This Gadget’s Human Potential Is as Deep as Sleep Itself

If a man’s home is his castle, then the garage surely must be his playhouse--the one place where he can disappear for hours into a world of his own choosing and tinker his cares away. Souped-up cars, elaborate birdhouses, rewired stereos--all stand as monuments to the ingenuity of the American male when left to the late-night privacy of his garage.

From the outside, Jim Walker’s garage in Santa Ana looks like thousands of others in Orange County. But he too has burned the midnight oil in the garage in recent years, spurred by a lifelong love of gadgets and a professional interest in the human potential movement.

The result is the Dream Machine, Walker’s love child.

When Walker looks around today’s world, he sees a stressed-out society. From housewives to chairmen of the boards to office workers, he sees people who either can’t manage their time or who can’t seem to plan their futures.

The Dream Machine will help fix that, he thinks.

The machine actually consists of several components, a package of sensory treats designed to eliminate stress and rid your mind of the clutter that keeps you from seeing things clearly.

The Dream Machine’s central feature is what Walker calls the JETBED, a rubdown table that looks like the kind you’d see in an athletic training room. Hooked up under the table is a Jacuzzi that, with the flip of a switch, will give you a warm, bubbling, watery massage without actually getting you wet.

As you relax, you look up at a video screen and can have your program choice of a wide range of computer-enhanced videos, all designed to soothe you. Simultaneously, you’re equipped with headphones with a similar selection of relaxing sounds. If you want, pleasing scents can be channeled into the room to enhance your comfort.

Walker incorporates other high-tech elements into the Dream Machine, such as laser light and biofeedback. I confess to being an ignoramus about such things, although while lying on the Dream Machine and watching the light show I suppose my mind was transported somewhere else for a while.

Although the Dream Machine experience can be a relaxation device unto itself, its greater purpose, Walker says, is as a step in the hypnotherapy process. “You can’t help but relax, and once you relax, you re-prioritize what is reality for you,” he says.

He pictures a future where stressed-out women at home with the children can take time during the day to visit the Dream Machine; where office workers on coffee break can slip into the Dream Machine room and relax their minds; where schoolchildren can rid themselves of tension.

You’re thinking, This is kooky . . .

I’m not so sure. We all know intuitively that we’re stressed, that we never seem to find the time to relax, that we don’t even know how to relax. And many of us who aren’t too hip on mind expansion still wonder about untapped potential in the recesses of our brain.

People just aren’t ready to make the leap, I suggested to Walker.

“We do it every time we go to the theater or sit down in front of the TV,” he says. “We’re in a sense going into an escape machine. For an hour and a half, we’re Mel Gibson or some other protagonist saving the world. For a moment, we’re Arnold Schwarzenegger and we’re having a great time and everybody loves us and we like ourselves. We walk away, and to some degree we carry it with us. A part of our self-image is expanded because we have identified with a role model or a situation.

“The thing of it is, there’s no reason we can’t take that with us in a much more lasting fashion. It’s just that we haven’t allowed our imagination to take more control of what we’re doing, to trust it and to recognize that we can be very healthy, very energetic and very successful individuals.”

It wouldn’t be accurate to call Walker, a recent 38-year-old dropout of the computer industry, a mad scientist. Not that he’d mind; in fact, that’s a badge of distinction that has a nice ring to it.

“When people call you weird, you can take that as something to be proud of,” he says. “It means you’re different. To be the same sometimes is to be nothing.”

I don’t know if Jim Walker’s Dream Machine will revolutionize thought as we know it or die on the launch pad. Does he see the future, or is he just an eccentric guy with time on his hands?

Who are we to say?

But I do know we’ve all got our dreams. Everybody’s got some manifestation of the Great American Novel gyrating in his or her brain. Instead of twiddling his thumbs, Walker went to work and built the Dream Machine.

If nothing else, this ought to make you wonder the next time you walk past someone’s house and see the lights on late at night in the garage. You might just ask yourself: “I wonder what that guy’s doing in there?”