It’s something I’ve been trying to figure out since attending my first Clambake four years ago. The scuttlebutt at the time was that there was a new band in town, who saw themselves as heirs to the Bay Area underground prankster lineage of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the Suicide Club, and the Cacophony Society. As the rumors went, everyone dosed at the same time, and pranks and theater figured prominently in the proceedings.

I was intrigued. At the time, psychedelics were starting to gain mainstream acceptance, but in a narrow context as psychotherapeutic aids to personal transformation. The psychedelic science community, in its bid to turn psychedelics into legal medicines, disavowed anything that smacked of recreational use. And Burning Man, which had long carried the prankster flame, had lately lost touch with its origins, as its bureaucratic apparatus grew to meet the needs of a 70,000-person city of increasingly wealthy and pampered attendees. Yet, here was a group whose antics hearkened back to the crazy days that both communities would just as soon forget. This struck me as irresponsible, dangerous, and a potential PR disaster. It also sounded like a hell of a good time.

But the curious can’t simply show up to a Clambake. For all intents and purposes, Clambakes do not exist. They aren’t advertised or promoted on social media, and community members are forbidden from posting any personal photos of the events or using any identifying language when discussing them in public. Newcomers have to be invited by a member of the community who’s been through the ringer and can vouch for the virgin’s capacity to keep cool. This sponsorship model, borrowed from the Bay Area sex party scene, helps weed out the creepers and faint of heart. If the friend you invited can’t hang, you can’t either. (The Clambake founders, artists, and participants who agreed to speak with me for this story did so on the condition that their real names, and the names of the events, not be used).

There are no spectators at Clambakes. Everybody participates. And I don’t mean “participation” in the watered-down sense that’s thrown around at Burning Man these days.

I received an invite from a friend who was deep in the pudding. Being a responsible journalist, I figured I’d go strictly as an observer, a Tom Wolfe in a fur coat who’d mutter “Hmm, yes, how very interesting” and scribble notes into a pad. The benefit of hindsight allows me to fully appreciate my naiveté. Ah, to recall how forced and awkward I was at that first party; an Alice in Wonderland-themed masquerade in a mansion outside of San Francisco, trying to get the skinny on what this was all about from a six-foot-tall hookah-smoking caterpillar, as Alices of all shapes, sizes, and genders did headstands on a vibrating massage chair while taking hits of DMT from a vape pen, at least according to a friend who says he saw it.

There are no spectators at Clambakes. Everybody participates. And I don’t mean “participation” in the watered-down sense that’s thrown around at Burning Man these days, where you’re expected to put in your time building the infrastructure before you can boogie. I mean, like, you’re a part of the madness, whether you want to be or not, and it’s going to get real weird, and it behooves you to roll with it and do your part to make it weirder.

Each Clambake has a theme. This narrative plays out over the days of the event, and ultimately demands resolution. Members of the community contribute art projects that speak to the theme, crafting an immersive and artfully-consistent sensory world, or container. When it’s humming, the container, coupled with the boundary dissolution of the psychedelic experience, allows Clambakers to suspend their disbelief and become characters in the play. There is no fourth wall.

Clambakes are examples of an emerging artistic discipline called immersive experience design. “Participants in experience-driven events are encouraged to find unique solutions to the challenges they encounter while interacting with the narrative,” writes Freddie Nelson, Clambake’s Creative Director, in a manifesto on the subject. “In this way, each individual can contribute to a shared story of the experience, as every action carries a meaning.”

The Clambake themes are often satirical and absurd, playing on archetypal myths and facets of the zeitgeist. In one, the hero’s quest for the fountain of youth is recast as a debonaire chain-smoking madam’s search for an elixir of immortality to help her woo a mop with which she’s fallen in love. In another, the sorcerer’s apprentice becomes a biotechnology corporation whose nature preserve has run amok with mating unicorns.

Some parties pit participants against each other in warring factions, and often end in a reconciliation. Breakfast cults battle over the proper way to cook the day’s most important meal in their quest for the Holy Skillet; a mathematician and a baker unite to stop a giant pie from crashing into Earth; two gurus advocate two opposing approaches to self-help (think Deepak Chopra vs. Tim Ferriss), only to realize that inner peace comes through utilizing both of their methods.

“We’re rehashing what are just classic themes of reconciliation and growth,” says Billy Spice, one of the Clambake founders.

Some themes are explicitly political, satirizing greed, capitalism, money’s influence on art and politics, and the police surveillance state. At a Clambake a few weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a wall was surreptitiously constructed over the course of the evening that cleaved the party in two and prevented partygoers from crossing its border.

“It’s hard to do political satire for a community that’s mostly in line with similar political values,” Nelson admits. “But what we can do is create more empathy for those who are struggling with those politics. The Wall was an empathy-building interactive piece of art where, for once, as a mostly-privileged white audience, you could feel the smallest, most microscopic taste of what it was like to be told: ‘No, you can’t go here. Why? Because we said so. Because we created a construct that says you can’t.’”