Late last year, after participating in a mushroom tea ceremony for a friend's birthday set to the sounds of 50 Years Of Sunshine, I hauled ass to Berghain for Josey Rebelle and CCL in Panorama Bar. Since the summer, I'd been asking people at raves how they learned to dance, searching for the key to finally "letting loose" and moving past the embarrassment and physical discomfort I often feel when moving my body. One piece of advice I received last July at a private party in a train station was to spend more time dancing on acid and find my centre of gravity. On the dance floor, going off a kaleidoscopic mix of the tea's fading spectres combined with a freshly divided tab, I poured my energy into making spirals with my wrists and hips, syncing the intention of my movements with what I was hearing. When CCL dropped Saint Etienne's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," my friend (who associates the track with childhood car rides) hallucinated her own birth and her mother's death. Watching the crowd reel, I was in awe of the symbiotic relationship between DJ and dancer. It felt profound that the eclectic choice of music could compel so many different kinds of bodies to move. I perceived everyone around me being guided on a journey together, following the sound like a map, letting the soothing, deep pressure stimulation of interconnectedness wash over me.

Over the past few years, classical hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms have added another dimension to my subjective rave experiences, helping me discover electronic music's noetic qualities and precipitating homespun dance floor epiphanies during winter lockdowns. My dad told me once that if you hold onto something too tight, it will slip out of your hands. I've come to think of the "thing" as my psyche. Psychedelics are a way of loosening my grip on things, relieving pressure before it boils over, allowing my brain to loosen up and make freewheeling connections. According to REBUS (relaxed beliefs under psychedelics), a model put forward by K. J. Friston and R. L. Carhart-Harris, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Imperial College London, when we take psychedelics, our brains rely less on prior beliefs, resulting in increased cognitive flexibility, altering one's perception of external stimuli, including what we see and hear, as well as our perception of self. This is one theory as to why users commonly experience this sense of unity or oneness.

These personal experimentations on the dance floor match up with a trend that's cropped up over the past six years. Between 2016 and 2019, for instance, a study which surveyed adults at electronic music events and festivals across New York City, found a 67 percent relative increase in LSD use among the respondents. Meanwhile, from 2020 to the present day, Jersey Club pioneer UNIIQU3 released the track "Microdosing," Jon Hopkins wrote the album Music For Psychedelic Therapy, Eris Drew sampled seminal psychedelic researcher Terrance McKenna in "Ride Free" and The Bunker launched a sub-label called Going In for music geared towards plant medicine ceremonies, all pointing to a resurgent interest in the psychedelic universe.

Psychedelia is baked into the history of raving and electronic music culture, from the 1960s, when Don Buchla installed a little red panel dipped in LSD in early Buchla Model 100 synthesizers—which users could lick for inspiration—to the etymology of acid house. Some trace the genre back to 1985, when DJ Ron Hardy played Phuture's "In Your Mind" at The Music Box in Chicago. Several attendees claimed the venue put LSD in the water, earning it the label "Ron Hardy's Acid Trax" on bootleg copies before its release in 1987 under the shortened name "Acid Tracks." In Downtown Manhattan's The Loft, David Mancuso hosted private parties that "combined [...] Timothy Leary’s LSD gatherings and downtown loft living with music capable of providing a form of life energy to enable his social gatherings to go further in their journey towards communal-transcendental transformation," as Love Saves The Day author Tim Lawrence wrote in The Wire. Starting on Valentine’s Day 1970, these events became the blueprint for other incredibly influential dance music institutions, including private parties like The Tenth Floor, The Gallery, Flamingo, 12 West, The Soho Place, Reade Street, The Paradise Garage and The Warehouse.

