Lo and behold, two precursors to the dreamachine, the stroboscopic flicker device inspired nearly one-hundred years later by William Grey Walter's The Living Brain (1953).  From Punch, 1855, and from Hood's Own by Thomas Hood, 1855.

William Burroughs on the importance of [literally] letting go:

I saw a picture of a balloon suddenly and unexpectedly soaring and some people still holding onto the ropes connected to the balloon were suddenly jerked into the air and most of them didn't have the survival IQ to let go in time.  Seconds later they are sixty, a hundred feet off the ground.  Those who didn't let go fell off at five hundred or a thousand feet.  A basic survival lesson is: Learn to let go.  ... 

Suppose you were holding one of those ropes?  Would you have let go in time. which is, of course, at the first upward yank?  I'll tell you something interesting.  You would have a much better chance to let go in time now that you have read this paragraph than if you hadn't read it.  Writing, if anything, is a word of warning.

LET GO!

"The function of dreams, they tell us, is to unlearn or purge the brain of unneeded connections—according to this view what goes through the mind in a dream is merely the result of a sort of neural housecleaning.  They also suggest that it may be damaging to recall dreams, because doing so might strengthen mental connections that should be discarded.  'We dream in order to forget,' they write." —William Burroughs, The Western Lands