DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

Intro and Background:

My first salvia experience was one of my best experiences with psychedelics. Prior to this, the only psychoactive chemicals I had taken into my body were THC and psilocybin.

I had heard about this substance called "salvia" several times before, but never looked into it. One midsummer's day, a good friend who was a bit more experienced with psychedelics than I told me that he had tripped harder than ever on a plant called "salvia" - and that it was legal and locally available! Of course, being the curious type, I immediately went to where he told me he had gotten it from and purchased a small baggie, about 1 gram of this dark, dried leaf ['40x'], and a small metal pipe with a screen to smoke it out of.

Preparation:

Hurrying home, I raced to my room and began preparing to smoke it. I was by myself; no sitter. I closed my curtains, turned on a bedside lamp, and cleared my mind, having learned that the best way to enter a trip was to do so with a calm head. I got my Bic lighter ready and opened the baggie. I knew that I would get a better result with greater heat, that I should lay down and stay down, and that I was supposed to hold in the smoke for as long as possible. Of course, not having done much research about dosage, I packed a full bowl of salvia divinorum. Little did I know, my life was about to change forever.

The Main Event:

I brought the pipe to my lips and fired up my lighter. I held the flame very close to the bowl, so that the blue fire near the base was all I could see as I breathed in smoke and flame. Comparing the smoothness of the smoke to weed, it was very, very harsh. I had to breathe in through my nostrils in a stutter to bear the heat of the smoke entering my respiratory system. When the bowl was nothing but a surprisingly small pile of white ash, I put the pipe down on my bedside table.

I lay face-up on my bed with my eyes closed, legs dangling off the edge, and my feet on the floor. I held in the smoke for about 10 seconds and breathed out. As soon as I started to take another breath in, I felt it.

First things first; for the entirety of the come-up and plateau - if a salvia plateau lasts long enough to ever be detected - I was unaware that I had smoked anything. I was convinced that this was how things were now.

The softness of the blankets and the suddenly extremely forgiving mattress surrounded me such that it was like I was floating in thick space. My mind entered a state where only sensations - more kinds of sensation than I had previously been aware was possible - and interpretations exist. I felt a soft, cool breeze flowing over my entire body and I knew that I was moving. However, I was moving in a direction that I was completely unfamiliar with in my ordinary life, yet had a strange sense of deja vu about.

I started turning both clockwise and widdershins, producing clones of my body at what felt like every degree of my turning. They were not separate from me, they were a part of me. My perspective on what was happening somehow expanded to include both first- and third-person. I felt/saw that there was a massive mesh-machine made of, in one small section, the plurality of me, and in other sections was made of people I knew.

My consciousness took another step back and suddenly I could see that this mesh-machine was actually a hollow hoop - I could now see the other side of it from where I was, again in both first- and third-person - that was, at the same time as being vast from the previous perspective, almost two-dimensional. The hoop started to spin. I could see the angle of its turning and the spot where my original body was; there was a line connecting it to the centre of the hoop. Just as the hoop had started to spin, it began to extend into a hollow tube. I could see/feel the path that my original body traced out as it extended and spun. It was like the original position of the hoop was my current position in time and the extending tube was a representation of me moving into the future - it felt like I was existing in potential as well as the now, only the definition of the "now" was extended, just like the tube.

Once again, my awareness expanded, compressing the spinning tube into a line, which itself began to spiral around itself, curling into a structure that resembled the outside of a bass guitar string but on a normally incomprehensible scale. This, too, was compressed down to a thick line.

I could see other such lines - "threads", as I think of them - that I felt represented other people traveling through time. As I raced along my thread of time, I became aware that the end I was moving towards was attached to a wall of glowing whiteness. I hit the wall at an incredible speed and suddenly I was back in my physical body, saying out loud "What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck..." over and over again.

The Comedown:

I came back to reality to find myself laying exactly as I had been when I had started. My mind was focused on one thing for the next five minutes; trying to comprehend what had just happened. I checked the clock. At a rough estimate, my trip had lasted 10 minutes - what felt like an eternity of eternities. As I came down, I found that my heart, which had initially been calm and slow, start to speed up after a few seconds of being lucid. This I am sure was simply due to my now-lucid freakout at being shown this experience which, while I think I have done my best job to describe, can only be appreciated truly by others who have had experiences on this level.


All in all, my first salvia experience - I do not consider it a "trip" to this day - went as well as it could have. I didn't freak out during the most intense periods, I woke up where I was supposed to, and it gave me a completely changed (for the better!) outlook on reality.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 112799
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 12, 2019	Views: 655
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Alone (16), First Times (2)