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The search for a "drugless high" has taken some strange, and usually unreliable, turns in the past 40 years: aromatherapy, Sensurround, tantric sex, yogic flying, virtual reality goggles, seaweed-embedded T-shirts...

Toronto filmmaker Nik Sheehan's latest flick, Flicker, examines one of the weirdest modes of mental transportation ever devised: Canadian artist and mystic Brion Gysin's Dream Machine, a gyro purported to mimic the alpha waves our brains produce during dream states.

Invented during Gysin's Beat period, when he spent his days making art and artificially replicating his own alpha waves with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles, the Dream Machine looks like a lampshade that has been attacked by a Rototiller and set on top of a turntable. As the shade turns, rapidly changing, flickering patterns of light and dark are projected onto the viewer's face, and, allegedly, hallucinations soon follow.

For Flicker, Sheehan travelled to New York, Paris and London to meet with the remaining few of Gysin's artistic contemporaries (Iggy Pop and Marianne Faithfull among them) and asked each one to, literally, give the dervish a whirl. The results are predictable enough - visionaries have visions, after all - but what is most striking about Flicker is how ready the participants are to drop everything for a quick tiptoe through the talking tulips.

Thus, Flicker is ultimately more about our need for the unreal than it is about any unreality-generating gizmo. Sheehan's focus may linger on Gysin's perspective-altering art object, but the film works best when it shows us how the need for transcendence is eternal, and so powerful that even geniuses will jump at the chance for a sprinkle of pixie dust.

Here's where I get confused: Does the Dream Machine cause hallucinations, or activate what's already in our brains?

Hallucinations and neurological reactions are related. True hallucinations only happen to a small percentage of the people who look into the machine - in fact, definitely a minority. Others will see shapes and symbols, and they often talk of colours that they can't even describe. And then there's a chunk of people who will get absolutely nothing.

How big a chunk? What are the numbers?

Well, ha It can't be scientifically verified because nobody's done a proper study. All the studies were cut off in the sixties because the machine was associated with all these beatniks on drugs

When you say hallucination, do you mean the whole "There's a train coming at me There are bugs on my face" routine?

Absolutely One woman saw visions of the antebellum South

When you filmed people using the Dream Machine, how did you know whether or not the presence of your camera caused them to, shall we say, exaggerate their responses?

Well, this is the interesting thing. To me, the machine is just a delicious metaphor, and it's visually fascinating. So, at the beginning, I didn't really care if it actually worked or not. But after I had the machine built and brought it home, I turned it on and kaboom I had a full-blown vision of angels flying at me. It was astonishing.

The feathery kind or the bat-winged kind?

Actually, I think the happy kind. More like the little cute ones you see in those biblical books. Whether that was imprinted on my memory or whatever I don't know, but it was definitely a hallucination. So I take the people in the film at their word.

Do you use the machine every day now?

Ha No, no. It's an ungainly and difficult thing to set up. People keep asking me if I'm going to start manufacturing them, and, um, no. But good luck to anyone who wants to.

Who owns the copyright to the device?

Nobody, because Brion Gysin is long dead. But that's one of the delicious things about the whole beat culture - they intended things not to be caught up in copyright. I mean, Gysin died in poverty and he spent his life bitter and angry, not comprehending why the Dream Machine did not become a massive success.

Ikea could make them.

Good idea But this is 2008 - safety concerns are everywhere. One in 4,000 people will have an epileptic seizure when they get in front of it. In our world of bean counters, that's a legal problem.

Some of the people you interview have well-documented drug histories. I suspect Marianne Faithfull, for instance, could achieve a hallucination watching water boil.

Iggy Pop claims he doesn't actually look into the machine, he just likes the experience around it. And Kenneth Anger directly says it doesn't work unless you smoke pot first. So, while it's true that many of these people have experience with altered states, the goal is a drugless high.

But does it work on squares?

I suspect it does. The bottom line is, it's a mental attitude. You have to open your mind to it. If you allow it in, it will have some effect. I will tell you, though, in the middle of a dark and nasty Canadian winter, at 3 in the afternoon, when the world outside is just dreary ... it's very refreshing

Particulars

BORN: London, March 17, 1960

A SERIOUS START: Sheehan made an early documentary about AIDS, No Sad Songs (1985), which helped bring the suffering of AIDS victims to light. (CITY-TV broadcast a shortened version in prime time in 1987.)

WHIMSY: Over the two decades since, Sheehan has had a varied filmmaking career. In the mid-1990s, he produced and directed Symposium: Ladder of Love, a takeoff on Plato that brought a crowd of collaborators - including Daniel MacIvor, Brad Fraser, Tomson Highway, Patricia Rozema and Charles Pachter - to present ideas about the nature of love. He also made two biographical documentaries, on expat Torontonian artist Scott Symons (God's Fool) and drawing teacher Paul Young (The Drawing Master).