encountering strangeness in festival culture
By Ivan March

You arrive on Tuesday, and the world is still recognisable. Tents in orderly rows, strangers performing the polite choreography around their temporary neighbours, the slow conversion of van parking into something that starts to resemble home. By Thursday afternoon, something has shifted. Not just in you but in the fabric of the place itself. The membrane that usually holds the world together has begun to thin. The dust hanging in the late light seems thick with presences. You catch the eye of a stranger and for a moment, a long moment, a moment that stretches like Dali, you are not sure where you end and they begin. This is the weird announcing itself.

There is a particular mode of perception that descends somewhere around the fourth hour of a psychedelic journey, or perhaps in the dying light of the second day of a festival when the initial social anxieties have burned away and one begins to see, truly see, what is actually there. The familiar categories loosen. The distinction between self and world, between inside and outside, becomes less a fact than a suggestion. It is in this state that one encounters the weird. But the question that follows, is which weird is this? A weird we want or a weird we don’t want? And how would you know the difference, especially when you haven't slept in forty-eight hours and every other food vendor starts to look like a butoh performer.

Before we can navigate the politics of the weird, we must understand what kind of knowledge altered states might offer. Philosopher Chris Letheby, distinguishes between three ways of knowing that one can access while tripping.

One thing worth noting. A lot of people who take psychedelics at festivals think they're doing philosophy. They're not. They're having feelings. Big, beautiful, overwhelming, reality-dissolving feelings. And then they mistake those feelings for insights. This is the original sin of the psychonaut, the ancient error that turns profound experience into tedious anecdote.

First: Knowing That (Propositional Knowledge)

This is facts. Actual, checkable, "water is wet" stuff. "I was born in 1988." "My mother's name is Frida." "That man is wearing a red dress." Notice something about these statements? They're ordinary. Dull. They're also testable. You can verify them.

Here's the thing psychedelics lie about: they make you feel like you've discovered a fact when you've actually just discovered a feeling. You know that moment when someone looks at you with absolute certainty and says "I finally understand that love is all there is"? That's not a fact. That's a beautiful feeling dressed up in a fact's clothes. It's like putting a tiny tuxedo on a cat. The cat is still a cat. The feeling is still a feeling.

The rule is simple. If you can't write it down sober and have someone else verify it, it's not propositional knowledge. Which brings us to..

Second: Knowing How (Ability Knowledge)

This is skills. Things your body and mind can do that they couldn't do before. Notice how this doesn't require you to believe anything. You don't need a theory of gravity to ride a bike. You don't need a metaphysics of sound to dance.

Psychedelics are actually very good at teaching ability knowledge. They can teach your brain to stop identifying with every passing thought. They can teach your nervous system to relax into discomfort. They can teach your attention to rest somewhere other than the usual hamster wheel of anxiety and planning. This is real and this is valuable. This is also completely invisible to the person who hasn't done the work. You can't see someone's ability knowledge. You can only see what it lets them do.

The test: can you still do the thing when you're sober? If you can only let go of your ego when you're chemically assisted, you don't have ability knowledge, you have a rental and rentals get returned.

Third: Knowing By Acquaintance (Knowledge-Of)

This is the weird one. This is what happens when you touch something directly, without the buffer of concepts and categories. You can read about the ocean for years. You can pass every exam in marine biology and oceanography. You still don't know the ocean until you're in it, salt in your mouth, waves washing-machining you.

Acquaintance knowledge is what psychedelics are actually great at. They give you direct, unmediated contact with dimensions of experience that normal consciousness filters out. The constructedness of the self. The aliveness of the non-human. The vast, terrifying, beautiful outsideness of things that usually just sit there inertly being a backdrop.

Here's the catch, and it's a big one. Acquaintance knowledge feels like propositional knowledge. It feels like certainty. It feels like you've finally understood something. But you haven't necessarily. You've experienced something. And experience is not the same as understanding, any more than standing in a hurricane is meteorology.

Note: The person who has acquaintance knowledge without humility can be one of the most dangerous creatures at the festival. They will tell you, with absolute conviction, that they have seen the truth. They have not seen the truth. They have seen *a* truth. Their truth. In their brain. On a chemical high. The fact that it felt real doesn't mean it is real. The fact that it changed their life doesn't mean it would change yours.

So What Do You Actually Know?

You know what you can do. You know what you can describe sober. You know what stays with you when the chems are gone and the festival is over and you're back in default world.

This is why the weird we want isn't the weird that gives us answers. It's the weird that gives us better questions. And the humility to know that most of our certainties are just feelings in a trenchcoat, trying to look like facts.

