Hey man, is this a dream?

From Eluminatus

"What was Brittney thinking?" was the question on the front pages of the paper. A survey revealed that Tacoma, followed by Miami, was America's most stressed-out city. Hey, you'd be stressed too if you lived in Tacoma.

(((thump))) was incredible. "It's like 1999 all over again," Craig said. Or, as the sample Olli Wisdom started his set with phrased it, "To infinity – and beyond!" A woman dancing next to me, close to the stage, put on her glasses looked around and started laughing – not uncontrollably, but rather completely.

At 4 a.m., almost exactly, sirens were heard, and just as the music reached a peak, it cut out. A voice came on saying

"Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please.  I'm sorry, but the police are here, and they've asked us to stop the party."  

It seemed like an incredibly long pause where you could only hear murmurs building from the crowd before the music kicked in again just as intense as it had been before, with the echo "party, party, party, party" (although when I listened to it on the DNA Lounge's web site, it was only a second or two).

Everybody laughed, and I saw the guy dancing next to me wagging his finger at the DJ – oh, you naughty boy! A song built around the guitar part from Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" (with a minor change in the only lyric: "I want my LSD") had the whole crowd playing air guitar.

"You gotta be able to ask yourself ... hey man, is this a dream? .... Seems like everybody's sleepwalking when they're awake or wakewalking through their dreams."

When Olli played a song with a sample "Let's all travel at the speed of light!", it seemed remarkably plausible. At some point I started seeing people with drinks again, and realized that they had reopened the bar at 6 a.m.. We – and lots of others – stayed until they finally closed at 7.

How completely unexpected.

Update, five years later: See Notes from underground: Space Tribe at Geomagnetic.tv's Psyonesis (http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=972)