DOSE:

1.5 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I had first heard Salvia mentioned from a friend of mine who had spent more than his fair share of time invested in researching potential new experiences. At the time it sounded cool but I thought nothing of it. It dissapeared into the back of my mind until one day another good friend of mine said he had tried it out with him and explained how intense the experience was. From that point on we went on a two week 'Salvia-hunt', looking for this mysteriously powerful, yet legal hallucinogenic. It proved more difficult than hoped for, although completely legal, many places either discontinued its sales or were simply out of stock. I found a list of online merchants and selected one based on its high marks in ratings from customers. I was wary about the whole ordeal but I went ahead and ordered a gram of 20X on Wed., hoping for it to come for the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, while I was preparing to go out to see George Carlin live in DC, the package came in the mail. I was so excited at the thought of possibly doing it after having such a good time at a comedy show that I called up my friends who expressed interest and set up some plans.

Skip ahead a little bit.

After the great show and successfully getting home in one piece I got a phone call from my good friend who had got me interested. He invited me over to this kid's apartment complex. Apparently the building had lost power so it was pitch black with a bunch of candles lit up everywhere. It was almost surreal how ideal it was. The kid was a nice guy, said he had experienced salvia himself and offered to let us use his room and have everyone else head out into the living room to not disturb us. He had a pretty decently sized 'water-pipe', roughly around 2-1/2ft that he gave us to use and I went first with three of my good friends in the room. I hit the pipe once to fill the chamber, and then a second time to clear it. When I thought I had my fill of the smoke my friend commented that there was some more so without completely exhaling I inhaled some more.

The effects were almost instantaneous. I had hardly had it in me before I started noticing everything linear in the room losing its shape. After about 20-25 seconds I exhaled and at that moment there was no hope for me. I laid down on the bed and all existence as I know it completely dissapeared. I remember that my friends were talking and I quickly lost understanding of what they were saying, every time they spoke I would become distracted until their vocalizations became involved in my Interstellar experience.

As soon as I laid back, I focused in on my friends who were speaking, they were laughing and I thought they were laughing at me, as if they were planning something or plotting. Normally this would dictate the start of a bad trip (I've experienced shrooms before and it didn't take much for me to switch back and forth between happy and terrified, but Salvia is a completely different kind of beast) but for some reason I could care less. What I first noticed was the poster on the wall of a skyscraper. There were lines across it and these lines stretched past the poster edges and encompassed everything. The best way I can describe it is very similar to those boards at airports and train stations where they place schedule times, and they can flip around when they change arrival times and such. Those were everywhere and they would constantly flip to show a new image. At one point it was just these 'lines' of rubber ducks, all in different colors, another time it looked like humans standing on each others heads. It really made no sense and at this point I completely let myself go into the experience.

What happened then was a complete loss of ego. I had no body, no self, no identity to call my own. I was no longer of this universe. The lines I had seen before were all directed to one direct focal point which I can only assume was the ceiling. These multicolored streamers were all funneling into this what I conceived as a vortex, sort of a rainbow 'black' hole, and it was drawing me in. This was the one dimensions, where there was no time, no identity, no coherance or laws of physics. Everything just sucked into this swirling vortex. At the EXACT same time my mind was split on a different location. The people having left to the room for us were now in the living room, but I could still hear them playing guitars and singing along.

While my mind was entranced in this chaotic realm of neon extremities, it was also tunneling in on the door from which the noises were coming from. Their voices and the music sounded BIG and POWERFUL, as if there were divine beings, although I never did mark them as being a God of any sort. My mind was ripped in two, on the edge between choosing to follow the path to the beautiful vortex, or to enter through the doorway and see what 'presence' was there. Both choices seemed like bad ideas as the vortex appeared as it if would make me disappear forever, and the voices and laughter made them sound mischevious and deceitful, however I was never at one point freaking out. In fact, I felt like I was a part of them all, as if maybe I was one of them and that I would have no harm done to me yet I still sat on the crossroads of two dimensions unable to decide which path to decide on. At that point a name came through my only level of 'consciousness' I had.

Salvia.

At first I didn't realize what that meant at all but I turned my head and saw the candles lit in the corner of the room. There were five total. I couldn't really distinguish them as flames, rather I saw them as five pure entities, spirits, dieties, angels, whatever you want to call them, but they were the light. Now like I said I wasn't scared at any time, but I knew that these pure lights was the direction I wanted to be in. They would steer me away from the wrong dimensions. When the name Salvia came across my mind again almost instantly a complete shift in the trip occurred.

WHAM. I was in my body again. I had a name, I had a past, I had three friends in the room of a dark apartment with no power lit by candles. I knew exactly where I was and what I had done, almost as if the I had been lifted out of my body and the pure lights had tugged me back down. For another 5 minutes I experienced what I would consider to be a very strong shroom trip as I came down. Everything was wavy and I got a very 'warm' vibe from everything. It was an amazing feeling and I was so comfortable with everything. The candle lit room also added a sense of intimacy that just made feel completely relaxed. My one friend later said he could tell the instant the shift occured because I was all dazed and laying down and then instantly got up and started talking to them. I was still visualizing, but I had complete control over my thought processes. One of the guys in the room got excited and decided he wanted to try it next.

Unfortunatly for him, as soon as he went into his own different universe, my other two friends started excitedly beaming me with questions of my experience. Undoubtably all the commotion affected his experience because the poor kid started to freak out, and we had to calm him down for a couple minutes before he started to come down. I only mention this because we both were in the same setting and similar mindsets, and I feel it is only fair to share the both ends of what Salvia offers. For me it was a truly amazing experience, for him it was a hellish nightmare that wouldn't end.

I was later told that I was peaking for about 5 minutes before I came down on the 'glowing affect'. That stage lasted about another 5-10 minutes in which afterwards I felt a strong high for about another 20 minutes or so. All around by about half an hour after I went I was completely back to myself again.

When I try it next I'm going to make sure that there's no more than one other person in the room and their silent because even though I never went into a bad trip, I did get distracted and annoyed by their interruptions. As for my friend our conversations were enough to send him into an experience similar to something in the movie 'The Cell'. All in all, I would do Salvia again, but I would agree with many of the others, this is not a social event, and its not something to be done all the time.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 62456
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 27, 2010	Views: 4,544
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Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)