DOSE: T+ 0:00		smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract)
T+ 48:00		smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

BACKGROUND

I am currently studying engineering at University, and I have always had a very logically inclined way of thinking and viewing things. This experience changed the way I look at "reality" forever.

It was October of 2015, and my best friend J decided to suggest that we go to a local head shop and purchase some Salvia extract. I don't smoke weed anymore, but at that time I smoked somewhat often, though I had dialed it back enough to be able to do my school work. He explained to me that it was basically going to be a mind-fuck but it would be over in about 5 minutes. He told me that he tried it when he was a teenager with his friends in a hotel room. One of his friends saw miniature copies of himself all around him. My friend J said said that when it was his turn, he got folded into a square in the wall, and he could physically feel his bones and flesh being folded up, as if some entity was treating him like a flat piece of paper, if that makes any sense.

I considered these experiences that J shared with me, and weighted them against the fact that the trip would only last "5 minutes". So, when he propositioned me to procure this substance and smoke some with him, I decided that I was too curious to not try it. Little did I know... that 5 minutes could be stretched out.

It's a beautiful brisk Fall day, the sun is smiling down on the red and orange leaves that sprinkle down from the urban trees that line the streets, forming crispy piles juxtaposed against the green grass. We arrive at our shared second-floor duplex suite with a miniature cork-stopped vial in our possession, a dark dark dark green substance contained within which resembles finely crushed leaves. He smokes a bit first out of my shiny red metal pipe, as apparently only a teensy bit is enough. After about 7 minutes of him being lost in Salvia space, during which he spoke to me that "the top is the bottom," and said "go away" a few times, and struggling to string sentences together in general, he's back. He said that while he was under, he saw everything in the room was made of patterns (a few days later I showed him a graph of the sine function and he said the pattern looked like sine waves, but they formed the real image of the actual room he was in, which at the time was the kitchen). The 'sine wave' patterns kept creeping in from the side of his vision, distorting his vision as they approached him, and he had to keep turning away from them or else they would reach him and he would then become those patterns too. That explained why he had turned around a few times and said "go away" a few times as well. I guess he didn't want to be a pattern.

Now it was my turn. I smoked the same amount as him, which honestly looked like it was ten or so tiny little flakes. Used a torch lighter with the flame on for the entire inhale. Held the smoke in my lungs. At first I felt absolutely nothing. Held the smoke in for about twenty seconds, and there was nothing. I guess I expected at least some kind of feeling since I was used to the near-instant high feeling from smoking weed. So I was thinking to myself, "Is he joking with me?" But ten seconds after the smoke had left my lungs, I felt it. I quietly said out loud, in an almost goofy/nervous way, "oh shit." The same way I would say "oh shit" at the top of a very high roller coaster as it starts to teeter over the edge of the first big drop.

I guess I saw the same kind of pattern as J did, because I would describe what I saw in the same way. It was like someone was taking photoshop and distorting my kitchen with a sine wave effect. The distortion was proceeding from right to left like a wave. The best way to describe it would be like an invisible vertical line was moving right to left, and to the right of the vertical line were these perfectly sinusoidal distortions of the real world. The kitchen was still in my field of view, but it was getting distorted. At the time I was facing the kitchen sink which had a window looking outside perched above it. I turned around to my left, to look at the kitchen table behind me. The table surface looked infinitely big. I felt like I was swimming in the table top. An ocean of wood. Then I looked at my friend, standing in the kitchen door. He had a grin which I can only describe as evil looking, though I did not literally get the evil vibe from it. The vibe I got was that he had just played the world's biggest prank on me. I could describe the prank feeling akin to having my entire life lead up to this moment, just so I could be pranked, though I only use those words to describe the cosmic jester aura emanating from J. These were not my actual thoughts or understanding of the moment. Next, the trip decided it was time for me to get rolled up by the floor. I was on the floor at the time, asking my friend to help me. He (later I saw on video) asked me "help you with what?" "To stay inside," I replied. I didn't want to get rolled up by the floor, so I got up and kind of half-ran to my room, and plopped down on my bed. I remember feeling like I was at the end of a train tunnel at that point, though my entire trip I was only visually seeing my apartment. No hallucinations, no escaping reality, just distortions and feelings. The last thing I remember was hearing the song "Love Alive" by Heart playing somewhere in the distance. "You gotta keep your love, keep your love alive..." After passing out for about ten seconds, I came to. I burst out laughing, and asked J, "what the fuck was that?!" before bursting into laughter again.

When the trip ended, we watched the videos we took of each other, and I didn't understand what I meant when I asked for help to "stay inside." Did I mean "stay inside the house"?

No.

MAIN TRIP REPORT

Two days later, I decided that I would try it again. After doing "extensive research" into Salvia Divinorum, including reading a bunch of other trip reports, and discovering that it was in fact an entheogen, I felt like I needed to dive deeper. So, laying in my bed with J again being my trip sitter (ALWAYS HAVE A SITTER!), I mentally prepared myself. There was some nature music playing on my TV from one of those music stations that come with cable TV. It was some peaceful yet melancholic piano melody in 4/4 time, moving at about 30 BPS, with tweeting birds and forest sounds here and there. The music itself I can describe as hauntingly beautiful. I have some music theory background as well so the mode of the music itself was in Lydian mode, dancing through the I, II, III and vi.

There I am, laying in my bed with a fuzzy purple throw blanket on top of me. J holds the pipe and torch lighter for me. He had packed the bowl for me too. Since I wanted to go deeper, I let him pack for me about triple the amount I had smoked the first time. Same technique, torch for the entire inhale, hold breath as long as possible. So there I am, with my head peaking out from the blanket and rested on a pillow, and I am staring at the analogue clock perched on my wall above the closet door in front of my bed. The 'seconds' hand ticks away, and I am staring directly at it as I count the seconds since the flame stopped. I remember feeling nothing as I counted all the way up to about fifteen. Then sixteen. I psychically (not physically) felt the room shake, like the T-rex from Jurassic Park was approaching but still very far away. Seventeen. Another shake, this time much more present. I didn't get to eighteen. It was instant darkness.