There is an older vocabulary for what happens on the dancefloor, one that precedes both the psychiatric manual and the neuroscience papers by millennia. The ancient Greeks had two words that name the poles between which the psychedelic experience oscillates: sparagmos and enthousiasmos. Sparagmos is the act of tearing apart, the ritual dismemberment that features in the myths of Orpheus and Pentheus, both torn limb from limb by maenads in states of ecstatic frenzy. It is the god Dionysus himself, torn into pieces by the Titans, scattered across the world, then reconstituted. Enthousiasmos is its complement, the state of being filled with the god, of having the divine enter and occupy the self. En-theos: the god within.

The festival dancefloor is an engine for producing both, often simultaneously. The beat operates as a kind of sonic sparagmos, a rhythmic dismemberment of the unitary self. Each drum kicks out a part of the ego, each bass beats out a further scattering of the pieces. The body is no longer a coherent entity but a collection of parts moving to different tempos, different logics. Arms have their own agenda. The spine undulates without consulting the mind. The self, that stubborn fiction, is pulled apart and the pieces are scattered across the dancefloor like offerings. This is why, around hour six, you may notice that your left foot appears to be having a conversation with someone else's right knee, and neither of them has included you in the discussion.

And yet, and this is the mystery the Greeks understood, that this tearing apart is not destruction but a preparation. The self that is dismembered by the beat is also the self that becomes available for possession. The scattered pieces leave spaces, gaps, openings. And into these openings something enters. That crack where the light gets in. This is enthousiasmos: the god rushing in to fill the spaces where the ego used to be. Not a god, necessarily, in any theistic sense. But something. A presence. A force. An intensity that was not there before and that does not originate in the usual inventory of the self. Sometimes this presence feels like cosmic love. Sometimes it feels simply like the bass. Sometimes it feels like both simultaneously.

The dancers at a festival at 4am are not, in any straightforward sense, themselves. They have been taken apart by the music and something has entered the ruins. This is why the dancefloor can feel simultaneously terrifying and liberating, why the same experience can produce both euphoria and dread. Sparagmos without enthousiasmos is just fragmentation, the self scattered into sensation without center or substance, what the tradition would call mere madness, or what your friends will call "that time Ben took too much and spent six hours convinced he was a recycling bin". Enthousiasmos without sparagmos is impossible; the god cannot enter a vessel that is already full. This is why the guy who arrives at the festival with his ego fully intact, determined to have a profound experience, will usually end up having an experience that is, at best, moderately interesting and, at worst, involves a lot of intense conversations about cryptocurrency.

The politics of discernment (telling two things apart), then, is a theology of attention. The art of noticing, even the micro stuff, becomes divine. The question is not whether one is torn apart; the festival guarantees that, one way or another. The question is what enters the spaces that the tearing opens. The wrong kind of possession feels like occupation, like something alien forcing its way into a self too weakened to resist. The right kind feels like recognition, like the return of something that was always meant to be there, like coming home to a self more expansive than the one that was torn apart. The difference is not always visible from the outside. It is known, if it is known at all, only from within, and often only in retrospect, in the quiet aftermath when the music has stopped and the god has departed and one is left to sift through the scattered pieces, trying to understand what happened and whether one wants it to happen again.

Black speculative traditions offer the most urgent intervention here. They don't read the eerie as some metaphysical riddle. They read it as the basic structure of Black life under anti-Blackness. Angelica Medina's thesis sharpens this claim to a devastating point (2025).

Medina argues that the psychedelic concept of 'ego death' cannot simply be universalised. Drawing on Orlando Patterson's theory of 'social death', the condition of being cast outside the category of the human, she contends that for Black individuals who were never granted full personhood within social institutions, the goal cannot be to dissolve a self that was never permitted to exist. Instead, the psychedelic encounter opens onto something else entirely: an 'ego birth' (Medina, 2025, p. 4).

If social death means Black people were never fully human, ego death presumes an ego to lose. Medina's question cuts: "Given that black individuals were never considered human, how could ego death apply to them?" (2025, p. 8).

Same dancefloor. Same psychotropics. Different histories. For one, dissolution is liberation. For the other, confirmation. The same pharmacological event produces opposite meanings. This is one of discernment's hardest lessons: the experience is never just the experience; it is always also the history that the experiencer carries into the space with them.

