“My cousin said this is really strong,” Zaira said as she unwrapped the little green gummy bear, holding it up to examine it in the fading sunlight. “So we should probably split it up.”

“Do you want some?” she asked, holding it out to me.

We were at Bonnaroo, the legendary three-day music festival in Tennessee—a sprawling temporary city of tents, art installations, and about 80,000 people who’d all come to lose themselves in music for a long weekend. It had been over a decade since I’d touched any type of illegal drug or substance. A full decade of being straight-edge military, of random drug tests and the weight of responsibility that came with wearing the uniform.

But I was in graduate school now, on a two-year sabbatical from the Army. The next drug test was still a year away. And I was at the festival with people I trusted—my girlfriend Zaira, and our two friends Molly and Kevin. Plus, I’d already been drinking, so I had a nice buzz going. The stars were coming out. The bass from distant stages pulsed through the ground like a heartbeat.

Why not, I thought.

“Sure,” I told her.

She carefully divided the gummy bear up like a surgeon performing a delicate operation. I got the head. Kevin got the feet. Zaira and Molly split the torso between them.

I looked at the little gummy bear head sitting in my palm—barely the size of a Flintstone vitamin. This little thing is supposed to get me high? I thought, skeptical. It seemed almost comically small.

Down the hatch. Washed down with a few sips of Corona as we enjoyed the last bit of golden hour at our campsite, the Tennessee sky turning shades of orange and purple above us.

We settled back into our camping chairs, letting the gummy bear work its way through our systems, when a guy in his twenties with a flannel shirt and a friendly smile wandered up to our campsite.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he said casually, as if he was about to ask us about the weather. “You guys need any molly or K?”

It was so matter-of-fact, so casual—like he was offering us a beer or asking if we wanted to buy a bottle of water. At Bonnaroo, drugs were as omnipresent as the music itself. All weekend, we’d watched our friends and fellow festival-goers partake in everything—substances I’d heard of during D.A.R.E. classes two decades earlier, and plenty I hadn’t.

“Nah, we’re good, man. Thanks though,” I said with a polite wave.

He nodded, completely unfazed. “Cool, cool. Have a great night!” And just like that, he moved on to the next campsite, probably making the same offer.

Bonnaroo was its own universe with its own rules—or lack thereof.

“Okay, where do you guys want to go first?” Molly asked, holding out the crumpled festival schedule, ready to move on from the drug dealer interlude.

“I want to see Lionel Richie,” I said confidently.

“That could be cool,” Molly said supportively.

“How about Lauryn Hill?” Zaira offered as a counter-proposal.

“Whatever you guys want to do,” Kevin said with a shrug, just happy to be there.

“How about Frank Ocean?” Molly added.

Me, “Zedd could be cool.”

I could see that no one was going to step up and make a decision—classic group paralysis. My military training kicked in automatically. Sometimes you just need someone to make the call.

“Alright, let’s start with Zedd, then Lionel Richie, then Frank Ocean, and close out the night with Kaskade at the main stage.”

Everyone shrugged in agreement. Good enough. A few minutes later, we were weaving our way through the festival grounds toward the first stage.

The bass pulsed through the ground, resonating in my chest as I stood among thousands of dancing festival-goers. Lasers cut through the night air, creating fractal patterns above the crowd that seemed to breathe and shift with the music.

As we danced under the stars, I was both intoxicated and fatigued from nearly forty-eight hours of nonstop celebration. My legs should have been tired. My body should have been screaming for rest. But I didn’t feel tired at all. Instead, euphoria took over, fueled by red bull, alcohol, the music, and the electrifying energy of the massive crowd.

Gradually, I began to feel a subtle change moving through my body. It started as a gentle tingle in my hands and feet—like the pins-and-needles feeling when circulation returns, but pleasant somehow. Then it spread inward toward my core, wave by wave, until my entire body hummed.

As we walked through the crowd toward the next stage, I began to feel weightless. I felt as if I needed to consciously force my feet down to the ground to counteract their desire to float into the air. It was as if gravity had loosened its grip on me, and I might just drift away if someone gave me a gentle push. The world around me started to blur and soften at the edges.

Oh, I thought with sudden clarity. That’s what the gummy bear does.

Music has always had a special relationship with psychedelics. From the ancient icaros, the healing songs of indigenous shamans, to the meandering guitar riffs that defined the Grateful Dead’s legendary concerts, to the modern natural tribal ambient sounds of artists like East Forest, music becomes something else entirely when you’re on hallucinogenic substances.

That night, my soundtrack alternated between the soulful R&B of Lionel Richie and Frank Ocean to the house and electronic beats of Zedd and Kaskade, with a few other artists mixed in. Each genre opened different doorways in my mind.

Eventually, we ended up back at the main stage where Kaskade was playing. Progressive house music flowed through me as the bass built up and dropped in deep hits that caused the crowd to erupt in orgasmic pleasure.

We’d lost Molly and Kevin somewhere between Lionel and Frank. Now it was just me and Zaira. I was feeling high as fuck and good—really good. She held me by the hand, pulling me through the crowd closer to the stage, navigating the sea of bodies.

As the music pulsed through the crowd, it wasn’t just a sound anymore. It was a living, breathing force that connected everyone around me, an invisible web.

I looked at Zaira—her hair catching the stage lights, her joyful smile, the way she moved. As she pulled me forward, I looked down at our intertwined hands.

Which hand is mine? I thought, genuinely confused. I couldn’t distinguish where I ended and she began.

I looked up at her face. Is that me? Am I Robert or am I Zaira?

