But only with your help, of course! 
Picture a wave forming on the horizon, a big one (talking late-'5Os, early-'60's): the psy-chick surfers coasting out there, beatniks, non-conformists, oddball academics bored with the small-town life at the shore and all its dismal soap- opera games, looking for something to carry them away into a wilder, richer world; the first swells of energy carry with them a tide of psycho-active algaes. 
HOFFMAN/HUXLEY/BURROUGHS/GINSBURG/WATTS/LEARY/ ALPERT/KESEY & co send back their first reports and manifestoes. Munching on the junk food of the gods, our proto- mutants are initiated into the mysteries of the Vortex: they glide back down to the cardboard facades of Main Street with their evocations of kaleidoscopic infinity, eyes lit with the light of alien suns. Their news answers a gnawing hunger among so many trapped within the greypastelboxroutines of the industrial-consumer-democratic hive. 
More, they activate dormant circuits of the hive's nervous system, and spawn a burst of deviance, mutation: forms of rebellion less interested in disputing what varieties of greypastelboxroutines are preferable and what's right and wrong for everybody, than in setting up scouting parties for heading out to sea... 

Underline the word parties. 
Dosed to the gills, beatniks in existential black mutate into rainbow-hued hippiedom. Up with the Flower Children, hedonistic and "escapist" -- so-called because they withdrew >from the arena of domesticated primate aggro-sports known as "politics" in favor of actually learning about the infinite kingdoms within their own bodies and nervous systems. 
Drop into the Haight, turn off powertrips, tune out conformism and competition. 
Meltdown ensues. All the accelerated bondings through Be-lns, Love-Ins, communes. Awash in the incense of oriental exoticism and occultist bric-a-brac, a renaissance of the spirit decks itself out in threads of psychic kitsch. 
And how much can we fault them, really, if their Love & Peach trip undercut itself by becoming a denial of the Darkness; after all, they are there for us to learn from. 
But just as everyone is tumbling about in the cosmic troth, anticipating revolution of millennium tomorrow afternoon at the latest, the Wave suddenly evaporates beneath them. Oops, the Earth Egg didn't quite hatch yet... just some initial stirrings. And so the children of the Vortex find themselves hurtling through the air like Wile E. Coyote, wrapped up in all their newfound lifestyles, but the vital juice is gone, and it all becomes so tame and lame so quickly, and in any case, a lot of people couldn't handle the intensity so it comes time to settle back into a safe routine, in some cases lay the ground for those who come after; & all around are the Mr. Joneses of many guises, panicked at the imminent collapse of Normalville; some take their chance to cash in on what they can of it, a lot of others are wholly freaked, and so begins a Counter- Reformation. On the one hand, a retreat from direct encounter with the Abyss crystallizes into the New Age, and on the other, it's back to the Bible, dumb drugs, whitebread, and Family Values. 
And all the hipsters left posing without a clue, all the burnouts/fuckups/addicts & victims of some invisible multi- dimensional boogeying elephant; over there in the ivy towers, the blind men scribble their learned tomes, dissecting some stray paisley footprints; but something far stranger has happened, and its awfully hard to make out just what till the next, bigger cousin of that wave starts to surface offshore. 
Meanwhile even many devotees of the Vortex ascribe it to the decline in quality of their psychoactive goodies, mistaking the portal for the vise beyond (but how do you enter the vista without the portal? Hmmm... Bethyvision! a distant curl of the Vortex whispers back). 
Credit it all to upsurges of the Gaian mind, long-schemed scams of the giggling DNA consciousness, or the flotsam & jetsam cast down by That Transcendental Novelty Item End of Time; choose your metaphors -- the more the merrier: hut there's a mystery-in-process that all the nice rationalistic analyses will never get at. Here I'll echo a point once made by Leary: the most subtle form of conservatism is that which views the present only through the prism of the past! 
And yes (to those for whom it's not patently obvious), it's happening again. 

At the heart of the rave is a modern, technologically-clad form of non-verbal, ecstatic communion. The ethos of openness, sharing, intimacy, touch and empathy -- not to mention the pure intensities of trance itself -facilitated by the use of LSD) & MDMA (hey, the fact that you have to take these things to loosen up is a sign of just how far down & lost we all are!!), in tandem with the all-night long pulsation of bodies to the same sound source, can and does create a context where layers of armoring and conditioning are shed, where those willing can find the joyful and mysterious realm of their bodies free of oh-so many enculturated ego-trips and bullshit,... while also opening the "post-terrestrial" circuits of their psyches. (Whew! Pause, rewind, read paragraph again, slowly.) 
In other words, a safe space where we can be as weird as we want to be. 
A collective molting ritual for the new species. 

