DOSE:

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 5x)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

finding my recently-relocated self without an intimate really worthy of the name, i felt i needed to smoke my first salvia alone. since i had no desire to be defenestrated from my 4th floor apartment in the grips of higher sobriety, and couldnt think of how to lock the window irretrivabley, after a fast i headed for the woods near sunset, wandering far uptrail away from the potential grasp of Davy Jones Minor (the river) and off along a game trail to an upland spot where i could forsee no perils worse than the undesirable but unlikely and relatively bearable prospect of walking into a tree. and of course the chance of calling Inferno by crossing the wires of nature's tinder and a dropped pipe. now, i learned in school that only You can prevent forest fires, so i strip a large area of ground to the moist soil. as a gaurd against the contingency of moving the pipe outside the bounds of the raked earth during some world-oblivious gyration i dug an acute perforation into the ground over which to hold the pipe while smoking and afterwards to drop it immediately into. all this was in the curve of an old gully.

i desired silence (particularly that of the periodically screeching pheasant over the hill) and darkess for my trip but it was getting colder than i thought. not wanting bodily discomfort to impinge on the experience i decided to light up. at this point my heart was pounding wih the usual harrowing anxiety of being about to do a drug. but i smoke it. i soon see some visual disturbances but its not anything. i wait a long while. 30 minutes later i am holding the final inhalation of another bowl when i feel ripped by pleasant kinesthetica in the extremities and chest. i instantly realise what is happening. i feel my mind swell and i exhale.

over the course of a second i watch the little patch of small herbaceous plants (mints, no less) on the opposite bank of the gully spectacularly unfold into a polypresence as though i had crossed my eyes in some radical fourfold way. i noticed that a light piece of wood, glancing at which a few minutes before smoking i had for an instant mistaken for a white feather, had now become precisely that feather. one of my first thoughts was that it felt more lysergic than i had hoped from reading that salvia had no effects on 5ht receptors or any other known neural avenues of psychedelic alteration. yet i soon began to notice things that were a far cry from acid. looking to my left, the unfolding was wrought on every object, and i forgot what was happening; when i glanced at the pipe and the lighter on my right i not only remembered what i was doing, i felt rational lucidity return -- but not only that, i could at every moment see and 'percieve,' that the intensity of the psychedelic!
a was gradually greater the farther away from the pipe i looked. i mean, it was a function of space, not time. i looked all the way away again and thought somethig like, oh, over here is full of tripping.

i think all that took about a few seconds. at this point, with utter horrifaction, i hear a man nearby calling to his dog -- a not unbelieveable danger, since though i was a good bit off the beaten path id passed several people walking with thier unleashed dogs on the way to my spot. oh, shhhite, i thought, ohhh shhhhite. feigning normality is going to be a nightmare if this guy comes up. its going to be totally impossible. but then i listened, and heard him call again, here, timmy boy, and then he whistles this classic all-american whistle -- *too* classic, it suddenly dawns on me -- this is too cliche, this is a man-calling-dog *archetype,* so much so that *it can't be real.* and then i realised i couldnt hear the man or dog making any noise in he underbrush. it was a pure hallucination.

i am relieved, and look down and abruptly notice that i am half on my feet, moving exceedingly slowly. whoa, what are we doing. i feel compelled to stand and am afraid to. i realise that the compulsion is a physical one; a force, an cool, needley upward heaviness is gathered like a stormdriven tide in the tops of my arms and legs and shoulders. i remember thinking for an instant that the force was significantly stronger in my left arm around the wrist. at that point i looked up from my almost-sitting body and observe the faint, pellucid figure of the Virgin, her head shrouded, holding my arm and exhorting me telepathically, yet not paraverbally -- rather, through an unknown language that i apprehended perfectly (the only word i remember is 'muirnant') -- that i needed to get up and walk over to behold something. something to which, i understood, the word 'muirnant,' which was something like the adjectives 'profound' and 'portentious' and 'unspeakable' admixed and rendered into an active participle, applied fervently.

i was afraid to go.

Exp Year: 2000	ExpID: 1160
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 18, 2001	Views: 17,986
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Salvia divinorum (44) : Alone (16), Nature / Outdoors (23), First Times (2)