Reconstruction of

The Dream Tent

Handout for Participants

You are about to experience some mind therapy from the late nineteenth century. The Dream Tent was invented by the New York neurologist James Leonard Corning in 1899, the same year Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.

Corning’s idea was that the brain was susceptible to chromatic and sonic vibrations in the drowsy state before sleep. While in that state, doses of pleasurable colour and sound could induce pleasant dreams and thereby improve the patient’s waking life.

He reported to the International Review of Electrotherapy and Radiotherapy that with the aid of the Dream Tent he had cured Miss L of her Matutinal Depression and Inertia (not wanting to get up in the morning), Mr S of his Insomnia, Mr L of his Morbid Dreams, Mr S of his Imperative Conceptions, and H of his Nervous Irritability.

The pleasant colours were delivered to the patient’s retinas via a motor-driven chromatrope, a well-known optical device popular since the 1830s where two discs of glass painted with cycloidal patterns were rotated against each other in a magic lantern, optically mixing their colours and pulsing them off the screen. Our reconstruction uses authentic chromatropes and a magic lantern from the period.

The therapeutic musical vibrations were delivered to the cells of the patient’s brain via a canvas and leather ‘acoustic helmet’, into which Corning had stitched padded metal saucers supporting above each ear hollow metallic nipples connected by a long india-rubber tube to a wax cylinder phonograph, a machine for playing recordings popular since 1888. Our reconstruction uses a Bela Mini computer, programmed with three circular sonic layers, breathily resonating with the optical logic of the spinning chromatrope discs.

In Corning’s words, ‘pleasing scenes, fantasies, and combinations of color form and fade before [the] eyes’, while ‘the musical waves, surging into the labyrinth and onward to the sensorium, produce effects alike transcendent and indescribable’.

126 years after it was first used on sick patients, will you also experience some of the therapeutic benefits of our reconstructed Dream Tent? It’s time to find out.

Take off your shoes, lie on the divan, put on the headphones, and we’ll zip you up. Then, all you have to do is look steadily at the chromatrope.