Adore into Dreams
A bit of '90s nostalgia to kick things off.
First I'll tell you about Crave. A certain type of 90's kid will know what I'm talking about. Crave was a candy the way heroin is a drain on your finances. If Pixie sticks had a sociopathic older brother that broke shop windows and set fires, that's Crave.
I cannot find images of Crave online anywhere which feels strangely claustorphobic in this day and age. To have something you so clearly remember not immediately available to be observed and fetishized. But I guess we didn't take pictures of goddamned everything back then and when we did bandwidth only allowed for the uploading of the really important stuff, like fake nudies of Agent Skully.
Then I'll say there was also a lemon lime soda marketed by Pepsi, called Storm. I have since found out it was only test marketed in the Midwest but let me say, it was delicious. It was smooth, only lightly carbonated. It had caffeine, and a fair dose at that. And when mixed with Mountain Dew it was the ticket to sleepless nights in succession so as to render one mildly psychotic.
My friends and I mixed the soda blend with Crave and drank the bilious looking black serum that resulted. We then lit incense, lowered the lights, popped Nights into Dreams into the Sega Saturn and listened to the then-newly-released Adore album by The Smashing Pumpkins.
Adore was the maltreated stepchild of the Pumpkins' dicography. Even before its release, before anyone had heard it, I recall the concensus being, "The Pumpkins have gone soft. We're gonna hate it. Hey every body, let's not listen!"
So it came out and the best it got was grudging acknowledgement that it wasn't actually complete shit.
My friends and I, as we spiraled further out from coherent reality listening to it on sugar highs that likely shaved years off our general life expectancies, found it gleefully enveloping. Our buzz peaked well past the jitters and became as smooth and euphoric as the Gerber Baby on extasy.
To this day there is a shade of perfect sleepless calm that I can only associate with day-three shut away with my friends on semi-lethal doses of legal stimulants and listening to the most haunting and cavernously imaginative album 1990's modern rock ever produced.
Utterly gorgeous
Add to that the wonderfully realized out-of-body-experience simulator, Nights into Dreams. There was some heady alchemy involved in that game's creation, based on both the capabilities and limitations of games technology at the time, that conspired to perfectly evoke those dreams you have about how everything is possible, and nothing matters, and life is just fine. If I'm ever standing on a ledge shrieking about how I can't go on and how life's not worth living, somebody wheel out a console of that game, blast Adore from nearby speakers, and I'll pull through just fine.