This tradition finds its voice in Nuzo Onoh the 'Queen of African Horror'. Her Igbo cosmology has no fixed line between living and dead. Her characters aren't haunted, instead they navigate a weird that isn't intrusion but baseline reality. For Onoh, the task is not to make the strange visible but to navigate a cosmos that was always already strange.

For most Westerners, psychedelics open a door to the outside. For Igbo cosmology, they open a door to the inside, to dimensions never lost, only buried. Which is why the woman from Lagos who's communed with ancestors since childhood may find the festival "transformation" workshops adorable. It’s giving bitch please. You're discovering fire while she's been running the kitchen for thirty years.

The dominant anglocentric culture insists on disenchantment, therefore the festival becomes not a portal to another world but a return to a world that was never lost, only temporarily obscured by a state of affairs that fears mystery.

The invocation of Mark Fisher's 'acid communism' finds its necessary feminist counterpart in the work of Alex Dymock, whose 2023 article 'Acid feminism: Gender, psychonautics and the politics of consciousness' directly engages Fisher's framework while also complicating it (Dymock, 2023).

Dymock argues that the most influential first-person narratives of psychonauts have systematically excluded women's voices, and that a specifically narcofeminist approach is needed, one that moves beyond the self-obsessed, self-improvement narrative that dominates contemporary psychedelic discourse (Dymock, 2023, p. 820). She traces how women in the 1960s and 1970s used psychedelics to awaken to the 'miserable material realities' of their lives, and how this consciousness-raising was subsequently downplayed by feminist movements eager to distance themselves from drug culture (Dymock, 2023, p. 825).

This is a crucial historical amnesia. The second wave's practice of consciousness-raising women gathering in living rooms to share personal experiences and discover their collective political alignment, bore the imprint of psychedelic culture, even if that imprint was later scrubbed from the official record. Dymock advocates for a renewal of the 'politics of consciousness' that would challenge the fundamental assumptions of the psychedelic field itself, including who gets to count as a psychonaut and what 'experimentation' really means.

The weird we want, from this perspective, is the one that reveals the structures of patriarchal power that persist even in "liberated" spaces. The weird we don’t want is the feminism that reduces women's psychedelic experiences to therapeutic narratives of healing, stripping them of their political and experimental dimensions. As Dymock writes, acid feminism might serve a dual function, speaking both to the wider feminist movement and, equally importantly, to the psychedelics research field itself (2023, p. 835). It might also explain why, at the festival's "Sacred Sexuality" workshop, the male facilitator spent ninety minutes talking about his own journey while the women in the circle exchanged the kind of glances that launch a thousand ships.

Imagine a workshop at a “transformational festival”, led by a well-intentioned facilitator, inviting participants to "surrender to the dissolution of the ego". For a woman who has spent decades fighting to establish a sense of self against a culture that constantly narrates her as object, as support, as background, the call to surrender may land very differently than it does for her male counterpart. The "self-healing" that psychedelics promise is not neutral; it is shaped by the gendered histories of the selves who seek it. This is also why the phrase "just let go" has a different resonance for someone whose entire life has been a negotiation with the forces that would prefer her to let go of things like bodily autonomy, financial independence, and the right to finish a sentence without interruption.

Recent research has begun to document what queer communities have long known informally: psychedelics can profoundly reshape experiences of gender and sexuality. A 2025 study published in the wake of growing psychedelic research found striking patterns: about one-quarter of women, one-eighth of men, and one-third of people with other gender identities reported that psychedelics had heightened their attraction to a gender they were not usually primarily drawn to (Kruger et al., 2025). Around 10% of participants said that psychedelics influenced their gender identity or gender expression. Some reported feeling like the opposite gender while under the influence, others experienced both genders simultaneously, and some felt something entirely different, they 'felt they were in a space that went beyond gender' where 'the concept of gender no longer made any sense' (Kruger et al., 2025).

The psychologist Jae Sevelius, a researcher on psychedelics with sexual and gender minority communities, offers a crucial framing: "Ultimately, psychedelics don't change who we are. They help us remember or discover who we've always been underneath the social programming" (quoted in Kruger et al., 2025, p. 7). This is the queer weird at its most powerful, not the imposition of new identities but the excavation of identities that were always present, buried under the weight of normativity. It is also, for the cisgender heterosexual man who suddenly understands what it feels like to be perceived as a woman for the first time, what we might call 'a learning experience'.

