DOSE:	3 bowls	smoked	Leonotis leonurus	(plant material)
		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)
	2 hits	smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract - 5x)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

(Warning: Get comfortable. It is possible that the Bible is shorter than this report, though I’ve not actually done a word count.)

The evening started great: my package came in the mail, and I was delighted. I ordered a bunch of stuff… wormwood, yohimbe bark, morning glory seeds, baby Hawaiian woodrose seeds, the Blend, and with it all came a small sample of salvia 5x leaves.

Normally, my wife and I go to a friend’s house on Wednesday to watch TV and eat dinner, but I had a phone call to make at 9:30, and didn’t feel especially social anyway, so I’d decided to stay home and do some accounting work on my computer. Getting the package was a bonus in this respect; I figured while she was away and I had the flat to myself, I might as well play with all these new toys.

Sitting at my computer, I figured it couldn’t hurt to smoke a bowl of Diviner’s Three to see if this herbal shit was for real or not. I honestly didn’t expect anything to happen, given my rather regular use of that OTHER herb, but I was actually pleasantly surprised: I did indeed get a buzz, and it was a very pleasant (if strong/harsh) smoke! It was mostly a body buzz – the physical sensations of being on a light (one-three tokes) grass buzz, but none of the mental side effects: physically stoned, mentally sober. It was a nice, enjoyable feeling, and I recall a swell of relief – in time, I betcha this would very adequately replace pot as my relaxation-drug-of-choice. I began to wonder at the possibilities… maybe I should get some raw dagga flowers, maybe I should immediately order more of this shit… it was cool and I was happy. It wasn’t exactly the same as grass – if grass were coke, this was a root beer; different flavors, one a bit more potent than the other, but both brownish carbonated liquids that will quench the thirst for such.

I finished my work faster than expected… surprisingly so, considering that I was kinda stoned here. I figured that since I had a few minutes (it was 9:18 when I closed Quicken) and some actual cannabis, I should take a hit to celebrate. I did so, and didn’t get any higher. Hm. Suddenly, my memory knocked on the back of my brain and whispered, “Hey, dude. Why don’t you smoke a bowl of this new blend with a little Salvia 5x sprinkled in it? You are done with your work, after all…”

And this struck me as a very good idea. I did just that, putting the Salvia in the bottom of the bowl and the blend at the top. Most of the bowl got me only a little higher – the last hit, which was almost pure Salvia 5x, did… something else. I dunno what it was – it wasn’t stoned, it wasn’t drunk, it was somewhere in the middle and also something foreign, and I was left just looking at the ashes in my pipe and marveling at the fact that this was A) cheap, and B) delivered to my house through the mail without any fear that The Law would have anything to say about it. This was all new and different, and naturally, wondering how far this herbal shit can go, I decided that it would be an even better idea to really “open her up” and see what it could show me.

I packed about two hits worth of pure Salvia 5x into the pipe…

(We interrupt this story for an important message from our sponsor.)

Kids: Do NOT do this. Like, EVER.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.)

…and took the first hit. I was somehow able to hold it in for a bit, and I can distinctly remember thinking, “Whoa. WHOA!” to myself. I began to sweat. I felt like I was floating. I had roomspin, not nauseating like with alcohol, but not nearly as slow either - in order to look at something specific, my eyes had to re-center on the object about ten times every single second, whereas with alcohol they would have to readjust about once a second. But I was still fully in control of my mental faculties. I was elated. This shit was FOR REAL, man.

A few minutes later, I took the second hit. This was a great big massive hit, as most of the Salvia was singed and warm now, and much more conducive to burning. When I let off the carb on my glass pipe, I got a lungful of smoke that was far beyond my expectations. Under normal circumstances (i.e., with grass) I would have coughed up 1.48 lungs at this point, but somehow, SOMEhow, I managed to hold this in. It was a struggle, and I was going to win. In fact, my last memory before the shit completely destroyed the fan was of resting my arms on the desk, staring into the pipe’s bowl, and fighting to keep this hit in.

And then, life as I had come to know and understand it over the last 28 years shattered utterly and completely, with no warning whatsoever.

In less time than it takes to comprehend, my consciousness – my sense of self, my personality, my five senses and the things those senses perceive to make the cohesive whole that I understood as reality (including my desk, my body, my computer screen) all of it - instantly shattered into approximately 1000 pieces.

Vertical pieces, at that.

