Rave, awe, social bonding, and the 4Ds (dance, drums, drugs, and sleep deprivation)
Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Humans have come together for exalted, communal experiences involving music, dance, and psychedelic substances for millenia. Their cumulative effect leads ritual participants to feel a sense of meaning; of coming together as a group or tribe, i.e. ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim, 1912) or ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1969). One of the main consequences of such collective gatherings is a unifying of participants, or social bonding (Savage et al., 2020; Block, 2020). What helps individuals to experience the group as bigger than its individual parts is liminality (Turner, 1969; van Gennep, 1909/1960), or going beyond culturally normal modes of social interaction. Ritual liminality is created by a number of identifiable human behaviours, including what we term ‘The 4 D’s’, which are: (1) repetitive music or drums (Savage et al., 2020); (2) dancing (Lewis-Williams, 1992); (3) drugs, including psychedelics (Hood, 2014); and (4) sleep deprivation (Dahl, 2013). This suite of behaviours are powerful enough to alter our state of consciousness and take a group far away from its conventional realms of normality (or the profane), and into the surreal and sacred. Importantly, this gives group members an opportunity to transcend the boundaries between self and group by sharing a transformative experience with other group members (Newson et al., 2016; Jong et al., 2017; Buhrmester et al., 2018). Transcending to the sacred plane via liminal group experiences has been common in religious rituals (Dunbar, 2013), but this cognitive toolkit is also exploited by the secular, for instance at large music gatherings (Turner, 1969) or raves (Gautheir, 2004). Of these collective rituals, the rave is a relatively recent, but seemingly enduring subcultural phenomenon. The exhaustive all-night (or weekend-long) dancing, engulfing repetitive bass beats, and, often heavy psychedelic drug use, constructs a potent liminal space with the potential to generate intense and lasting social bonds, establishing a collective effervescence unparalleled for many young initiates (Gauthier, 2004). Through the use of liminality, rave culture is able to access a ‘sacred’ realm in which ravers may experience communitas in an engagement familiar to ritual devotees all over the world. During raves, the use of self-prescribed psychedelic drugs may elevate liminality and, in turn, lead to increased social connectedness. Psychedelic experiences are often characterized by a reduced sense of the self (Yaden et al., 2017), or even more extreme, ego dissolution, whereby the boundaries of the ego are temporarily disrupted (Milliere, 2017). During ego dissolution, the self is felt to be integrated into a greater whole, and an increased feeling of unity with one’s surroundings is experienced (Nour et al., 2016). However, recent research has demonstrated that psychedelic experiences involving strong feelings of awe, but not necessarily ego dissolution, were associated with increased levels of connectedness to humanity and nature up to five years after the event (van Mulukom et al., 2020). Importantly, this effect was driven by the ‘feelings of connectedness’ awe subscale, rather than by ‘self-diminishment’ or ‘perceived vastness’ subscales. This suggests that a more fine-grained investigation of liminality following psychedelic drug use is necessary. Moreover, the study did not measure the strength of social connections between psychedelic-taking co-participants, which begs the question of the more immediate bonds psychedelic drugs can induce. Previous research suggests that experiencing highly emotional, significant events together creates a particularly strong and visceral type of bonding, called identity fusion (Whitehouse et al., 2017). Examples of such events include fighting on the frontline (Whitehouse et al., 2014), experiencing a traumatic childbirth (Tasuji et al., 2020), and even watching a major football match (Newson et al., 2016). What is common to these events is that they contain strong, emotional experiences that are personally transformative (Newson et al., 2016), and which are perceived to be similarly transformative for fellow participants (Buhrmester et al., 2018; Whitehouse, 2018). Here we suggest that events with high liminality may be another type of event that reliably induces bonding between its participants. Moreover, we suggest that psychedelics may be particularly apt at inducing this state. The consequences of intense shared rituals in terms of connectedness and prosocial behaviour have not yet been tested empirically in relation to psychedelic consumption. Here, we will examine these questions in an online survey with a large sample (projected participant recruitment, N = 500) of self-identified ‘ravers’ who have attended legal and illegal ‘free parties’ and raves. We target these individuals through online networks of ravers in the UK.
Authors: Martha Newson, Valerie van Mulukom
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3210185878
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