The question wasn’t philosophical—it was literal. I had genuine difficulty distinguishing which one of us I was.

As we found a spot closer to the stage and I wrapped my arms around her from behind, I began to dissolve completely. I was no longer just Robert. I was Robert and Zaira, both of us, fully and completely.

And as I continued to fall deeper into the music and the dance-like trance, I dissolved further still.

Who was I in this crowd?

I looked at a shirtless man with sunglasses and a trucker hat, hands raised to the sky in pure ecstasy. Was I him?

A young woman with flower pasties covering her breats, face painted with more flowers, wrists full of beaded bracelets, perched on her boyfriend’s shoulders, screaming with joy. Was I her? Was I the DJ on stage, looking out at this crowd?

Yes. I was all of them. All at once. I contained multitudes.

It felt as though I had tapped into something infinite and universal. I transcended time and space. I was no longer just one person in a crowd. I was part of something much larger, something that encompassed everyone and everything, everywhere, all at once.

I even felt connected to the trees at the edge of the field, the earth beneath my feet, and the stars overhead. They all seemed to pulse with the same mystic energy. I felt the earth, the air, and the crowd just as clearly as if they were physical extensions of my own arms or legs. I lost my individual sense of identity.

As my consciousness expanded, my sense of time began to unravel. What once felt like fleeting moments stretched out, expanding until each second seemed to last for hours, then years, then centuries. It became impossible to discern where one moment ended and the next began. It was as if I had been plucked from the normal flow of time and placed in a space where time was no longer linear—where past, present, and future blurred together into a single, continuous experience.

It was surreal, dreamlike.

I looked at Zaira, her face glowing in the shifting lights of the stage, and felt a connection deeper than any I’d known. In that instant, visions of our future—a home, children, a lifetime of growth and love, as well as heartbreak and suffering—flashed before me with absolute clarity. I could feel our future in my heart, just as clearly as I remember the comforting feeling of eating bacon and eggs for breakfast that day.

In what felt like a few heartbeats, I lived our entire lives together. My life from birth to death. Her life from birth to death. All the love, the pain, the joy, the sorrow—all of it. Living each lifetime thousands upon thousands of times over and over again, like a film reel stuck on repeat but somehow never boring, always beautiful.

Not only did I feel our lives, but I felt the entire lives of others as well—not as an observer watching from outside, but as if I had lived every moment as my own. All of their pain and suffering, their happiness and joys, became mine. The young mother worrying about her kids back home. The college kid experiencing his first festival. The middle-aged couple who’d been coming to Bonnaroo for a decade. I was all of them, simultaneously.

Eventually, slowly, I began to slip back into my individual consciousness. Like waking from a dream but in reverse—becoming smaller, more contained, more singular.

I looked at my watch. Nearly 1 AM. The night’s performances would be winding down soon.

“We should head back to camp to beat the crowd,” I shouted at Zaira, barely audible over the music.

She nodded, and we walked back to our campsite—an easy walk just on the other side of the tree line, close enough to hear everything but far enough to have some peace. I was still feeling euphoric, sweaty, physically exhausted but mentally electric.

We settled into our camping chairs. I opened one more beer, and we shared some fruit and beef jerky. Then we crawled into our tent, ready to call it a night. The music was still playing, bass still thundering through the ground and into our bodies.

I checked the time, “They should be finishing soon,” I said.

That’s when we heard Kaskade’s voice boom across the festival grounds: “Bonnaroo! Who’s having a good time!” The crowd erupted in a roar. Lasers, lights, and flames were still visible, filtering through the tree line like a distant war being waged in celebration.

“We’re going to play until the sun comes up!”

I looked at Zaira in shock. She looked back at me with wide eyes.

“Should we go back?” she asked.

I was also physically exhausted. My body had been dancing for hours. My feet ached. My throat was dry from shouting and singing.

“I think I’m done,” I said, surprising myself with the admission.

We crawled into our tent and zipped it shut, creating our own little world within the larger world. But the music and the alcohol made sleep restless. I tossed and turned for the next five hours in a trance-like state—not quite asleep, not quite awake, the effects of the gummy bear still dancing through my neural pathways.

During that liminal time between sleep and waking, I felt a profound connection to the consciousness of the physical world itself. The forest surrounding the festival. The trees rooted deep in Tennessee soil. The soil itself. Even the Earth as a whole—all of it seemed to pulse with awareness, with aliveness.

My perception expanded to encompass the tiniest atoms vibrating in air and the vast expanse of the cosmos spinning overhead. In that moment, I perceived existence across all of time—past, present, and future melded into a singular experience. I felt as though I had become the universe in its entirety, catching a glimpse of the true nature of existence.

It was beautiful.

As the night progressed toward dawn, I gradually returned to my ordinary state of consciousness. The transition wasn’t easy. At times I felt an alluring pull to remain in that expanded state, to stay dissolved in the cosmic everything, to die and leave my body behind.

Ultimately, it was my connection with Zaira that anchored me to reality. I could feel her beside me in the tent—a physical and spiritual tether to our shared existence. The desire to be there for her, to live out the marriage and long life that I knew we were destined to share. This mixture of love and purpose became the gravitational force that drew me back to my human form, back to being just Robert instead of God.

As dawn broke and the music finally faded, I fell asleep.

Eventually we woke up—stiff, dehydrated, covered in a thin layer of festival dust. We packed up our tent and camping gear, loaded everything into the car, and returned to our normal lives.

But that moment, that experience, stuck with me forever.

For years afterward, I would ask myself: What the fuck was that?