After the famed yet failed super-glued-pringles-can attempt of 2017, you have, with the help of your dad who yearns for his two-decade-since-deceased “glory days” in a French field wherein he tried a space cake for the first and last time, successfully snuck your own cakes of the cosmos into a family-friendly, indie-rock festival. 

Well done you. 

Yesterday, your step-mother caught you smoking a cigarette and you received the customary bollocking, your sister dropped your favourite lipstick into the brown void that rests steaming beneath the eco toilets, and you avoided the lanky northern boy with whom, last year, you shared a sexual experience that will keep you up at night for longer than the Mandy allowed him to be. 

The sun is finally setting. 

The floodlights and neon-LEDs are pinging into existence across the Yorkshire dales. The living dead and the very-much-living are emerging from under tarpaulins, drawn by the hum to converge upon the heart of hearts – the main stage. The universe is moving not round and round but up and down. A distinct, juvenile but precious freedom looms on the horizon. 

Can you feel the earth spinning? 

From the boot of the Honda, filled with muddy wellies and an old Breville toastie maker, you fish from a plastic bag within a plastic bag within a rucksack your soft and chocolatey creations. They have been batch tested and approved as appropriately and simultaneously panic-inducing and perfect, proven by the visions of a life under the sea you experienced lying in your bed two months earlier while listening to Crystal Castles. 

One brownie for you. One for your sister. One for your sister’s boyfriend. 

Watches synced? The countdown begins. 

You are thus presented with a choice. Your step-mother wants to see Tom Grennan, relatively new guitar-boy, undoubtedly enjoyable, smackings of a good atmosphere, sister on board. Your dad, on the other hand, fully content to go about his evening alone and recently having developed an obsession with contemporary psychedelia that has already rendered him the black-sheep on the drive here, offers up a wild-card: The Lucid Dream. 

Top Trip: Go with your dad. 

This means splitting with your sister. Up to this point, she has ‘done weed’ once and on that occasion, in her conspicuous yearning for a cool, nighttime breeze on the drive home from the party, regurgitated a half-digested Hawaiian pizza into the gap where the car window disappeared. However, she has her boyfriend, who himself caught an STD as-yet-unknown-to-science in a field at Glastonbury a few years ago. 

You all know what you’re doing. 

Your very-much-not-family-friendly family splits on the hill, the main stage buzzing with an unknowable melody, the early birds already bobbing near the bars. The A-team head into the forest and you, hot on the heels of your dad’s Millets walking boots, head to the small, pink tent nearest the cheapest campground’s entrance. 

You are early. So early that you get a spot directly in front of the stage, which has no barrier between beauty and beholder, and directly next to the speaker, which is currently blasting Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. You make small talk, your dad reminisces about how much he loves and hates the 80s, God pushes people into the tent behind you. 

An hour and minutes or minutes and an hour later, four men appear to scattered hoots, dressed in a cross between bio-hazard suits and painters’ uniforms with their band’s logo pressed on the left breast. No one really knows what’s happening other than that something is happening. You’re all on the rollercoaster, about to drop. You especially. 

You can feel the earth spinning.  

What follows is a set of the most oneiric music you have ever experienced. Believing you are in some way unique because you base your entire personality off of The Stone Roses, you, of course, know every type of music there is to know about.

Actually, no you definitely do not.

SX1000 puts you into a slow-moving blender in which you are torn apart and promptly put back together as someone who thinks fire alarms are the superlative musical accompaniment. More more more more more more more.

But just like that, they’re gone. 

Both you and your dad struggle to get a sentence out that builds upon ‘I really liked that’ and ‘that was good’ for the next fifteen minutes. You wear his twenty-year-old smile. 

Around 5am, after a stint at the Indie Disco, the tent unzips and your sister falls in with her lover a few centimetres behind her. 

“I just ate a burger like a fucking snake,” she tells you, grinning. “I’ve never been this hungry in my whole entire life!” 

In the second it takes you to giggle, the next six years disappear. 

That night though, that Lucid Dream of a night, lasts forever.