22 May 2024
Psychedelic Playgrounds
How Music Festivals Support Transformative Psychedelic Experiences
by Gabrielle LeHigh, PhD
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV Number 1 • 2024
It’s starting to get dark. There are lights flashing all over the place. I can feel the bass from the music and people start dancing. People are cheering, and it’s starting to freak me out. I can’t find my friends. I don’t know what’s going on. I just stopped, and I lay down on the grass. And I’m praying for it to stop for a moment.
Now, I’m a kid curled up in a ball in the middle of a concert ground in the Everglades. This couple came up to me and asked me if I was okay. I replied, “Not really.” I told them what I did (mushrooms and acid). They were like, “Oh, shit.” They sat down with me and talked to me, just holding me and helping me out. Then they got me up and told me, “Let’s get it out. Just go with it. Dance all right.” And that’s exactly what I did. It was wild. Like it was the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced. I realized that I couldn’t fight it. The more I fought it, the more it freaked me out, and the more I wasn’t letting it happen. My subconscious was stepping in.
I just started listening to the music. Next, I could see the music. I could feel everything that was going on. Looking at the sky, it was this entire city pattern of geometrical and electrical rainbows, squares and hexagons, and things turning into small cities. As the music was playing, the whole environment changed. I thought, “Wow, this is really, really, really cool.”
I’ve never felt this way in my entire life. I had a really hard time in school. I would fight all the time and lash out for no reason. I had a hard time coping with my own issues, which was one of the things I never admitted to myself. I resorted to these types of things because my father died when I was young. Now I’m 15, and I think it was the mushrooms doing it to me, but I yawned really, really hard. I could feel stress leaving my body. I felt my muscles had more agility. I felt like I didn’t have knots in my back. I wasn’t tense anymore. And it was like I just wasn’t angry. I wasn’t thinking about anything other than just how it felt and how good it felt. Once I started appreciating it, I sat down on the grass and took my shoes off. And it was like, I could feel the energy going through me.
When people stand in front of the stage, engulfed in the music, entuned to their altered senses, it resonates with the introspective phases where clinical patients wear blindfolds and headphones with a curated music playlist encouraging inner self-exploration. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Sebastian was 15 years old at his first music festival having this experience while watching Phish. Over 15 years later, he conveyed the details of this story to me, emphasizing the importance of tapping into unexplored emotions around his father’s death when he was a child, connecting them to his anger-driven behavior, and finally relinquishing them. This story is one of several from my dissertation research on transformative psychedelic experiences at music festivals, highlighting the complex entanglements between psychedelics, live music, community, and transformation.
I embarked on my dissertation journey in 2019, intrigued to understand how people take psychedelics at music festivals and how they derive meaning from them. I was driven by my psychedelic explorations along with my understanding of the limitations in current therapeutic psychedelic studies. The renewed examination of psychedelics in biomedical research is essential. Still, it limits the context of psychedelic experiences to controllable therapy-set standards. My research explores the potential benefits of non-medical contexts, specifically music festivals.
Music Festivals: Escaping the Everyday
Music festivals are interdimensional portals through space and time, carrying travelers beyond the boundaries of consciousness and reality. These carefully crafted spaces entangle features of music, performance, art, and community. While pre-recorded music is one experience, live music production is central to creating meaningful experiences in this context. One participant, Floyd, describes how musicians are not making music to get to the end of a song but to relish in producing every note, beat, and sound throughout the performance. The power of live music comes from the process of musicians making music simultaneously with the audience and the ability to transport the audience into a feeling of timelessness where “nothing before exists and nothing after exists.” It’s the essence of living in the moment. The connection between the audience and performers manifests in specific moments, evidenced by how artists interact with the audience in sharing messages, such as sampling Alan Watt’s “What is Reality?” in Inzo’s “Overthinker” or sharing messages like “Everything you need is inside you. It’s up to you.”
These relationships between artists and the audience become enveloped in the otherworldly features of festivals. These unique spaces away from our everyday constructs of reality are filled with interactive art featuring geodomes encasing geometric designs and planets with spectators laying on air mattresses, wishing trees for people to write messages, like “your story matters and your feelings are valid so be kind to yourself,” extensive stage productions with lasers, visualizers with fractal imagery, disco balls, pyrotechnics, strobe lights, and inflatable dinosaurs, and flow artists wielding fire poi and hula hoops. Interweaving these elements is a deeply embedded culture of compassion and empathy. In the rave community, the fundamental principle of PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect) connects strangers, builds community,, and establishes everlasting friendships through compliments, social support, and a culture of gift-giving.