Or take it from another angle. Compare the rave-thing to a chemical reaction: a half-dozen ingredients (make your own list), inert & ordinary in the normal course of things. But combine them in right proportions, at the right time and place, apply the catalyst (& what would that be?) and boom!, you've set off an explosion, a chain reaction producing energy, lots of it, and in that process a dynamic that continues to transform many of the starting ingredients into new & unknown qualities. No question, of course, that skeptical bystanders can look in from the distance and reduce it all back to something familiar: escapism, consumerism, fashion parade, whatever. But we'll leave them to their nervous calculations... 
OK, so you want a schoolbook definition of techno-shamanism that catchphrase everybody likes to invoke but no one seems to be able to actually explain? 
Prepare to jump levels: As the individual shaman/ess evicts demons and excises magical darts from the sick person through a mixture of magickal sound & motion, so on the level of the diseased and crisis-ridden "global village", raves aim to heal the collective body by shaking it loose of its neurotic fixations and death-fetishes. 
Exorcism through Dance 
Unhooking the talons and shadowy webs of control. A physical unlearning of a few thousand years worth of bad habits. 
Learning to be at once a little more human and a little more alien. 
Healer, leader, visionary, outcast: the shaman/ess' role is multi-faceted, both at the center but also relegated to the margins of the community. The use of rhythmic sound and/or psychoactive compounds are central to shamanism. The shaman/ess chants, hums, drums and dances as a way of programming her/his voyage into the 'spirit realms (a.k.a. hyper-space), as well as of healing the mind and body of others... all on a more face-to-face, way low-tech scale, of course. 
So there, chew on that for a while. 

It's a pretty sad but predictable fact that so-called radicals have been oblivious to this phenomenon, just because it seems to emanate out of niteklubland; too bad -- when will they figure out that all social alienation is ultimately grounded in an alienation from the body -- that realm of nature closest to us hut oh-so far away. Their heroine Emma Goldman once proclaimed to the grim socialist militants of her day: "If I can't dance in your revolution I want no part of it." 
And what if dance could be a modality of social change? 
A heretical thought, no doubt. "Free your ass and your mind will follow," so said George Clinton. But hey, he was just another crass capitalistic rock star, right? 
Not to rescusitate, however, that burdensome word, Revolution. Scratch the R, highlight the E. Quote an obscure graffito from a wall in Paris, May 196X: "This is not a Revolution but a Mutation." And say rather, TAZ. Temporary Autonomous Zone. 
Like the TAZ, the rave is wild, nomadic, outside the maps of Power. At its best, the rave opens onto a realm of free-form behavior and perception, one in which there is no hierarchy, no leaders or followers, at most the dj and the light-show artists. (Hopefully benign -- be careful who you leave your sensorium with!)... 
Not unlike the Situationist International's notion of the "situation" (sorry, I just had to drag them in here!), a space of liberated interactions... but where the participants are the art and the show, the synergy between them all the event (or event horizon?). (Did the S.I., by the way, ever have anything to say about music or dance?!?) If the insurrection was supposed to realize itself in a festival, we might ask, why shouldn't the festival turn into an insurrection -- an insurrection of Love? 
Anyone who has been part of a real rave, if only once, briefly, knows that its insane, insanely beautiful ferocity is something that exceeds all the contrived parlour-games that pass for alternatives, social or political. The simple fact of this ferocious hedonism is, without words or slogans, a refutation of domesticated existence. So fuck it if most of this California rave-scene is still ensnared in niteklubism. Invade the pseudo- raves, instigate roving micro-raves. Doesn't take more than a ghetto blaster and a handful of courageous revellers to start a rave on any streetcorner or park, see how long it takes to catch... or to be shut down.... 
This is our form of protest --our style of dance is angry and combative as well as loving and celebratory. To free our bodies first from the rotting carcass of history. 
And from there... who knows where we'll go? 

Prediction: a few years down the road, the rave-scene will he looked back on as the primary networking mechanism for the tribes of star-farers. 

Dance 
If you had to have just one metaphor for it all to live by and through, wouldn't that just be it. The spiral dance of life... so it sounds cliched, but cliched only in words, in words... 

Dance 
But (& rave-friends can detour here for a sec, these are words for those who've never raved and long stopped going out to) 

Dance 
Dance -- this kind of dance -- is freeing motion. Not just moving to the beat, but letting the beat help you throw off all the constricted robotic movements that have been imprinted into your heart, your eyes, your ears. your arms, your ass, your dreams, by all the tricks, traumas & seductions of society; and find the real you. Dancing with the world, but dancing off the consensus-trance, that narrow greyout rightangle robotic updown freezeframe pseudo-reality. 
Raves signal the return to Western culture of sacred dance. A dance that balances disciplines with excess, ecstasy with focus.. Look at the three great monotheisms that have molded our psycho-somatic matrix: Judaism, Christianity, Islam: none of them possess any tradition of sacred movement. They have all been scared shitless of the Body, arid have instituted its repression in a thousand and one subtle ways. How appropriate that the advent of a spiritualized form of movement to the center of Civilization should present itself in a totally decadent, seemingly profane form. And people wonder why raves are actively suppressed in the U.K.? Don't he surprised if it happens here too! And Iet's get this out of the way too: dancing on a decent dose of psychedelic is something else again: communing with the animal spirits encoded into the depths of your skin, letting them out of their millennial cages. Learning how you can be each of them when you need to be; and it's also about learning how to fly, how to turn yourself inside out into a spinning glowing disc, though that is a little harder... and then, once we've got that under our belts, we can do it together. 
It's been said before, but not clearly enough: UFOs R Us. 

