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William Burroughs once commented in a letter to Allen Ginsberg: ‘Of course life is literally a dream, or rather the projection of a dream... the whole existing system can be dreamed away if we can get enough people dreaming on the Gysin level. There is nothing that can stop the power of a real dream. I mean this literally.’ And he did. Burroughs was making the point that has been central to mysticism throughout the centuries: it is through the malleability of dreams that we gain access to ‘otherness’.W. Grey Walter had this to say about the physiological function of the brain: ‘In a telephone system the meaning of a message received depends on the sender; in a sensory system the meaning depends on the receiver. When nerve impulses travel from a sense organ, it is their destination on the cortex which determines, in the first place, that character of the sensation, not the sense organ from which they come. If, when you get a number on the telephone, you give a message, the message remains the same, even if you give it to a wrong number. The result of such an error in the brain is very different.’
Grey Walter went on to explain how it is the receiving point that gives substance to the message, not the initial ‘statement’. Meaning/perception is thus individualised physiologically by Walter, just as it is individualised psychologically by Freud.
In exploring dream the ‘old dispute about mind and matter, for which each generation finds new slogans’ as Grey Walter termed it, is never far from the surface. The dreamachine generates vivid images and brightly coloured patterns. Are these physiological? Are these aspects of a psychic reality? If they are the former, do they then lack meaning? And if they are the latter, do they then encompass meaning?
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Text copyright Paul Cecil, 1996