Festival Structures Promote Transformation
Each element of music, art, stage production, and community exists in an intricate flow of dance and movement, coming together in a dynamic and ever-changing melody that is a powerful force in creating meaningful psychedelic experiences within the music festival context. These crafted psychedelic playgrounds are filled with galaxies, lasers, visualizers, art, psychedelic mushrooms, and music conveying conscious ideas and messages of compassion, wrapped in a supportive community outside our everyday reality. They offer a liminal space that breaks down social and cultural frameworks, allowing festival-goers’ minds and bodies to explore new ways of being and doing through pleasurable play, resulting in transformation. Transformation ranges from processing grief, making a career change, overcoming addiction, addressing mental health, processing trauma, and gaining self-confidence.
This contextual melody challenges festivals as unstructured spaces. As Kyriakopoulou (2021) discusses, festivals function as timestamps, dictating what people do, what substances they take, and how they move through their environment during a psychedelic experience. Through my research-based self-exploration, I discovered this flowing structure of the festival. I realized how it mirrors the clinical protocols developed for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. When people stand in front of the stage, engulfed in the music, entuned to their altered senses, it resonates with the introspective phases where clinical patients wear blindfolds and headphones with a curated music playlist encouraging inner self-exploration. One festival-goer explained, “When I was internalizing it, I was thinking a lot. I feel like those are the better parts for me to learn about what’s really going on. I could pinpoint where the hurt originated.”
Similarly, at festivals, people remove themselves from periods of introspection when walking between sets, sitting around their campsite with friends, or looking at art. During these periods, participants talked about reintegrating into their social group to process their introspective exploration, not unlike when a patient takes off their blindfold and headphones to discuss their experience with a therapist. As unstructured as festivals may appear, these oscillating periods of introspection and integration are driven by the timestamps meticulously and purposefully created within the psychedelic playgrounds of festivals. These patterns of activities help create a structure that supports meaningful experiences.
My research dives beyond the traditional examination of the drug, set, and setting (Zinberg, 1984) to understand how these elements entangle in dynamic dances and create the potential for structured and meaningful experiences. It presents a unique set of contextual factors that go beyond the pharmacological effects of drugs to encompass relationships and processes with elements of the environment, such as Sebastian’s experience presented earlier with psychedelics, Phish, and community. None of the aspects of the drug, set, and setting alone create a psychedelic experience. As one participant describes, these carefully crafted psychedelic playgrounds lend way to a specific recipe, a chemistry between these assemblages that work together to create such experiences. Drug effects entangle with artistic playgrounds and supportive communities to create something clinical settings are missing. The organization of these events creates rhythmic structures guiding festival-goers to transformative experiences while containing unique elements that festival-goers find most impactful in their experiences: live music, engaging art, and a deep connection with a like-minded and loving community. At the same time, the recipe or chemical reaction is never repeatable. There is no set dose, recreated sunset, or replayed live performance. It is a spontaneous intra-action occurring when all the elements align. While music festivals are not the desired setting for everyone, they show infinite possibilities for context to merge into transformative experiences. Clinical practices can learn from music festivals by integrating essential elements to enhance the therapeutic nature of psychedelic experiences.
References
Kyriakopoulou, L. (2021). Liminality (Re-)Realized in the Psychedelic Rave. Anthropology and Humanism, 46(2), 226-243.
Zinberg, N. E. (1984). Drug, Set, and Setting. Yale University Press.
Gabrielle R. Lehigh, PhD
Gabrielle R. Lehigh has a PhD and master’s degree in Applied Anthropology from the University of South Florida (2023, 2018) and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Anthropology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2013). She is a Research Coordinator at Moffitt Cancer Center, working to develop and test novel app-based interventions for smoking cessation among vulnerable and high-risk populations. She is also the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Psychedelic Grad, a growing online community that supports up-and-coming professionals in the psychedelic field. Gabrielle has an unrelenting passion for harm reduction, benefit enhancement, and educational awareness around psychedelics and psychedelic use in non-clinical settings, with a focus on serving the festival and rave communities and supporting diverse access to psychedelic treatments. Her dissertation stems from 18 months of fieldwork, attending 32 events, conducting 38 narrative interviews, collecting 523 survey responses, and recording 650 hours of participant observation. Her dissertation is available online (https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/9893).
