DOSE:	0.4 g	smoked	Cannabis
	0.5 g	smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract - 5x)
	capsls	oral	Theanine

BODY WEIGHT:

133 lb

To give a little background, I've been majorly depressed for the last 4 years despite any help I have received so far. I also suffer from borderline personality disorder. Due to both of these I have always been vehemently seeking out new things to try to 'help' me (which in my world means to make me numb or happy). And so I dabbled with all sorts of illegal drugs. My previous experiences include (but not all I can remember) MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, DXM, heroin, morphine, opium, cannabis, diazepam, xanax & klonopin. I decided on salvia to help further my self-actualisation and help me to hopefully have some magical kind of revelation.

I purchased a 5x extract of salvia divinorum to smoke. I had used it once before prior to this, but had smoked it over a longer period of time, which gave very mild hallucinations such as the light morphing into patterns if stared at intensely and everything looking like it was vibrating.

TRIP PREPARATION:
Before smoking the extract, I smoked some cannabis to help relax me before tripping. I smoked about 0.4g of high quality cannabis from a bong.

I should mention that I was not in the best of mindsets and it was silly for me to even attempt to trip, considering that I was feeling both anxious and guilty about something that had happened earlier in the day. Usually cannabis eradicates that feeling, only this time it didn't, however I still took the decision to use salvia anyway. I had been preparing myself for this extensively so I thought I would be fine. For months I had been meditating, balancing my chakras, changing my diet, trying to change my mindset and practising accepting my negative feelings for what they are and letting them go. I even researched extensively how to trip safely, how to cope with a bad trip, how to stop tripping etc. But nothing could have prepared me for this. I also took the mistakes of not going to a dark quiet room and lying down whilst tripping & not having a trip sitter or any back up plan.

THE ACTUAL TRIP:
I rolled a small joint using only the salvia and packed it tight. I stood in the doorway to my garden and took a few deep breaths. I lit up, taking a massive rip of the joint and holding it in despite how harsh the smoke was. The smoke was vile, the worst thing I have ever tasted, nothing like my previous time. I felt more disconnected from reality but had no visual response to the salvia yet. I let out the smoke after about 20 seconds. I took another rip of the joint, and the disconnection intensified. I could feel this impending doom inside my stomach, warning me not to smoke anymore. Being as impulsive is one of the symptoms of my personality disorder, I thought 'Fuck it. Who cares? I want to get fucked up.' and persisted to smoke my third and final puff. There was another voice at the back of my head telling me to be careful what I wished for.

Everything slowed. The impending sense of doom exploded in my face and in that moment I knew I had smoked too much and was in for a wild and scary ride. I hastily put the joint out and stumbled to the couch. My vision wouldn't focus and everything seemed to be in three's. Instead of double vision, I had triple vision. It looked like how an old computer was when I was a child and used to mess around with opening too many windows of the calculator program. I would drag it around with the mouse and the computer would glitch, showing way too many versions of it.

I sat fidgeting on the couch with as much force as I could, as I discovered that the visual effects seemed to lessen when I was moving (probably because I was paying more attention to my body rather than my anxiety or my current visual nightmare).

I had one of the worst feelings of anxiety and panic I have ever had in my life. I could have died right then and there it was so intense. Then my head began to flush and feel warm and heavy, which would have been one of the best feelings I had ever experienced if it wasn't for my absolute terror. I felt like I was vibrating violently. My ears were ringing, like someone had put a delay and echo effect onto a high pitched frequency, before placing the amp that was playing it inside my brain. The ringing felt like it kept moving in and out, like how an ambulance sounds when it goes past - the whole doppler effect thing.

I don't remember what happened to my vision after that, there's a gap in what I saw, almost like I went blind for a few seconds. I saw nothing. And I don't mean I saw a big black void like how it is when it's too dark to see; I mean absolutely nothing. Complete non-existence.

After what felt like 10 minutes (but was probably only 10 seconds), I reached for my phone. I couldn't take it anymore. Then something even stranger happened. It shrunk in my hands. It seemed so far away. Like my eyes were cameras that couldn't stop zooming out. The disconnection was at its absolute peak.

I must've taken about 10 tries to enter the right passcode. My hands were just so far away from me. It felt like playing a video game from an old arcade. The feeling of impending doom began to grow even more and I knew it was a race against time before my phone would be so small I wouldn't be able to use it.

The hallucinations I experienced were utterly indistinguishable from reality. They were not ones where I could say 'oh it's just the salvia, they aren't actually real, I'll be fine.' and they were unrealistic. They felt MORE real than reality itself.

