Flicker

The dream machine looks simple enough: A 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes, and wait for the visions to come.

The dream machine offers a drugless high that its creator -- poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin -- believed would revolutionize human consciousness.

He wasn't alone. Kurt Cobain had a dream machine. And William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to "storm the citadels of enlightenment."

With a custom-made dream machine in tow, director Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin -- his art, his complex ideas, and his friendships with some of the 20th century's key counterculture figures.

Gysin was fascinated by identity. He saw himself as a incarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins, trained in counter-espionage during WWII, and wrote and rewrote his name in countless permutations, as if to make it disappear -- in the process, inventing the cut-up technique that his lifelong friend, Beat novelist Burroughs, would make famous.