DOSE:

3 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

11 kg

It’s taken nearly 7 years to gather my thoughts on what I saw, felt and 'heard'.

Lesson one; do not smoke Salvia inside a small tent...

It was an April afternoon in 2006. I had my best friend (at the time) over with his younger brother. We had picked up some salvia 20x to smoke. I had heard of its powerful effects, but having weed as my only other reference point I was massively under-prepared for the experience I was about to go through. My parents were away on holiday and we (for some reason) had put up a tent in my garden. We thought this was a good place to try out the salvia.

First toke; nothing happened, just the taste of bitter smoke.

Second toke; after a few seconds I felt like I had an electrical current running through my entire body, as numb and painful as pins and needles. I also felt very aware of gravity, but it wasn’t pulling me down, it was like something in my bowel was pulling me down and to the left. Like I had an imaginary electrified rope pulling on every muscle in my body at once.

Third toke... no change... then 5 seconds in...

Nothing, not even blackness existed around me for what felt like an aeon. I had the sense that I was in the non-space that was there before the universe expanded into it.

After this aeon of time; I saw another aeon of my entire life up until that point repeated over and over and over into infinity.

Stage three, I ‘woke up’/‘had always been in’ a space in which I felt I had died, and has also been in for an aeon. This is the only bit where I remember what I saw. I had ‘broken’ into a vastly more colourful, tilt-shifted surrealist version of our normal universe. I attribute this to the feeling the prisoners would have felt when looking at the fire itself in Plato’s (Allegory of the) Cave.

Emotionally I felt like my entire life up until that point (even though I couldn’t remember who I was or any part of it) was all a faded memory from a past life of a different person; that the entire time from my birth to my last collapsing memory all had happened within this space. But what I had seen as life was an illusion/a memory; this new space that I broke into was where I had been all along. I felt like I had woken up from a dream, and that I would be here for the rest of my life. This was reality. Eternity. Time no longer existed, or had slowed down a million-fold. What I saw was as vivid as a clear summer’s day. At first I was simply astonished at what I saw, the panic came later...

I vividly remember a beautiful bright grassy green colour and lots of summery yellow had bursted from every angle surrounding me in a very curved, repeated fashion, like a hilly, tilt-shifted landscape cocooning me. Looking back now, years later, I have since realised I felt very much like how a fly would on a gigantic leaf in a field. My field of view was no longer the normal one my eyes had given me, instead I saw what a fly would see, 360 vision- I could see what was in my periphery as clearly as what was in front of me. (as far as I was aware I didn’t know I even had eyes), and repetitions of shapes I saw; repeated with slight delay in each of my millions of eyes, colliding and undulating behind each other like very 2D cutout paper.

It felt also very much like I was myself as a child in a staged play, and that someone was watching me. I’ve since realised that person watching me, was me; my grown-up subconscious; wondering what the hell I, as a child, was doing in this crazy landscape. I felt like the me watching me, who I couldn’t see, was also my dad. I was my own dad, and I was also me as a very young child. I felt like how a dad would if he saw is child in peril, but also like I was the child innocently in peril but instinctively horrified.

I also didn’t feel like I was a fly, but rather how I would feel if I saw the world through the eyes and soul of one, and what I would see and feel; kaleidoscopic vision, and insignificantly baffled by the world. The direction of gravity below and to left now felt like it was a black hole that if I looked at, it would suck me in. I could feel its presence, and forced myself to not look at it.

My two friends in front of me were what terrified me the most. The were both originally to the left and right of me, in a small circle, but now they were both in front of me, judging me, like gods (as my field of view had expanded around me 360 degrees) I no longer knew who they were, I didn’t even know they were people. I didn’t know what a person was or what they looked like, and there were these two entities in front of me. I was fascinated by their eyes. They truly are the window to a soul. They looked like the eyes of Horus, and had a very feminine quality.