I finally got the right passcode to my phone and I pulled up Safari as quick as humanly possible. I frantically typed in what I desperately needed to know... 'how to stop a bad trip', which in my abbreviated state was spelt 'hw to styop a bsd trip'. Thankfully Google knew what I meant. The answers as I was scrolling down desperately were all 'you can't, you have to ride it out.' and at that moment I almost caved. My body throbbed, vibrating like I had been left strapped to an electric massage chair at level 100.

Then... I remembered. Whilst I had been buying something on an online store, they had marketed a 'bad trip stopper' which was a dextrose energy tablet and some kind of herb to relax you (looking back I think it was either skullcap or valerian possibly). I saw on the page of 'how to stop a bad trip' that low blood sugar was listed as a consistent factor in people who experienced bad trips. That decided it. I practically ran into the kitchen, opened the fridge and got out the first sugary thing I could see. An apple.

I felt terrible. Anger had began to overtake me and I was so frustrated I felt like crying. I was tetchy and extremely irritable. My furniture arrangement stopped me from properly getting to the fridge in such a state; and under the influence of salvia, I now wanted to flip everything over and smash it all up.

I bit into the apple like my life depended on it. I have never ate an apple so quick in my life. It made me feel ever so slightly better, so I continued to eat another. I also had some L-theanine I had capped up earlier so I put about 8 of those capsules in my mouth and swallowed. It was the only relaxant I had to hand that I knew would work (I had used it before to stop yohimbe jitters).

I felt slightly sick and really woozy - out of control still - but my vision was now only disconnected rather than pulsating and splitting everywhere. Moving made me feel better earlier so I continued to do it by hunting for more sugary food in my kitchen cupboards. My tongue seemed to regain its tastebuds in a flash, so the awful taste of the salvia came back. In an effort to get rid of it, I chewed some gum, ate a piece of rocky road, pretzels, yet another apple and ice cream. The taste didn't even stop one bit. I had to brush my teeth twice, scrubbing my tongue more fiercely that ever to get it to go away. I also drank 500ml of water to hydrate myself in the hopes of making myself feel a tiny bit better.

I went back to sit down on the couch and my anxiety lessened as I knew the effects of salvia were fading. The buzzing had stopped as well as other body effects. The whole trip and panic came on no less than 10 seconds after I exhaled my last hit, with the majority of the effects fading after 20 minutes, the stronger ones only lasting about 10 minutes.

POST TRIP AND REALISATIONS:
After the visual effects went away, I still felt dissociated. I was on the brink of tears. My anxiety was overloading again. The trip had a profound effect on me. I shut myself in the bathroom, sat on the floor and wept, followed by doing breathing exercises and root chakra meditation to ground myself and sacral chakra meditation to help my anxiety.

Once I felt more normal, I searched 'how to recover from a bad trip' on Google. I saw suggestions from members of forums that a bad trip meant that something was bothering you either consciously or deep down; that it was an insight into the bad part of your psyche and you had to find meaning from it and accept it.

So I asked myself what was the most scary part of my trip. I did some deep searching inside my mind. It wasn't the hallucinations themselves. It was the fact that I wasn't in control of them, and I was deathly afraid I wouldn't get my control back ever again.

And so I reflected on my life, so many of my recent situations and even going back to when I was younger, were me trying to keep control or being scared to loose it. To clarify, I don't mean control over people, I mean over my life and my situation as a whole. Keeping myself away from new things because I couldn't deal with the lack of control. Ruining parts of my life just so I didn't loose control of it. And then there was the opposite end of the spectrum where I got so sick of being scared to loose control that I pushed myself into extremely dangerous situations, because I had become apathetic to my state of fighting for control of myself. My greatest fear in life is loosing control.

SHORT TERM EFFECTS, FINAL REALISATIONS AND MOVING FORWARD:
Writing this now, about 4 hours after the trip, I still feel disconnected (not in a scary way though), I just don't have as much coordination as I'd like, but it's worth noting that I'm probably really tired after today as I woke up very early. Salvia has helped me realise and accept (since I always knew it very very deep down) what my greatest fear is, at the moment I don't know what to do with that information or how to move forward with it. Although it was a scary trip for me, I now reflect on it and realise it was for the best. If not for the experience, I wouldn't have conscious knowledge of what my greatest fear is. I'm sure I will come back and search my memories to thoroughly dissect what happened and what the hallucinations themselves meant rather than just the overall meaning.

SUMMARY:
If others take nothing else away from this report: Have a sitter, titrate your dose and don't under any circumstances use a psychedelic when you're in a negative headspace. If all else fails remember that the bad trips happen for a reason. Eat something sugary to get your blood sugar up, take something calming if possible and do some breathing exercises to relax you. Don't forget salvia doesn't last long, so it will all be over soon. Respect what you're taking and stay safe.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 110409
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 17
Published: May 1, 2020	Views: 646
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Cannabis (1), Salvia divinorum (44) : Personal Preparation (45), Depression (15), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3), Alone (16)