During the birth of techno in Detroit, the genre's primary forum was unlicensed venues, making psychedelics an en vogue rave elixir in the absence of alcohol, according to Brendan and Amber Gillen from label Interdimensional Transmissions—proprietors of the infamous No Way Back events. "Even a Detroit party that doesn't understand the psychedelic side of it has psychedelics built into it because it's based on the history of Detroit rave," asserted Brendan. In the late '80s and early '90s, when he was converging with this scene, "juice bars" would serve Ocean Spray to parched crowds, and "smart bars" would sell forearm-sized vitamin drinks made with mixed supplement powders, both entrepreneurial efforts that were a godsend in DIY facilities that didn't always have running water. Later, in '94, when Brendan first encountered Drexciya, he interpreted the music, especially the keyboard lines, as evidence of that psychedelic lineage. "Drexciya represented the underground approach of actually trying to change your mind, to evolve your mind," he explained.

As someone who was raised on Marianne Williamson tapes and "the power of positive thinking," modern spirituality has given me the ick since puberty, so I was relieved to find out the bonding and existential come up I experienced during CCL's set, and on countless other occasions, wasn't indicative of an underlying new age gene cropping up later in life, but something shared by ravers of all stripes. Studies have shown that taking psilocybin and LSD can increase emotional response to music and imbue it with meaning for the listener. Furthermore, the rave environment has been found to be especially conducive to "feelings of awe and personal transformation" according to cognitive anthropologist Dr. Martha Newson. In a 2021 research paper, she wrote, "Transcending to the sacred plane via awe-inspiring or liminal group experiences has been common in religious rituals for millennia, but this mechanism is also exploited by the secular, for instance at large music gatherings or raves."

During a time when many in the scene are still suffering from extreme anxiety as community and culture are repeatedly open and closed off on a pendulum's swing, Brendan believes psychedelics may offer some positive therapeutic benefits for people in dance music, who he said "are used to being interconnected." Between 2015 and 2018, use of LSD in the US rose by around 50 percent, which researchers, suspect may be a result of users self-medicating with illegal substances to "find relief from depression, anxiety and general stress over the state of the world," according to results published in the July 2020 issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. While in the UK, the pandemic period has seen a spike in microdosing, where users take low doses (usually between 10 and 20 micrograms) a few times a week to increase creativity and manage mental health issues like depression and anxiety.

Calling from her room at a residency in Mexico, DJ, producer and founder of Nature Loves Courage Festival Abyss X told me, over the coos and screeches of birds, that acid was a necessary tool in helping her stave off depression during lockdown. "I think we all went through some mild or heavier depression, depending on the person. For me, microdosing, not in the classical scientific sense but in larger quantities, guided me through my then much needed manifestation of a brighter and free-er state of existence and helped me purge negative feelings that accumulated through being confined in a space for long durations of time and not being able to practice a social life properly." Everyone I interviewed for this article observed a pattern of increased psychedelic use in their respective communities over the past few years. "I was hearing from a lot of people who did a lot of white powders tell me about their psychedelic experiences when parties first started happening this summer," said Brendan, "Telling me about their mushroom experiences and how transformative they were."

DJ and producer Eris Drew believes the resurgence of psychedelics in the scene is partly due to a longing to return to rave's ecstatic roots. Drew, who has released on Interdimensional Transmissions and attended many of the same Midwest raves as Brendan and Amber, explained that in the late '90s, the "game" was to see who could reach the most ecstatic point. "We were trying to have the most ecstatic experience, not the most inebriated. So people would discourage alcohol use because it diminished the ecstatic effects of LSD, mushrooms or ecstasy," she told me. However, the culture shifted into the early '00s as she perceived drug trends leaning towards coke, ketamine and alcohol, and having a psychedelic experience on the dance floor grew more taboo. "The scene felt much more adult to me. It felt more sophisticated, and not in a nice way," she said. "So I guess when I talk about the ecstatic roots of the scene, it was just a scene that was more psychedelic, young and really focused on that experience, privileging it above other things."

