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A Towel in Time
Salvia divinorum & Amphetamine (Adderall)
Citation:   Gnat Mesc. "A Towel in Time: An Experience with Salvia divinorum & Amphetamine (Adderall) (exp117391)". Erowid.org. Jan 15, 2025. erowid.org/exp/117391

 
DOSE:
50 mg smoked Salvia divinorum (extract)
  10 mg oral Amphetamines (daily)
BODY WEIGHT: 350 lb
I tripped on salvia with a friend. This friend, who I’ll refer to as Peter, and I, are interested in psychedelics. Salvia is legal in the state we live in, so I bought some. We did it around the end of June in our sleepy coastal town. The place where we tripped was a field by my house. It was overlooking the ocean, relatively private, and had no cliffs or hills that were steep. The location wasn’t perfect, due to the amount of bugs present and the grass that went up to knees, which hadn’t been cut in years. There was a slight breeze and it was a sunny day, although the temperature was cool. Overall, it was a good spot. We laid out a towel that faced the ocean in a small patch of dirt at the bottom of a relatively flat hill. I bunched up my knapsack for a pillow, and started pouring water into my bong. To stop the salvia from falling into the stem piece, I put a small layer of weed at the bottom of the bowl.

Peter went first and had a positive light to moderate experience. I now felt much less nervous, given the fact that Peter is much less experienced in drugs than me. If he can handle it, I can handle it. Before I was going to partake in salvia, I remembered to look up if there was any interaction between adderall and salvia. I take one adderall in the morning because I am ADHD. The only source I found claimed that amphetamines can increase the anxious feelings of salvia. However, since adderall has never made me anxious and I have never had a bad reaction to it, I decided it was safe. I also take lamictal and prozac
I also take lamictal and prozac
, both of which don’t interact with salvia.

I sat on the towel and I loaded a bowl. Eventually I used the rest of the 10x I brought, which was about 30-45 milligrams, and I didn’t break through. I definitely was high, but I didn't trip. Maybe I wasn't holding it long enough, taking hard enough hits, or burning it enough. Maybe it kept falling through the stem piece! I waited to make sure I was feeling okay and not going to trip off the amount I had taken. Once I made sure I was good, I put the tiniest amount of 20x on top of a larger layer of weed in the bowl. Peter looked at me and expressed some hesitation. I explained how I felt comfortable and waited an appropriate amount of time for the effects to kick in. This time, I laid down on my stomach while hitting the bong and made sure to take a bigger hit. It worked.

At first, I looked around at my surroundings, which had become foggy a few minutes prior to me getting high. Everything just seemed different. I still knew where I was, and I wasn’t hallucinating, but my perception had definitely been altered. The field seemed blurry and almost shaky. I decided to lay down and close my eyes. A normal plane of closed eye blackness turned into moving, evolving geometry. The shapes started out as vaguely mechanical and then developed into turning and twisting gears. As the gears turned I felt myself turning. It felt as if I was a gear, rotating along with the others. Gravity was turning around me and morphing me into a gear. A realization then struck me: I was in a clocktower. I was part of the machinery in a clock tower! This seemed so obvious once I figured it out. “Of course I’m part of a clock tower, why wouldn’t I be” I thought. How normal this seemed to me contradicted how strange it felt. At once I perceived a sense of familiarity with the clock tower along with the definite sense that what I was physically feeling was strange. It felt as if gravity was pushing and pulling me from every conceivable direction. When I was a gear, once I had adjusted to it, I had a conversation with salvia. Salvia, the drug, was talking to me. I spoke first. “Is it okay I’m here”, I asked once I felt her presence. She had no voice, so I don't know how I interpreted a response, but I did. The response affirmed it was okay I was here, here being a drug induced hallucination where I was a cog in a clock. As silly as this seems, when I was tripping it felt like a real place. I still knew I had ingested a drug, and that my friend was sitting next to me, but that reality didn’t feel less real than me being a wheel in the machinery of the clocktower. Salvia then proceeded to tell me to let Peter know I’m okay, due to me currently looking like I was dead to him. So I spoke and told Peter about my conversation, how I was okay, and was going to return to that reality. He responded that he was glad I was having a good time and that he’ll see me later.

