At a recent eye exam, the light the doctor shone in my eye made its capillaries suddenly visible to me, a network of bright red tendrils floating in the darkness of the examination room.
Earlier, the nurse had me peer one-eyed into the scope of a machine, in which I first saw a blurred picture of a brightly colored landscape. The machine whirred slightly as it measured the internal geometry of the eye, and then, without any direction from me, automatically adjusted its lens to snap the picture into focus.
A deserted road receded straight into a bright green landscape, and where the road met the horizon there hovered a large striped air balloon.
Inside out
The psychoanalyst-turned-crackpot Wilhelm Reich saw — by the evidence of his own eyes — a constant bombardment of the earth by a life force he called orgone energy. First noticing the telltale bluish light in the darkness of his lab basement, he was soon seeing it everywhere — most obviously in the sky, the color of which he had thus explained. Reich invented the orgone accumulator, a kind of therapeutic isolation box intended to concentrate the play of this life force on its occupant.
Reich’s fancies percolated through mid-century counter-culture, with its antiscientific bias and mystical predilections. That Reich had been imprisoned by the fda only increased his outlaw allure; among the most famous of orgone box enthusiasts was that other outlaw, William Burroughs.
Even the filmmaker Stan Brakhage thought he was seeing orgones when he looked up at the sky, a dance of particles whose motion sometimes seemed to foretell rain. So when as a teenager I gazed out the porthole of an airplane and saw the same particles popping across the bright clouds below, I felt I had joined my heroes.
This was a vision I can still repeat at will. Only years later did I learn that, as with so many miracles, what I was seeing was self-produced: the particles were white blood cells pulsing through the capillaries of my retina.
In William Burroughs I first read about Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a flicker device for hallucinations. Following Gysin’s published instructions (now found online here), I used a turntable, a light bulb, and a slotted oatmeal box to fashion a dreamachine of my own.
See, too, Flicker stories
With closed eyes I faced the flickering light, the pattern of which bypassed my retinal vision to induce a kind of direct neocortical vision. This came in the form of huge wheeling expanses of intense and even repellent colors — acid greens, yellows, and pinks — unlike any you’d ever see on earth. The experience pitched me into an odd kind of panic, as if I were on the verge of an epileptic fit, and I did not repeat it often.