Looking back, they didn’t even look like themselves at all. They looked like mirrors of the same being in a Hindu painting, repeated endlessly into an even more distant horizon behind them. It/they both seemed to be wearing mythical purple clothing, and their hair and skin was blazing bright orange- like the surface of the sun during a slow-mo CME (Coronol Mass Ejection). Everything was moving so slowly. And they seemed to be at the pivotal end corner of this landscape behind the hills, but also made up of the hills (or the hills were made up of them), but instead of gracing the landscape with light of a sun; they were intrusive, like if the sun had been poisoned and they were slowly killing everything on the landscape with their female eyes. With the gaze of the character that embodies Night Time on Bald Mountain in Fantasia, or the eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Their gaze was on me, and I was next. They could see me. I felt like I was going to be here in this torment forever.

After what felt like an aeon of multiple lives and deaths in this space, the whole landscape collapsed in on itself, like each of my million fly eyes had popped one by one around me, and everything quite literally folded in to the N'th degree, including me. Where my friends were acting as the poisoned sun before, I then remember seeing a dull white light that was also black like when you have concussion. I suddenly remembered I was in a tent, and felt like I had been sat there my whole life. Memories slowly started to return to my subconscious. I begun to remember who my friends were. I had the feeling one would get when waking up from a million years of hyper-sleep. I freaked out in thinking that this tent and everything in it was the whole universe. I remembered there was a zip, and I scrambled to get out.

I stumbled out of the tent, and instead of being glad to see the outside world, it felt very cold and imposing. The summer I had seen in these millions of lifetimes was a million times more youthful than this cold old world. I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere. I felt like an insomniac would after not sleeping for a year. Itchy and irritable. I went inside and they followed me. I lay uncomfortably on the sofa in a embryonic position, the sofa felt abrasive. I snapped at my friends, and eventually asked them to go home. They left. I tried to sleep for the rest of the afternoon, but I didn’t; I lay awake trying to gather my thoughts as to what on earth, or in the Universe just happened. For the next 24 hours, everything had a yellow tint to it, and felt like one of those dimly lit dreams where you’re scared in the dark, and all you want to do is turn the lights brighter, but they don't. I longed for summer.

Looking back, I don’t think either of them had a mind-blowing experience like I did, which made it even more frustrating at the time. Now, I am glad; I wouldn’t want any stable-minded person to go through what I went through.

Looking back, I feel quite sad about the whole experience. It's like the child inside me died that day, and is still stuck in that world somewhere, my innocence had died, and is never coming back. It changed me in every sense. Since then, 7 years later I can remember it as vividly as the world around me now. I am now more aware of the world around me, and have not stopped thinking about how the Universe could possibly exist, and that my current life is an illusion splashed on the walls of that bizarre subconscious singularity. That child of me is still there, in the space of beautiful hell, and I plead for him to get out somehow.

At the same time it also feels like it never happened or was in a past life itself.

The only thing I don’t remember during the trip is what I heard. The whole experience was silent. Utterly silent, which was what made it so terrifying. It must have all happened in the space of 10 seconds, but it felt like an almost eternal glimpse of silent, swirling infinity.

Since then I am convinced that nothing exists until your senses sense they are there. Memories never existed. Nothing right now exists or has shape until your eyes look at them, then when you look away, that memory you have is no proof as to its existence. The Universe itself black holes and all, is weirder that what I saw, but man... it terrified me. It was the Universe behind the curtain. The campfire which lights Plato’s Cave. The ascent to sunlight would be death and rebirth of life itself.

I don’t think God created the Universe. The Universe is God itself. And since we are made out of the same stuff as the rest of the Universe, drugs like this let you see the cogs of God’s/your mind... Enough.

I'd say take very extreme precaution with this drug, it is not to be messed with, and I would never do it again. One time is enough, another- and I would go insane.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 102590
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Feb 13, 2014	Views: 31,946
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), HPPD / Lasting Visuals (40), Hangover / Days After (46), Guides / Sitters (39), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), General (1)