trippy visual effects, the device is said to induce an "alpha state" - a state conducive to lucid dreaming or intense daydreaming - in people who face the cylinder with their eyes closed as it spins around a bright light.
Dreamachine enthusiasts - whose ranks have swelled recently thanks to chat forums and a book published last year - claim that it promotes a trancelike serenity, intensifies creativity and insight and even uncovers suppressed memories.
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