The Naked Guy Tripping Balls at EDC Finally Answers Our Questions

Electric Daisy Carnival in Vegas finished up earlier this week and it was a weird one. Every EDC before this was burning hot to pleasantly warm like last year. This EDC felt like the abominable snowman came down from the mountaintop and ripped giant farts in people’s stoned faces all weekend long. You couldn’t go 5 minutes without an icy gust of wind reminding you global warming might be real. A fitting way to suffer considering Bill Nye opened the 3 day event with a speech about science.

To add to the weirdness, not shortly after Nye’s speech, this guy made his way to the Quantum Valley stage completely naked and attempted to become one with the music until cops took him down and to the med tent.

If you’re like me, you wondered what he took to be tripping so hard. Luckily, he came on Reddit to answer a few questions. Yes, naked EDC man did an AMA. Let’s get right to it. What the f**k happened?

I took somewhere between 6-8 tabs of LSD right when I got off the early shuttles at 5:00 or so. I went to Malaa with my friend group since he was the only artist playing and he put me in a really weird mood (I thought his mixing and track selections were kind of s**t tbh). I was there early for Bill Nye anyways.

By the time Bill Nye went on, I was already tripping balls and thought the sky was a Bob Ross painting and that a giant military plane that landed at the base was like a model on strings coming from the sky. I came out of Bill Nye’s speech feeling super inspired (he is one of my childhood heroes), then my group was walking to the Circuit Grounds to see i_O.

I split off because I saw the Quantum Valley popping off (I am a super huge trance guy, as it’s the genre I DJ most of the time when I play shows, so it’s no surprise that the music sucked me in). When I walked towards the QV, no one in my group noticed, and I ended up getting sucked into my own head since I was alone and tripping balls. Within minutes, I began to experience ego death for the first time, and believed I was ascending into a higher state of communal consciousness that all humans would eventually be a part of. Basically, I believed I didn’t need clothes on the psychedelic highway I was racing down, and ended up stripping and dancing my ass off and within minutes was surrounded by cops, was cuffed, and taken to a holding area, then a medical tent for a few hours, then got kicked out.

Yikes. No wonder this dude was at Quantum Valley. He probably thought that thing was a time travel device that’d let him tear through the 5th dimension of his soul.

So considering this was Day 1 4 hours into it, did he just spend $400 to spend the weekend in jail?

I got kicked out and separated from all of my stuff (phone, ID, credit card, shuttle pass, camelback, etc.) that night. The police cut my wristband off as well. I tried all night to talk to the exterior medical tent personnel and the Lost and Found to no avail with getting my stuff back. I ended up getting in contact with some friends in the festival using someone else’s phone and they came out at the end of the night and took a cab back to our hotel with me. The next day, I came early to see if I could get my stuff, but it still wasn’t in Lost and Found. I called my phone over and over again and eventually a security guy called “T” answered, and after waiting around a while and talking to his supervisor, who was near lost and found, they actually hand delivered my ID, shuttle pass, CC, ID, and phone. No dice on the camelback, some of my clothes, my earplugs, etc., but I got the important stuff and was able to pay $40 for a replacement band and ended up going to days two and three without a hitch! Shout out to T for being the real MVP!

He also said he experienced “ego death”.

I would define ego death as a mindset of disconnection from your physical and mental self as an individual and an overwhelming feeling of connection with the world and people around you, including their history, experiences, feelings, etc. In that state of mind, my sense of time was almost completely gone (there was a while in the medical tent where I honestly thought I would feel that way forever).

I was consumed with thoughts about the people around me (and my friends and family who were not present in that moment), and an appreciation for them being who they are and putting the efforts they do towards what they care about. I imagined the paths and decisions that got all of us to where we were in that moment in time, and how intricate the web of connections and interactions had to be to make (for example) an event like EDC possible.

This feeling was especially striking with the medical personnel, who obviously put themselves under severe stress and take the lives of other people into their hands for a short time in order to care for other people who are often having the worst moments of their lives. Just imagining the strength of character and commitment to such a wonderful and necessary institution within society literally brought me to tears and gave me a sense of thorough gratitude to be where I was in that moment, even if it was in the medical tent at EDC.

It could certainly affect people differently based on their mindset and the dose they take of course, but I think the sense of gratitude and appreciation for these minute details of existence that is possible under such a mindset far exceeds what is possible in normal everyday life. I also think many of these realizations that I experienced in those moments of intense stress and confusion will stay with me for life, for better or worse.

Many of the fleeting thoughts and feelings in the moment are nearly impossible to describe or even recall properly, which is why I have to describe it in more broad strokes terms like the “mindset” I was in.

Yea, pass.