So what if all this prepackaged ravitis costs too much! Don't leave it to them and whine about how commercialized it all is: throw your own! And mutate while you're at it! 
So some of the dinosaurs may not he happy seeing their way of life superseded, and want to stamp out those noisy critters scampering between their feet; more intelligence and greater manoeuverability will be our response. Haven't we gotten sick enough of the Enemy-Production Line? 
Social transmutation can be fun too, right? There's fun, safe vapid alcoholic-nicotine hedonism, letting off steam so you can return to Monday: and then there's fun that aim's high, fun allied with Will. 
But watch this -- all those scouting parties of the future will be known by their capacity to throw great parties -- and pioneer partying as a way of throwing off the legacy of the miserable Dominator culture we've all had to grow up in. 
Ravers, look a little ways forward: have you wondered yet what happens once you're burnt out after a year or two of intensive raving, once you've lost half your hearing, the beats become stale, and the Energy has leaked away. Where, what then? 
Define the rave for me. 
What does the verb to rave really mean to you? But first let's list all the stuff that seems to go with it: Acid/techno/deep house music; dancing from dusk to dawn; hi- tech light shows; lollipops, floppyhats, dayglo pendants, smart drinks; $15-20 tickets; zillion gigawatts sound-systems; X, acid, nitrous, 2 CB; goofy sci-fi outfits; so many inane and beatific smiles. 
Shall we ask together: just what is the essence of a rave? 
Suppose for a second that we subtract one by one each of the above elements. Stretch your imagination to the limit, and take away even, yes, even the music; till all we have left are the people, all those people who have found each other in this beat, in these hidden gatherings, but without the beat, just heartbeat, pulse-rate, breath and the exchange of love- energies (isn't that what sex is, ultimately?) Radiant and revelling in our unearthly beauty... so here we are: much as we adore it, do we really need the dance music to affirm our commonality, the patent tact that we are siblings of the same spiritual family who through the raves have managed to find one another and in that finding remember who each of us truly is, orphan child of eternity Do we need to confuse the rave with the quality of our common presence, our moving-loving together; can't we take the essence of the rave, freed of all the externals we associate with it, transfer and apply that energy elsewhere, to just about anything ...? 
It comes down to a challenge, a challenge posed in that leap from normal space to hyper-space that kicks in when the "rave" really starts to rave: those altered moments when each of us in being truest to our uniqueness enters into a harmonious whole. Elusive as this may be, it calls out, and asks to be realized in every moment of our lives. It asks for creation, creation of life, for the nurturing of real communities that last deeper & longer than a few hours on the dancefloor. 
All that creative energy, apply it not just to your style of dress but to your mode of being. Free eros & intimacy from the shackles of socially-programmed sexualities (gay vs. straight, male vs. female), from monogamy and the neurotic fixation on genital sexuality. 
Turn down the volume, listen to the silence, tune in to your inner rhythms, follow the energy pulse that connects you to your Self, to others, to Gaia, to the stars. 
Yes, celebrate, celebrate your arrival here at last after a long trek, but don't forget, this is only the point of departure. These parties are our loading docks and shipyards. (And don't worry, there is plenty of Work to be done, enough healing & cleaning for us all.) 
Here is where we will build not just a house, but a ship, a ship of dreams, a starship. Woven out of love. Chaos. Laughter Imagination. Will. & each other. 
And embark; post-nuclear families setting sail out along the unwinding multi-dimensional origami strands of alternity... 

Our motto: 
Utopia or bust. 
 

The Barbary Coast, July 1992 
Some conceptual map-points for the Imaginal Rave (as if you really cared! What, ravers read!?!): TAZ, by Hakim Bey; The Politics of Ecstasy, Neuropolitics, Info-Psychology, by Timothy Leary; The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem; Ultrahouse, Tekno-Acid Beat, and Toward Thee Infinite Beat, by Psychic TV & others (Waxtrax Records); The Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger; The Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, by Terence McKenna; The Sufis, by Idries Shah, & any ol' record by George Clinton. 
"The Imaginal Rave" is a Tribal Donut Production. No copyright. Text may be sampled and reproduced freely, but pleez give credit and contact info where possible. Copies available for $2.00 cash through the mail (or for four International Reply Coupons from abroad). Copies of Tribal Donut #1 (24 pages of hi-density chaostrophy) also available for $2.00 cash. Send all correspondence to: Tribal Donut, 41 Sutter Street, Box 1348, San Francisco, CA 94104.