DOSE:

15 mg

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 5x)

BODY WEIGHT:

185 lb

I had done a bit of homework on Salvia when I had first contemplated trying it. The experiences that i found on the internet ranged from 'no-effect at all' to DMT-esque out of body trips. The first 3 or 4 times that I tried it had no real effect. At most, what i had determined to be a placebo effect. About a year later i decided to take another shot at it and ordered a gram of 5x extract. I was in my dorm room with my girlfriend keeping out of the North-Country New York winter air. Many of the reports on erowid swear by this stuff despite my experiences up until that point, so i wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't nervous, but just in case it was going to work this time, i closed the shades, turned off the bright lamps and made the room silent as some people suggest. I measured out 15mgs and put them into my pipe. My last move was to put batteries and a tape into a recorder for documentation.

My girlfriend has a little bit of generalized anxiety and never uses any substances besides marijuana, drugs make her particularly nervous because of the typical psychology of situation control. She seemed calm, i know she trusts me to be safe and make careful decisions, after all, I am a neuroscience major and my PDR is my bible.

So it was time, I layed down, I lit the pipe and took a big harsh lungful and held it for 30 seconds or so, let it out, then took another...BAM, before i could exhale there was the first bite of a strong physical sensation raiding my sensory nerves. It was a vibrating feeling over all of my skin and in my mouth. I felt it as a feeling of motion when my eyes were closed, kind of spinning but not unpleasant, odd; exhilerating. The physical feeling then manifested as a weight on my body coming from the top left. I even felt the weight on my tongue.

Meanwhile, my ears rang out with the silence of the room much like they do on nitrous oxide, I was glad there was no sound. It felt like even if there was a sound, it would be absorbed by the air like on a snowy day. My vision underwent a change that is quite hard to describe. The visuals were dominantly manifest in the interpritation of visual stimuli. so as opposed to seeing visual distortions, i sensed them, knew them without seeing them. But things in front of me looked mostly normal. I would get an edge-of-my-vision effect, where it looked a bit like watching frames of time on an old projecter. This effect was almost exactly like my ketamine-vision only not as intense and it was overshadowed by all of the other things going on in my experience.

As for the chronology of the mental effects; as the trip started, i was laying on my back in bed, which is against a wall with a dark celtic style tapestry on it. My gaze was fixed up at the ceiling and the tangles of design on the tapestry bubbled and pulsed up in waves toward the ceiling very fast and my physical tingling gave a sense of movement following the couse of the waves. As they reached the ceiling, i could no longer see them, but i felt their existance just as strongly as they continued across the ceiling and down the far side of the room by where my girlfriend was sitting. I sat up a little but felt a bit dizzy so i stayed put. I saw this movement without actually seeing it, very wierd. It gave the impression of a sideways pie-slice shape with me at the acute angle pivot point and as the shape tried to close at the far end of the room, it would hit my girlfriend and wouldn't be able to comlete. My interpritation of the event was that my consciousness was trying to shut me into a room of the frequency of sanity i was experiencing and that the room has to close all the way in order to dive deeper into the next level, the further realms of the experience. But the room couldn't close because my girlfriend was sober and the presence of her consciousness in the room kept it from closing around me. it was a little frustrating but it wasn't her fault. it served as a disraction and as it went, i moved on to a new thought.

I looked again at the ceiling and this time I saw it as the floor. the wierd part was that i saw it as the floor of many rooms, one after another, that i had been in throughout my life, it didn't so much look like them as it felt like them and that brought visual and olfactory impressions of these rooms into my consciousness to experience, but vague of detial, peripheal. But it gave the sense of being there to such an extent that would i oriented myself within the false floor plan. So, although it wasn't in the forefront of my consciousness, i expected everything outside of my vision and the adjacent rooms in the building to be in accordance with my current working template of the floor plan. Things were pretty hectic and speeding foward. At one point I asked my girlfriend to hand me a cup of water. She got up and walked to a part of the room that was both out of my sight and not accounted for in my concept of the room... So to me, she walked out of existance. For a split second it scared me, then i realized how ridiculous it was conceptually and i started laughing. actually though, this was the first time that i sent the impulse to my mouth to laugh, and when i did i realized that i had been laughing and giggling for what was probably the whole time. By the way, the whole time at that point was about 4 minutes. From toke to landing consisted of 6 minutes. To me, despite all that happened, the duration felt much like that of a nitrous hit. At one point, the body feeling vibrates away and the mind springs back and your down. The drop off happens in seconds.

I played the tape back. At a few points i tried to communicate with speech and it was just strange rants and laughs, the rants make sense to me but i bet they sound quite strange to anyone else, 'Move your head...so...room close...haha...ha...your head...ha...the climbing fingers in the wall...with geospin vortex,cortex crawling...vvvrrrrooooommmpp...up and away'... The experience had alot of power and had an hour long tail of warm contemplation for what had just transpired in 6 minutes time. I felt as though i was very lucky for having that window to glance into the other dimension for a few moments. And thats what it was for all practical purposes, another dimension. My first attempt at explaining it to my girlfriend right after the trip went like this, 'You know the movie Lord of the Rings? Well you know when frodo puts the ring on and the whole world suddenly becomes another inside out universe of movement and mirrored reality? Well it was just like that'.

It is a Very strong substance that presses some amazing and bizarre buttons in the brain. From the small amount that science knows thus far, it works on the kappa opiod receptors in particular regions of one's neural anatomy. Ketamine and Dxm bind to Sigma opoid receptors, and share some aspects of experience. Nitrous is though to work on some receptors once removed from the opoid subsystem which may also contribute to a few similarities, but Salvia truly blows all else away. I have extensive experience with many chemicals and i have never been in a place as far away as Lady S. took me. It's nothing like any tryptamine or phenthylamine that i have ever encountered (I have never tried DMT, I suspect that the intensity of the experience might be comparable). If you are comfortable enough in yourself, curious, stable, and can handle it i would suggest watching your brain behave in such a bizarre manner, just be smart, careful, have a sitter, and be ready for the deep, the strange and the ridiculous.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 21844
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 11, 2005	Views: 33,411
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Mystical Experiences (9), First Times (2), General (1)