Entranced

By 2am I had moved up to the balcony. Apart from the breeze, the air was warm and all I had needed to make myself comfortable was to drape my scarf across my shoulders and put one of the cushions from the sofas downstairs under my head. I knew that sometime soon my phone would ring and the car in which I was heading out of the city would appear on the street downstairs. I should have been asleep in my bed, but the dorm had been hot and the large Canadian in the corner opposite me had been snoring (and the Swedish girl in the bed above had been very audibly annoyed). The irregularity of the snoring, the sighing, the sshhing and the heat had driven me out to where I lay listening to the pavement conversations of people stumbling home from the bar round the corner.

The sms came to warn me of the imminent pick up. I had a shower, had a coffee, brushed my teeth; hoping that one or all of those things would wake me up and make my eyes feel less heavy. And then I was in the car.

We drove for nearly two hours in the darkness – leaving the sprawling lights of the city behind. The first time I would leave Cape Town and the land was cloaked in black. The humming of the car engine and the loud trance music that was playing sent me into a strange daze and I only felt half awake.

We turned off the road and onto the dirt track that led down to the valley just before dawn. The coldest part of the night is just before the sun rises, and when we got out of the car I would have loved someone to wrap me in a blanket and leave me somewhere quiet. But I could hear music coming from beyond the trees, and we walked towards it.

We walked through a wooded area scattered with campsites and then to where the valley opened up and the tented dance floor lay ahead of us. The colours of it shone fluorescent in the predawn grey, but as we got there the mountains either side of us were starting to emerge from the night sky. Their bulk took on form, and then slowly detail as the blush of the light came over their tops.

At 6am on a Sunday morning, stone cold sober, and feeling more exhausted than I might have done it I had been up all night dancing with everyone who had been here since Friday, I didn’t think I would be able to find the energy to catch up with the people who had so long ago left normality behind.

Our emotional state of choice is ecstasy

Our religion of choice is music

Our society of choice is utopia

These are some of the decrees of the trance community.

You could see how the synthetic rhythms of the music were having a hypnotic effect on the crowd. It is supposed to draw you back in to a womb-like safety, where the beat of the music is like a mother’s heartbeat. But I still felt a bit like a parasite: a foreign body that needed to leach some energy.

The stage had been made to look like a vortex so that the DJ looked like he was playing through it from somewhere else entirely and in front of him the mesmerised crowd danced themselves into the trance, bare feet pounding on the ground.

It seems a very tribal way of moving. Imagine, if you can, what it might be like to have two drums on the level with ground, shoulder width apart in front of you and two more drums are up on the levels of your ears just out from your head. If you hold your arms out by your sides with your palms upwards and then stamp out a beat by stepping forwards on to the drums and by striking the two by your head. That’s how it seemed you should move.

As the day got hotter everyone did enter a sort of euphoric state where you dance until you sweaty, then swim in the river to cool off, lounge in the shallows like hippos and then clamber back on to the banks and sway in heavy, wet clothes back to the dance floor. I am not sure I was in the womb, but as the sun warmed me up and softened my tense muscles I could see how child-like was the delight of slipping in and out of cool water and how charmed everyone was by the music and the sun. Little pods hung from the awning above the dance floor and sprinkled water over the crowd of stomping people.

The music stopped in the late afternoon and we sat on the ground until the sun went down and let the heat and vibration seep back out of our limbs. And then we drove back in the darkness.

The thought of creeping back into my dorm – of having to talk to someone different, or worse, have no one to talk to at all was too hard to bear. So I didn’t go back that night. We drove instead to the harbour, where the boats floated in the shadows like toys left in a bathtub and I stole on deck like a stowaway so I wouldn’t have to be alone. And that’s where I slept that night, my toes still caked with the dust from the valley and my limbs sticking to the plastic of the waterproof mattress cover, until the sunlight of the next day came in through the low cabin windows to wake us.