In her excellent essay More Than A Party, Drew connects raving on psychedelics with various spiritual rituals and makes a case for why some find these encounters healing. She also wrote about the facets of electronic dance culture that are informed by private rituals and asserts that the power of the healing art presented at a rave represents the personal healing work of individuals: "My DJing [...] reflects the thousands of hours I spent alone or with a friend, mixing records at home, dancing or not, adorned, and experimenting with substances." During lockdown, however, after a few initial trips, Drew's desire to do psychedelics decreased and has only picked up steam again now that she's back to touring. "One of the messages that the mushroom gave me while I was in lockdown was that actually, the community aspect of the experience is more important than I potentially realized, especially at this moment in time. Although her personal experience was inverse during lockdown, she sees why participating in these private rituals with psychedelics has been appealing to many: they offer a feeling of connection when we're all so disconnected. "I think on a personal level, that would be the appeal for someone, because I mean all of a sudden the whole universe is kind of in your bedroom," she explained.

Today's psychedelic renaissance, which first began in the mid-20th century, has a complicated history and plenty of baggage. Its leaders have been predominantly white and male—oftentimes weird guru types—and as Camille Barton wrote in their recent piece for Double Blind, has come with a "normalized assumption in the psychedelic community that entheogens make users more open-minded, cooperative" despite extensive use among far right groups, including Nazi party members. When we spoke, the embodiment practitioner, psychedelic-assisted therapy researcher and resident DJ and booker for Berlin's Emergent Bass parties also noted that many traditional or indigenous cultures, with some colonial interruptions, have had their "plant medicine practices" intact this whole time, renaissance or not. "I think in the West though, yeah, we are experiencing a wave of interest and understanding and, unfortunately, commodification and medicalization right now. And we'll see where that all goes."

As a teenager, Barton found raves to be a therapeutic container for navigating mental health and creating a sense of balance and release. They spent long periods moving, shaking, crying and sometimes letting out screams inaudible against the thumping bass. "I think [raves] are one of the most available spaces to do that in a pleasurable way," they said. When asked about psychedelic-assisted therapy and its possible futures, Barton raised the notion of experimenting with collective healing instead of the more individualizing, pathological approach of one-on-one sessions. They cited the liberation psychology model which emerged in the '70s in South American countries as a way of helping people understand their experiences in relation to collective harm and oppressive sociopolitical structures. Raves are vastly more uncontrollable environments than a formally structured group, presenting a myriad of obstacles that could tip the careful balance of set and setting, and tilt an inexperienced user towards a "bad trip." Still, this struck me as similar to what's been useful about my encounters with psychedelics and raving; they combine personal transformation, ritual and community, which have helped in digesting my own life experiences and taking a wider and more nuanced perspective of my place in society. As Abyss X put it: "You're researching while you're on psychedelics. It's important that you set intentions before to help you reach states of transformation. While you're in the psychedelic realm, cracking through the walls of externally imposed ideas, you contemplate a lot over your personal journey and the restrictive societal constructs that hold you back from reaching the most fab version of yourself. Then you think, 'who am I?' 'what is my place in the world?' 'how should I live my life?'"

All these benefits considered, each interviewee agreed that psychedelics aren't for everyone, and I'm right there with them. They're just one tool for achieving personal insight. Co-regulating our bodies together through dance, standing in front of the speaker stack (with ear protection, of course) and feeling the sound, cultivating a deep listening practice à la Pauline Oliveros or all of these in combination could also generate the same mystical feelings of overwhelming love, oneness and presence.

As festivals and big club culture return, settling back into the "entertainment model" as Drew described it in her essay, a "model of raving with big personalities, flashy stages, corporate sponsorships, and a predominance of white straight artists in the spotlight," it does seem like a crucial time to honour the ecstatic roots of the scene and adopt that underground approach of evolving one's mind. The primary methods of doing this are by challenging the status quo, reading, listening and asking critical existential questions. Another way is to put your intentions towards interconnectedness, and focus on reaching the most ecstatic—and not the most inebriated—point. In both rave contexts and more private, intimate settings, the doors of my perception have opened onto vistas of joyous and constructive communions with music, myself and my community. These types of communion can be a subversive act in the face of stiffness and seriousness. But this makes positive psychedelic experiences doubly healing for people who want to transform their relationship with raving and reconnect with what it's all about (PLUR) after a period of upheaval.