There were now 1000 me’s, each only able to perceive and interact with 1/1000th of my life and reality in and of themselves, each having individual thoughts and ideas… and this was simply too much for my mind to handle, I think. In response to this abrupt overload, “I” – my “internal” person, the guy who is constantly making a running commentary inside my head of everything that is going on, the person talking to you now – settled into only one of the 1000 different me’s that I had become. I was aware of the other 999 as separate entities… it was a little like being one member of a team. If my eyesight could be compared to a monitor display, then I could only see a vertical sliver one pixel wide (for lack of a better way to phrase it) of my reality. I could only feel 1/1000th of my body – one of the wafer-thin slices in the middle. I was only able to hear, touch, or otherwise experience 1/1000th of life, and it was only a little sliver so thin that light could easily pass through it.

I could not hear – everything was as quiet as I’d imagine outer space to be. Time stopped. Everything was black except for that one vertical sliver of different shades of brown (I must have been facing my desk). This was all that remained of my world, and I remember thinking that I was dead.

But I couldn’t be dead if I could at least think this. There was hope. So, being a very physical person, I decided to take a deep breath – this is usually the first step used to ground someone. But I couldn’t breathe… more importantly, I didn’t breathe, just like I don’t fly or I don’t have six arms. I tried to turn my head to my right, just face a different direction… something, anything physical just to prove that I was still alive. And then things got even stranger.

I realized, at this point, that we issue commands from our brain in order to do nifty things, like moving our bodies. I do not consciously recognize these commands as separate activities, and I doubt many of us do - when I want to move my arm, I just Do It. But they are there, these commands, and I understood that I had issued that command to turn around, but the response to this command was strange indeed. I was dimly aware that the 1/1000th of myself all the way to the right did “his” part by turning just a little bit. The part next to him followed suit.

The horrifying reality of this began to set in: If I wanted to turn around, we ALL had to turn around. Oh, hell.

I was relieved that the my particular sliver was at least partially in control of the rest - the Drill Sergent of this platoon, so to speak. I had just given the order to turn my head, and all of the slivers were obeying… but they were obeying in sequence, instead of all at once. It was like a line of dominoes falling. I could hear a low rumbling sound, getting louder and higher, as those on my right complied and my “turn” to do my part in moving my head was coming up fast. That sound was some kind of Doppler effect in my brain – it was as if someone had taped my apartment’s ambient sounds and was playing them far too slowly, but the playing speed would increase just a notch every time one of my slivers did his part. The fraction of a second when it WAS my turn, I did my part, and everything for at least an instant sounded like it should… and then, to my left, I could hear the sounds of my apartment speeding up as the slivers of myself on that side also contributed in the moving action.

After about five, maybe ten minutes, we were all done and it was silent again. My sliver of life was just a touch different. We had all moved my head just a little bit to the right. Go ME (or ME’S, as it were)! Another low rumble to my right told me that phase two (of about one million) was underway, and we were all going to move a little bit more. This second “wave” took about as long as the first – roughly ten minutes. Hell, this wasn’t so bad. I figured at this rate, we’d be done moving my head in about two days.

…which is right about when I panicked.

All I could see, hear, or otherwise experience was this one little sliver of life. A line on a screen, a split second for every ten minutes where sound made sense. Nothing else existed for me, outside of a dim awareness that there were a lot more of me, and we were all in the same predicament. I remember thinking - as wave after wave of my tiny slivers of motion and sound washed over and around me from right to left - that I had well and truly screwed the entire pooch here. I somehow had managed to completely and irrevocably destroy my brain on my first voyage out. I did the mental equivalent of shooting a gall-bladder sized hole in my thought meats, and I would never be the same. I would never learn how to program in C, or understand music as it played, or walk, or talk, or have a conversation with my wife, or have sex, or anything else, ever again. This Was It© - all I had were memories of how I once was.

I let out a scream. Except that I didn’t: My mind issued the command to let out a scream, and it was now in the queue… to be executed after the rest of us finished turning our collective head.

This is already long-winded, so I’ll spare the mortifying fucking eternity that transpired after that. Unable to move unless it was my turn, unable to interrupt this action, feeling the absolute dread that is being utterly trapped in this sliver-of-a-consciousness and out of time and synch with the rest of existence. Wondering if this was permanent; and if so, feeling the terrible, terrible guilt of leaving my wife with a vegetable wearing a wedding ring. I could feel emotion, but couldn’t express it at all… all I could do was think, and I seemed to have about six eternities worth of thought as my sole possession.

I would have gladly shat myself in public if I thought I could have even a chance of getting out of this.

…but then, a ray of hope.

I began to notice my sliver of existence widening. With each pass, the sliver either to the right or left of me would join with my own – there were less me’s, and mine was absorbing the others’ thought processes and perceptions, making theirs my own. About five or six passes went by before I realized this, but realize it I did: my sliver was now five or six pixels wide, instead of one. I could see flesh tone, and green and yellow amongst the brown… what was that? Something’s coming together, here….