The literature of queer weird offers rich resources for understanding this excavation. The 2022 anthology Queering Psychedelics: From Oppression to Liberation in Psychedelic Medicine brings together 38 essays exploring how psychedelic science might address the unique needs and traumas of sexual and gender minorities, populations that suffer from "challenging mental health conditions brought on by social exclusion, pathologization, criminalization, and stigmatization" (Labate, Cavnar, & Belser, 2022, p. 4). The collection grapples with the dark history of psychedelic conversion therapy while illuminating promising research showing that substances including MDMA and psilocybin can offer life-changing experiences for marginalized communities (Labate et al., 2022).

The mycelial metaphor is apt here. The fungal kingdom from which psilocybin is derived is itself queer, with some species possessing more than 23,000 distinct sexual identities (https://www.discovermagazine.com/why-this-fungus-has-over-20-000-sexes-523). The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake has noted how this helps "scientists think beyond the binary, mirroring queer theory and reflecting the world in its crystalline multiplicity" (quoted in Labate et al., 2022). The weird, on this account, is not just a human experience but a feature of reality itself, a reality that is far more sexually diverse than our binary categories can accommodate.

The anthology Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock, provides the scholarly framework for understanding that the psychedelic experience is not a single thing but a multiplicity, shaped by culture, history, and politics. Published histories of psychedelics, the editors note, "often focus on medical research and consumption within the counterculture of 1960s North America." But psychedelic history "cannot and should not be understood in such limited terms" (Dyck & Elcock, 2023).

The collection includes chapters on soma consumption in West Bengal, tracing its historical origins and continuing connection with the salvific goddess Nīlakaṇṭha Tārā, on LSD in communist Czechoslovakia, where Milan Hausner's understudied work transformed psychiatric practice, on psychedelics in South America, examining research networks before the 1960s; and on the 'acid-anarchist' movements of early 1970s Ireland. Manal Khan's 'Tripping in Karachi: exploring the intersection of gender and its fluidity through psychedelic substances' examines the contextual and structural factors that inform therapeutic queer and feminist psychedelic experiences in Pakistan (Khan, 2023, p. 214).

These global perspectives reframe the festival as a site of encounter, but with all the attendant dangers of cultural appropriation and spiritual colonialism. The weird we want is the one that acknowledges the specific histories and cosmologies from which different psychedelic practices emerge. The weird we don’t want is the universalizing one that treats ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD as interchangeable tools for 'expanding consciousness', erasing the specific cultural contexts that give them meaning. The weird we really do not want is the super woke white guy with dreadlocks who has just returned from his fifth 'plant medicine retreat' in Peru and will not stop using the word aya in every other sentence.

Funnily enough, the scientific literature has begun to grapple with this through the critique of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) participants in psychedelic research. The festival, for all its global pretensions, remains predominantly WEIRD in its demographics and assumptions. The call for 'more diversity in the experiences and participants included in this research' applies equally to the festival space. The weird we want must include the weird that non-Western participants bring, not as “exotic” spice but as a fundamental challenge to the category of 'the psychedelic experience' itself. It must also include the recognition that when a Shipibo healer spends six hours singing icaros over a patient, they are not engaging in "sound healing" or "energy work" or any of the other terms that middle-class Westerners use to make indigenous practices palatable to their yoga classmates. They are doing what their ancestors have done for centuries.

The invocation of the festival as a "machine for producing experiences" finds its most sophisticated elaboration in emerging scholarship on the techno-aesthetics of rave culture. The concept of phantasmagoria, the dreamworld of the alien and the uncanny, produced through technological apparatus, illuminates the festival's deepest contradictions.

The psychedelic rave is not an escape from the techno-social world but its intensification. The sound system, the lighting rig, the chemical compound, the phone that documents; these are not neutral conduits for experience but active producers of the strangeness we actively cultivate. The dancefloor becomes a symptom of late modernity's crises rather than a genuine exit from them. We come seeking the outside, but the outside is always already mediated, packaged, delivered through apparatuses that shape what can appear and how. This is why you will sometimes spend three hours having a profound experience of cosmic unity, only to emerge from the dancefloor and discover that someone has posted a video of you on Instagram with the caption 'Lol look at this guy'.

This is not an argument for staying home. It is an argument for paying attention, for cultivating what we might call (following the weird fiction tradition) 'onto-discernment'. One learns, through repeated exposure to altered states, to tell the difference between a presence that opens outward and a presence that closes inward. Between a dissolution of the ego that leads to genuine connection and a dissolution that leads to mere diffusion, the self scattered into sensation without centre or anchor. Between a vision that reveals something actual about the structure of reality and a vision that is just the brain's idle pattern-making, interesting but not true. Between the deep insight that all is one and the slightly less deep insight that the reason you can't find your tent is that all tents look exactly the same in the dark.

