At 7 a.m. everyone was still dancing. They swayed like zombies in the glistening gray morning to the boundless thump of the bass. The night had been frigid; they danced to keep away the chill that hadn’t left the air and the cold in the dew that crept up their legs.

Glow sticks slowly faded as reflective tape caught a few weak sunbeams in the morning light of Sunday, September 16th. It was like a still from Rave to the Grave.

This was the situation on an expansive farm in rural Illinois on the final day of a three-day Earthdance celebration. The farm, in a town called Lowpoint near Peoria, Ill., was one of 340 locations in over 50 countries participating in Earthdance 2007. According to its Web site, Earthdance is the largest international music and dance event. The scale and location of celebrations vary from small private parties to huge gatherings in parks or stadiums.

The farm festival in Illinois booked over 30 electronic artists. Most of the artists performed some variety of trance, a type of music characterized by a breakneck tempo of 130 to 150 beats per minute. Trance music features crescendos and frequent breakdowns, time for dancers to pause, or freeze like statues before the music surges to a furious climax.

Phutureprimitive, the ambient trance project of disc jockey Rain, was the headliner at Earthdance in Lowpoint. Rain, an artist from Portland, Oregon, started DJing in 1992 and kept his sound private until the 2004 release of Sub Conscious on Waveform Records. Rain calls Phutureprimitive “subterranean electronic tribalism.”

Unlike other festivals, music isn’t the primary focus of Earthdance. The celebration, now in its eleventh year, aims to promote peace and support humanitarian causes. Participants worldwide join in a simultaneous peace prayer, and the Earthdance organization requires each local promoter to donate at least half the profits to a local charity. Over $1 million has been donated since Earthdance’s inception, not bad for a group of slovenly hippies.

But while peace and charity are well and good, I suspect that most of those who pitched a tent for the $30 nonstop festival came for the party.

The audience was a melange of hippies and ravers, with everything in between. White-haired ladies, college kids, locals, and a dreadlocked mother pulling her toddlers in a wagon covered with glow-in-the-dark tape were among those roaming the freshly mown grass. I met a guy who said he was an aeronautical engineer, and when I looked impressed, he looked sad and said he hated his job and just wanted to be a music producer.

As would be expected, the drugs were as diverse as the crowd, with everything from marijuana to 2C-B changing hands. A slightly drunk, bored girl told my brother she was friends with the owners of the farm and came to these things all the time. “We can tell who the dealers are, and we just turn them away, tell them to go right back home,” she said. My brother stifled a giggle.

Visual engineers Psymbolic coordinated light shows with lasers that flashed through the crowd and spotlights that wove undulating patterns onto the trees behind the main stage. As soon as it was dark, people began to twirl glow sticks and fire. When a young woman dressed all in black began to weave fire trails in the air, one particularly inebriated man gave her (and her burning chains) a sloppy hug.

My brother and I watched the fire dancers from the edge of a huge campfire. Next to us, some men with heavy Polish accents asked if we liked Beck. My brother told him that we did and that we saw him live at UIC Pavilion last year. He nodded, not quite understanding, and handed us two Becks beers. We sipped them, watching a baby with LED spinners attached to her jacket fall asleep in the campfire glow. It was a second helping of peace and charity.