Things began to quicken. Each wave took less and less time – from ten minutes to five per wave, and gradually decreasing. When I was about 30% “put back together,” I heard something… something that sounded as I remembered sound used to be so long ago. Sounded a bit like… “aaaaAAAAAAHhh…”

Then I realized it was me. That scream that was in the queue? It finally made it out, if only as a retarded whimper.

Things were really starting to come into focus now. I was far from all right, but my field of perception (all senses) was wide enough for me to recognize things. Years, I repeat, YEARS, had quite literally passed since that time, long ago, when I decided to smoke some Salvia, and I felt every second of them. But in all that time, I seem to only have turned my head a little bit, so much so that I was still staring at the pipe in my hand. I issued the command to look up at the screen of my computer… this happened, albeit in slow motion (it took roughly a minute, but this was more than acceptable to me at the time – in fact, I thought I was the Flash). I tried to put the pipe down – eventual success was mine. I sat there until I was about halfway back together, still aware that there were five hundred more slivers of myself, but that they were all falling into place at what seemed to be record time.

That’s when I realized that I was still alive, that I was actually one person being re-assembled, and that I had things to do… namely, I had to pick my wife up from our friend’s house. Oh, crap, I had to pick my wife up from my friend’s house!! She wasn’t there! How late was it? I thought she would get a ride at about eleven o’clock, when she found herself unable to contact me (because I was damned SURE I was unreachable for quite some time!). Dear god, where was she? How many weeks have I been here? I peered at the monitor, and was shocked – SHOCKED to see my reflection in the glare shield: I had not aged. My beard hadn’t even gotten longer. I looked at the time in my system tray.

It read 9:22pm.

I double clicked on the clock… it still said 9:22pm, and it was still November 19th, 2003. I squinted in disbelief (this took a minute). I picked up my cell phone (eventually) and managed to remember how to check the time and date on it. It confirmed everything: in all this time, all these days, hours, or years that I’d been trapped within a piece of myself, terrified but unable to do anything about that - I had been gone a grand total of about four minutes. Probably less, now that I think about it.

I (or, more appropriately, “Me and the Gang”) were suddenly aware of being soaked in sweat, and burning up. I decided that we should take a walk in the cool night air, smoke a cigar… the things we normally do, just to prove to ourselves that things were at least marginally okay and that we were still alive and somewhat functional. If it was difficult going down the stairs, then pulling the cigar out of my pocketed tin and lighting it was the equivalent to a monkey trying to solve a calculus derivative. Somehow, we prevailed, though. I made it about a block when the majority of myself was reassembled, and I noticed that most everything I saw was tilted about forty five degrees. I stopped walking when I noticed that, and then realized that the problem was that my head was tilted to the right. Everything else was fine. After correcting this, I really started to feel like I was sobering up, and headed back to my apartment to lay down. I was exhausted. That lying bastard of a clock may have suggested that I was only sitting at my desk for two minutes, but I had been there for goddamned years, without rest.

For the next hour or so, I was kind of stoned. This actually felt really, really nice. Come to think of it, EVERYTHING felt nice. Everything was actually great. I did eventually pick my wife up, and never have I so richly enjoyed driving on a cool night with the wind in my hair and the music playing. I was able to tell her a little bit about it, but nothing like the detail that’s involved here.

I slept like a baby.

It’s about lunchtime here, and I’m going to grab some eats, but I have thought about little else this entire day. I am not, as my story might suggest, completely wigged out or turned off by this event. In fact, I am – oddly – thankful for the experience, and happy/upbeat about the whole thing. I got my ass handed to me, sure, but that was my fault completely… it seems that the relative weakness of the smoking blend (and, hell, actual cannabis itself) threw me off, and I oh-so-completely underestimated how much business even a little Salvia 5x means as a result. But it has, at least for the moment, changed the hell out of me. What I experienced was as utterly remarkable as it was horrifying, and at least for the moment, I’m convinced that my timeline will forever be separated into two parts – before this trip, and after. I’m not quite “back” yet – I seem to have most of my faculties back, but I’m not as instinctually comfortable with them as I recall being – I get the impression that I’m driving a car or a mech, instead of just moving my body around.

But I’m here, and I’m enjoying everything in my life in a way I never did before. All the little things… the morning cup of coffee, conversations with co-workers, the ride in to work, hell, even the work itself are fulfilling in ways they never were. Guess you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till its gone.

Thus endeth the longest trip report in history. If you’ve made it this far, you are a trooper indeed, and you should request… nay, DEMAND, a sucker from the receptionist on the way out. ;-)

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 28562
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 16, 2004	Views: 27,821
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Leonotis leonurus (119), Salvia divinorum (44) : Alone (16), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3)