Very Frightening
Salvia divinorum
Citation:   SillyC. "Very Frightening: An Experience with Salvia divinorum (exp54682)". Erowid.org. Feb 5, 2008. erowid.org/exp/54682

 
DOSE:
1 hit smoked Salvia divinorum
BODY WEIGHT: 175 lb
It has been more than three years and I am finally realizing it was just a terrible nightmare…. I hope.

Background info - before the salvia trip, I had used a lot LSD and psychedelic mushrooms for 15 years in combination with nitrous oxide, benzos, and marijuana products. Never any bad trips. I, to my knowledge, have never used any of the new 'research chemicals'.

In the spring of 2003 I was at a friends house and a conversation arose regarding salvia and if I had ever tried it. I replied that I had heard of it but had never tried it and was rather skeptical of its effects considering it was a legal substance. Knowing that I was an acid tripper, a ‘friend’ gave me a bowls worth of salvia and gave me instructions to load up my bong, when I got home, and take a huge rip and see what happens. I was told something similar to nitrous oxide would happen.

The Event - I get home and my wife is taking a bath, I tell her that I’m about to smoke a bowl of some stuff called salvia and that I would be right back. I go into the bedroom, load up the bong, fire it up a take a hit. WHAM!! Instantly I find myself in a room that is closing up (by closing up I mean systematically folding into nothingness), and it is closing up very very loudly, like a giant machine slamming down over and over again, and I can see out of the corner of my eye that it isn’t just the room that I am in that is closing, the entire world is folding, much like the teeth of a metal zipper coming together. I could see the world folding up and being zipped away and its happening fast, and very loud. I am completely frightened to the core. I have no idea what is going on. I have no recollection of how I got to where I am or how I got there. Yet the room is strangely familiar, as if I had visited this place once as a young child. I have no idea what is up or down, left or right.

Suddenly the wall rips open and I can see through the wall into what looks like a concrete parking garage. A very strange person pops out of the teat in the wall and grabs me by both my hands and begins to pull me through the tear in the wall. I try to fight it, I do not want to go into the parking garage, it is scary and there are a whole bunch of people, thousands maybe, and they are all wearing the same clothes as each other, a sort of uniform. Brown t-shirts with a wide yellowish band across the abdomen and shorts of some kind. Maybe jean shorts, I cant recall. The brown and yellow t-shirts were the thing that stood out.

It becomes clear that I know all these people, they are strange versions of all the people I have known throughout my life, kids from little league baseball, family members, etc. These people were much shorter and stumpy with odd faces that were not human like. There is a sudden sense of urgency, as my reality is folding up in a wave like motion and the zipper is approaching, all very happening quickly and very loudly still. A group of the strange beings (that I somehow know) come out the concrete structures within the wall and begin to wedge themselves into the zipper teeth preventing my reality and the world from folding up on me. They are trying to get me to their side of the wall before the world closes up and leaves me on the other side, and the effort that everyone including myself is exerting is very intense. I realize that the wall is not actually a wall but a pure white latex membrane, and this membrane is beginning to wrap itself around me containing me between two realities, two dimensions, two places that are both totally unfamiliar yet somehow I feel that I was here once before a long long time ago. Possible before I was ever born.

At this point, as I’m stuck in the zipper of my reality that is folding up, unable to get to their side of the membrane and into the parking garage like structure, and unable to get back to my reality. I am scruntched down into a tiny space that I can barely fit in and it is getting smaller and tighter. A conversation begins with the guy pulling on my arms. The 'guy' is telling me that I have got to get across the membrane and into his world, he discloses to me that the reality that I was just in was never real, and that all the people in my life were placed there all for the goal of one day taking me across the membrane. Everything in my life had lead up to this special moment to get me across. My mom, wife, and everyone I have ever known are already across the membrane and have been waiting for me, they had already have gone through this process as well a long time ago. Apparently my whole life had been a giant farce, none of it had really happened. It had all been created to keep my mind active till the day I was to cross the latex membrane.

This made me very sad, and I began to cry out and call to my mother, not believing she was in there and slightly angry that she had never told me about this world and that it was going to happen one day. And my wife, she never told me. How could she betray me like this? How could everyone know about this and never tell me? At this point it seems to become apparent that these people, all dressed in brown and orange, are not going to be able to rescue me from my false reality and that they needed to wait for the next pass of the zipper. The crossing has become a failure. I am stuck in between two membranes of pure white latex, very tight and it is closing on me still. I struggle to stand and fight and pull my way out of the membrane, lots of struggling and effort and the membrane begins to tear slightly.

Now I am actually above myself looking down at myself tearing my body out of the latex. The tear in the membrane now turns into a giant fibonacci swirl and as I try to pull out, I notice that I am pulling myself out of a giant eye, the eye blinks and I am again pulled down and stuck in the white latex. After a couple of tries pulling myself out, the eye (which I described as the ‘Eye of God’) blinks and I am ejected from the eye like a tear drop. It is at this point that my wife is trying to snap me out of what was wrong with me. She is calling my name but I am still talking to the people in the wall. She told me after The Event that it was as if I was talking in some strange language she had never heard. The only word she could make out was 'Mom'.

I sort of come out of the salvia trip and ask what the hell is going on. She mentions 'salvia, you smoked salvia’. I immediately go back into salvia land where I am reminded by the leader of the brown & yellow shirted people in the wall that she (my wife) had to be sent back to my reality as an operative to convince me that I had not seen what I had seen because it would disturb me too much to know that my reality wasn’t truly real.

Coming back out of the salvia trip I begin to ask my wife strange question like “Who am I?” “What is going on?” “Who are you?” “What is my name?” as I quickly start to move around the house, and as I do, my reality is reforming slowly in front of me. To the dog “omg, you knew about this and you didn’t warn me”. To the cat “you were in on this too, I hate you, why didn’t you tell me about the people and that place” I am sweating greatly and I find myself naked. I see what appears to be thousands of people in the neighborhood standing outside, police and ambulance lights flashing and I nearly walk outside totally naked to confront the situation. My wife at this point is scared to death of me but stops me and informs me that there is nobody outside and that I am imagining it all. I still have no idea what happened to me at this point. I don’t remember smoking anything. Total amnesia. I still ask “Am I me? Is my name R___? Are you A__?” What is going on? A min or two goes by and it starts to come back to me.

“Oh ya, the salvia!” and I begin to yell out “OH MY GOD!!” and “Holy Sh__!” over a few times and then begin to exclaim “How the Fu__ is this stuff legal!!”

It is indescribable how real this trip felt. It effected me for a long time afterwards and I very easily flashed back to the experience in great detail on a daily basis for at least a year. It also took a long time to convince myself that the place I visited was not real (or at least I sure hope it isn't). Three years later and I still have not done another hallucinating substance since.

I would describe the experience as nothing short of a complete and total nightmare for both myself and my wife. She had to witness me in that state and told me I looked as frightened as she had ever seen anyone ever in her life. It was truly a frightening experience. This has all been remembered and recited from an experience that happened three years ago. There are many other details from the trip that simply cannot be described in words.

Exp Year: 2003ExpID: 54682
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 5, 2008Views: 10,967
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Salvia divinorum (44) : First Times (2), Entities / Beings (37), Relationships (44), Bad Trips (6), Alone (16)

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