The philosopher Graham Harman, developing what he calls 'weird realism' through the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, suggests that the weird names something fundamental about the structure of reality itself (Harman, 2018). Objects withdraw from all relation. We never exhaust them, never fully grasp them. There is always something that remains in the shadows, inaccessible. This is not a failure of perception; it is the condition of perception. The weird, on this account, is the experience of that withdrawal becoming visible, of the object's inaccessible depths suddenly pressing against the surfaces through which we usually navigate the world.

On the dancefloor, this withdrawal becomes felt. The stranger's face is not just a face; it is a window onto an abyss of interiority that can never be crossed. The music is not just sound; it is the trembling of a reality that exceeds our categories. The self is not just a self; it is a temporary solidifying of processes that extend far beyond the boundaries of skin. The sequins on your friend's dress are not mere sequins; they are a million tiny mirrors reflecting a million tiny versions of you, each one slightly different.

The task of discernment, then, is endless. It is not to arrive at a final distinction between the weird we want and the weird we do not want. It is to remain in the motion of distinguishing, to keep asking the question, to stay open to the possibility that tomorrow's weird will exceed today's categories. It is also to accept that sometimes the weird is just weird, not profound, not political, not transformative, just a sad man in a banana costume having an existential crisis by the fire pit while someone dressed up as Stalin plays a didgeridoo nearby.

The most important thing missing from any account of the weird is the weird we have not yet encountered, the strangeness that does not fit our categories because our categories have not yet been invented to receive it. The festival, at its best, is a training ground for this encounter. Not because it provides the answers, but because it cultivates the capacity to remain open to questions that have not yet been asked. Also because it provides the kind of sleep deprivation and sensory overload that makes everything seem questionable, including the fundamental laws of physics and the decision to wear shorts in weather that is, on reflection, not really shorts weather.

The Black weird, the feminist weird, the queer weird, the global weird, each has its own history, its own politics, its own claim on our attention. The task is not to decide which one is true, that question is probably meaningless. It is to decide which ones we want to move toward and which ones we want to move away from, knowing that our choices have consequences. This is the cornerstone of The Groovement, vibing or not vibing with something or someone. It is also to recognize that sometimes the weird we want is just the weird that doesn't try to sell us something, which is increasingly difficult to find in a landscape where even the "spontaneous" moments of connection are often sponsored by a beverage company.

The festival can be a bootcamp for ethical navigation, not because it provides answers, but because it brings us into contact with strangeness in such concentrated form that we are forced to choose. The weird we want is the one that enlarges our sense of what is possible without erasing the specificities of who we are and where we come from. The weird we don’t want is the one that dissolves those specificities into a universalizing fog, that treats all strangeness as the same strangeness, that forgets that the most important question is not what we encounter but how we encounter it, and what we do next.

That is the weird we most need, the one that has not yet arrived, the one that will disrupt everything we think we know, the one that will demand new forms of attention, new ethics, new politics. The festival, if anything, is a rehearsal for that arrival. Strangely enough it is a place where things that feel realer than real can happen. The self can rip. The gods can enter. The weird can arrive.

And you don’t look away, but in fact you turn to face the strange.

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References

Davis E. (2019) ‘High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies’. MIT Press

Dyck, E., & Elcock, C. (Eds.). (2023). Expanding mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics. MIT Press.

Dymock, A. (2023). Acid feminism: Gender, psychonautics and the politics of consciousness (https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231152773). The Sociological Review, 71(4), 817-838.

Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. Repeater Books.

Harman, G. (2018). Object-oriented ontology: A new theory of everything. Pelican Books.

Khan, M. (2023). Tripping in Karachi: Exploring the intersection of gender and its fluidity through psychedelic substances. In E. Dyck & C. Elcock (Eds.), Expanding mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics (pp. 211-234). MIT Press.

Kruger, D. J., et al. (2025). Psychedelics, sexuality, and gender identity: A survey study. Journal of Psychedelic Studies. Advance online publication.

Labate, B. C., Cavnar, C., & Belser, A. B. (Eds.). (2022). Queering psychedelics: From oppression to liberation in psychedelic medicine. Synergetic Press.

Letheby, C. (2021). Epistemology. In Philosophy of psychedelics (pp. 160-184). Oxford University Press.

Medina, A. (2025). Below to beyond human: Social death to ego birth during the Black psychedelic experience [Undergraduate thesis, University at Albany]. Library Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research.

Onoh, N. (2024). Where the dead brides gather. Canaan-Star Publishing.