The blackest black was now my entire existence. It is at this point that I enter the trip that will change my perception of reality for the rest of my life. This is also the point where the memory of "smoking Salvia" is long gone. I am now a passenger, observing what happens. My thoughts are no longer racing like they normally do. They are quiet. It's just black. Then, after some time, I arrived at the white room. A purely white floor against a purely white sky, yet there was still a visible horizon all around me. The horizon seemed infinitely far away in all directions. To my right, I see a wall of rectangular cross-section approaching from behind me. This is where my thoughts enter. I remember thinking the thought: "This wall is my thoughts." And with each word of that sentence, the wall expanded forward and ahead in a straight line. It was as if each word was adding to the wall, increasing its length. "My thoughts are real." Those words were also added to the wall, which was now some distance ahead of me. "My thoughts create reality." Again, the wall expanded straight and forward in the same fashion as the bike trails in Tron.

I was then teleported to another place. This place was a navy blue hallway of infinite length stretched out in front of me. To my left and my right were Roman-style columns about ten feet high up to a ceiling, and spaced apart about five feet. About five feet behind the columns and between each space were these spired arch doorways. Inside the doorways were an abyss of black. There were no doors or features to these doorways, just the rectangle shape of about three by seven feet which then converged to a spire two more feet above. While I was here, I felt like I had literally died. "Am I dead?" I asked (out loud I found out later). "Am I dead? Am I dead? No? Then... what?"

Without movement, I was teleported yet again to another place. This time, I was back in the blackest black darkness. But, unlike last time, there were things here. Cubes. Hypercubes. Literally 4-dimensional cubes, twisting and rotating in 4-dimensional space, and there were a plethora of them. As I looked at these cubes, it occured to me that there were stars, no, galaxies apparent on each 3-dimensional slice of these hypercubes. No, these were slices of universes. Each hypercube was its own universe, and there were more than one. There were many, dancing away in the darkness. This was in fact, the multiverse being shown. The distinct thought came to me: "This is the True Reality." It was the most awe-inspiring thing I could have ever laid my gaze upon. Space and time are one, just like Einstein said. Then, I have an answer. The answer to everything. It's so profound that I must share it with everyone. My family, my friends, they must know. But, Salvia tells me that it's a Secret. No one can know it. I can't tell my mom or dad or sisters or brothers or even my best friend.

Then, like Dr. Ellie Arroway in the movie 'Contact' returns to Earth from out of the wormhole, I am suddenly back in "normal" reality. I'm in my bedroom. It all looks normal. But, I am still trying to hold on to that Secret. At first I try to convince Salvia that I won't tell anyone. But, my mind betrays me. The thoughts cross my mind: "Maybe I will just tell so and so..." and each time I feel that temptation to share, I can see the room around me begin to angrily swirl away, like it was all made of oil paint and Bob Ross decided to mix it all up in circular strokes with his paint brush, and this meant that the universe was finished. All my family and friends, gone, because I can't keep a secret. The piano music is still playing, and the tone was so fitting with all of this. Salvia was furious and it frightened me beyond reckoning. The birds tweeting against the melody sounded angry. The piano melody would rise up to the minor sixth chord, creating a sad atmosphere as if to say "Yep, it's all over and there's nothing you can do! It's all your fault!" This scene of me trying to hold on to the knowledge and reality swirling away keeps looping on itself. So finally, I let go of the knowledge. The knowledge is gone. Now I am aware of myself in the room. I shouted three times in terror, as if possessed by the spirit of Salvia to do so: "Salvia is a Holy Drug!" Reality still kept randomly swirling, and each time it did, I felt the unimaginable horror of knowing that the universe was ending and there was nothing I could do. Then it would unswirl, and I would be clinging to my friend begging for his help. After a few more swirl/unswirl cycles, it was over. I was back. Now I remembered that I had just smoked some Salvia.

Words can't describe the feelings of terror that smoking Salvia can induce. Though I only felt it towards the end of the trip, it honestly scared me from ever smoking it again. I said out loud to my friend, "We are not in control." I was referring to reality, of course.

Obviously, my friend recorded me on video (with my agreement). A few things I noticed from the video: I didn't stay laying down for long. After about one minute into the trip, I suddenly sit up, then I get out of my bed, only to kind of stumble to the floor, where I start crawling. At one point I am miming with my hands, like I am picking some berries from a tree into my hand, then scooping them in my mouth and chewing them while saying in a deep voice "Saaalllviiiiaaa." I am just guessing that is maybe a sign that I should try chewing the leaves next time, which one day I plan to do. At the end of the video I am standing, and I can see that my pupils are bright red in the camera, up until the point where the trip ends, which I found interesting. Also, the entire trip from start to finish lasted seven minutes. But it felt like it lasted an eternity.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I was pretty arrogant before I had this experience with this plant. Now, I am pretty humble and a lot more open-minded. I still carry on with life and try to appreciate the moments as much as I can.

Nothing can prepare one for a deep dive into Salvia Land. It doesn't matter if you have had ego-death on Shrooms, dropped some Sid, or used DMT. I also cannot emphasize enough that you NEED A SITTER when smoking Salvia. I had no awareness of my physical movement when I was inside the trip.

Though the terror of knowing the universe is ending scared me away from smoking Salvia again, I still plan to chew some leaves, one day. I suppose it's more respectful to the plant.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 116954
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Jan 22, 2023	Views: 772
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