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Like many who appear to be the most radical or revolutionary, Gysin was conscious of working within a tradition; and that because of this he served as a custodian for those ‘forces’, elements, or ideas that passed through him. He told Terry Wilson: ‘The permutations discovered me — because permutations have of course been around for a long time; in the whole magic world permutations are part of the cabalistic secret.’ He also placed the following words in the mouth of a fictional character in his novel The Process: ‘I'll tell you one thing you really should keep to yourself: the World is contained in that Word. If you have understood, there is no other mystery. The Way Out is to permutate... “Rub out the Word”’Gysin's first permutational poems were broadcast by the BBC in 1960.
No Virtual Reality suite has yet come up with anything near the fluidity, range and inventiveness of image of the dreamachine, and none is likely to. The dreamachine, whether it reflects physiological patterns, or acts as a gateway into the personal, collective or cosmic unconscious; whether it is meaningful or meaningless, has the immense advantage of allowing us to respond to ourselves. It provides access into our own brain. It is literally a machine that produces dreams.
Gysin himself reflected on the type of vision engendered by the use of dreamachines: ‘I think it scares people... Because of the fact that it deals with that area of interior vision which has never been tapped before. Except in history, one knows of cases — in French history, Catherine de Medici for example, had Nostradamus sitting up on the top of a tower... he used to sit up there and with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicker his fingers over closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way which were of influence to her in regard to her political powers... they were like instructions from a higher power... ‘They could also foretell bad things. Peter the Great also had somebody who sat on the top of a tower and flickered his fingers like that across his closed eyelids... And any of us today can go and look out the window or lie in a field and do it, and you get a great deal of the type of visions — in fact, it’s the same area in the alpha bands of excitation of the brain — within the alpha band between eight and thirteen flickers a second. And the dreamachine produces this continuously, without interruption, unless you yourself interrupt it by opening your eyes like that.’
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Text copyright Paul Cecil, 1996