The reassurance that me gazing into this strange land was not only okay, but encouraged, and the subsequent support by Peter was followed by another transformation. Time started slowing down and I turned into the orange towel I was laying on. The English lexicon reaches its limit describing experiences like these, because the previous sentence doesn't feel accurate, despite technically being the best way to succinctly describe what happened. I turned into the towel in a choppy way, as if I was going one frame per second. The slide show that was currently my perception definitely felt slower than how I interpreted my time as a gear, but the flow of time didn’t slow, I did. Time stayed constant, I was merely the one changing. The variable that changed was me, not time. Frame by frame I became the towel and felt like I was being shaken out, as if I had crumbs on me that something was trying to clean off. No amount of time passed but all time passed when I was a towel. It felt like every timeline where I was a towel had merged into one slide show that had already happened infinite times, and my brain. The best way to describe it is that my brain was being fed every timeline where I was a towel and was being shaken out, but they had already happened and that my brain was simply not processing this information all at once.

The next thing I did was open my eyes. I proceeded to sit up and look at my friend. We started talking about what I felt, then I looked up the hill I was laying on. I couldn’t see over the otherside. Obviously it was just more field, which I had walked in countless times over the course of my life. But I felt, no, I knew what was actually on the other side. It was the edge of time. All that could happen, has happened, and will happen, in every possible formation was on my side of the hill, and on the other side was nothing. The place where time ended and nothing was, or could be. In vain, I tried to explain this to Peter, but what came out was incoherent rambling. I then pulled up my phone, responded to a text from a friend, and turned off my phone. The black screen housed my reflection, where I saw my face shift and change. My face always looked human, but the proportions shifted to mimic different animals. The reflection turned into a gorilla, and then a chameleon. I let out a strange, foreign noise when I saw this, which Peter then asked me to confirm was a laugh. It was.

I closed my eyes again and transported for a final time. Now, I was inside a human cell. Not a cell like a prison, but like the concept in biology. All around me I saw what were the building blocks of my human body. Microscopic components made out of microscopic particles made out of even smaller microscopic particles combining to make me. It was incredible. I was in awe. Once I felt myself leaving this reality, a black and white cartoon wasp flew by the cell. It startled me but I was beginning to sober up slightly so I remembered to breathe deeply and just let whatever happens, happen. I then sat up and informed Peter that I was actually done tripping.

The physical effects I felt were strange. I definitely felt dissociated from my body. It felt like there were infinite copies of me in every direction. I felt the motion of my consciousness traveling between every copy, both away and towards the original me. The emotions I felt weren’t negative. In fact, quite the opposite. I felt so thankful for being able to view these different realities. Euphoria might be a bit strong of a word, but pleasure definitely was there.
Euphoria might be a bit strong of a word, but pleasure definitely was there.
The contrast of actual reality (well, what a secretion of chemicals in my brain tells me is reality), versus the drug induced visions made me feel much more appreciative of my reality. I thought about how my reality would appear just as absurd and foreign to someone from a different reality as the other “realities” appeared to me. After this experience, I definitely felt an antidepressant effect. Minor inconveniences didn’t bother me as much, and I felt more appreciative of my loved ones. How much of this is inherent to salvia versus how much is due to the expectations and goals I had going in is impossible to determine.

I can understand how someone who experienced exactly what I did on salvia could come back terrified and withdrawn. The social weight put on this substance, both culturally and individually, strongly influences the trip, to the point where I’m certain other people could take the same amount I did in the same setting, and see and feel things completely differently. Perhaps someone who’s never heard of salvia wouldn’t have felt the common tropes relating to salvia of wheels and flattening like I did. It’s impossible to test. I would love to see someone react to salvia never having heard or seen it, with no preconceptions at all, however I don’t know how you can confirm a person fits this criteria (maybe they’ve heard of it but don’t remember), or even how ethical it is. Research should definitely be done beforehand, just as with any drug. If someone went in without any knowledge of what was possible on this drug, and what other people had felt, I doubt a positive trip would ensue. I wouldn’t openly advocate for salvia use to most people, because I’m not sure how universally an experience like I had could be enjoyed, or how likely it is for the experience to be positive. For me personally however, I do not regret trying salvia at all and I found a lot of value in it.

Exp Year: 2022ExpID: 117391
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Jan 15, 2025Views: 15
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Amphetamines (6), Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Entities / Beings (37), Combinations (3)

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