DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

235 lb

In my 44 years of life I've had many powerful experiences. There have been the intensely tender like a girl's first kiss, the profound sadness of having close family members taken away, the glory of peaking an 18,000ft mountain in South America or the sheer thrill of jumping out of an airplane. In short, the everyday moments of grief, happiness and fun that people normally experience. But then there is Salvia. A breakthrough in Salvia puts all life experiences in a separate and much milder category. If your life, however exciting it may be, can be likened to a glass of chocolate milk the successful Salvia trip is akin to drinking the lifeforce of gods steeped in the rocket fuel of alien ships.

I had smoked Salvia a few times before and found the effects interesting. I could lay back on a couch, close my eyes and feel a sensation I liken to being within a slowly churning taffy machine. My mind becomes suggestible and I can think through visuals that my brain is happy to connect the dots and make them real. I recall a funhouse guy walking on stilts that keep on stretching or a dirty carousel with voices summoning to come join the party. It was a weird effect that I enjoyed jumping into but I never lost touch with my surroundings and I was aware throughout that I was the director in this surreal circus. I've gotten stoned a few times on other psychedelics like DMT and 25i-Nbome; each an experience with its own flavor and profile and all enjoyable in their own right but I never lost sight of the fact that ultimately I remained in control.

Not tonight.

I had been noticing that each trip with Salvia seemed a little stronger than the previous. In all I'd probably smoked it a half dozen times and this sixth or seventh took me from the shoreline where I'd been playing with a scoop and bucket and a rubber ducky out to the deep end of the ocean into the bottomless abyss. Within a few seconds it was lights out and I was cast into a new dimension altogether. Honestly, the power of expression and mere English vocabulary fail completely in capturing its awe and grandeur. As a weak metaphor, let's say I felt like an atom-wide rag doll tumbling about within an immense dryer. There is, for me a hardened atheist, no mystical or reverential language available to describe entities and goddesses or any of that but nonetheless I sensed that my intrusion into this dimension was violently unwelcome. There was a visual aspect to this rapid-fire roiling, like being caught perhaps in the electric soup of the subatomic realm. Ethereal walls of rapidly shifting plasma peaks and valleys organizing into crazy patterns too fast for me to appreciate before the next formed. In this landscape I was reduced to but a trifling puff of consciousness really. I really gave it my all - fighting is a better word - to regain a foothold in this groundless universe with all the futility of an ant helplessly trying to paddle itself out of a river's current.

My eyes opened momentarily to catch a glimpse of my surroundings and every surface around me was layered in crazy glyphs that I can inappropriately equate to math or alien symbols. All my perceptions of the 'real' world in that fraction of a second were draped in a malevolence of sorts; perhaps for my barging in unannounced unto this... environment - what else can I call it! With my eyes opened so briefly I had perhaps had the slightest inkling of hope that I was finally anchoring a foothold back in reality but it's as if whatever was going on in my brain said 'oh no you don't, imma kick yo ass some more' and I was thrown back into the center of the hurricane of signals within my head for a couple more rounds of this terrifying episode.

If we think of hell as the most inhospitable of places this would be a correct assessment for this salvia trip. In it were to be found no corny devils nor lava pits or tormented souls. There was however the far more fearsome sense of complete and utter alone-ness and but the realization that I had zero control over my fate. And that is as scary as one can possibly imagine. Good thing, if we're to look for a silver lining, that these trips last 'only' a few mintues for if they were to last so much as three or four times that (let alone half a day like LSD) people would surely go insane or have a fright-induced heart attack.

One would think that with such a terrifying experience I would have taken my leftover 20x salvia along with my bong and thrown them right out the window never to mess with this shit again but, like all other roller coasters, there is this residual wow that draws me back. When I can get the balls to do it again I will and just cross my fingers that there's more to this than a white-knuckle ride into the raw emotion of complete fear.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 100892
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 44
Published: May 19, 2019	Views: 4,723
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Alone (16), Bad Trips (6), General (1)