DOSE:

Repeated hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

215 lb

I am nearing 40 and have spent a squeaky clean lifetime. I smoked pot for the first time in my twenties with no appreciable effect and have been stoned afterwards exactly four other times. I never enjoyed it. Pot just makes me feel stupid and I spend the 'trip' wondering if or how silly I look to others. For this reason chances are very good I will never smoke it again. I have never done any other drugs. I do not smoke, drink alcohol (except rarely to be social) and have no other substance abuse issues of any sort. Not even coffee does anything for me.

Given this background I recently read about Salvia and some users reported their trips. It piqued my interest mostly because the trips were short and often given to outlandish experiences but the active ingredient was above all else non-addictive and apparently harmless. So I talked with a good friend who is much less of a square than I am and she said that by coincidence she had just recently done it herself, not liked the experience and that I was welcome to the rest of her bag.

Later that day I went to her house and picked up about half a gram of 10x strength Salvia which is what was left over from her and her friends testing it out. I also borrowed her smoking device which is a little glass pipe about two and a half inches long. She even had to give me her lighter since in my apartment I have no use for one! Although she promised to come by later that night to sit for me other plans came in the way and it would have to be postponed. I was however too jazzed up and although felt it was inappropriate went ahead and fired up the pipe after filling up the bowl. Because I don't smoke, or whatever other reason (I bike?), I can take record-breaking amounts of air in my lungs. I did a couple of cycles of exhale/inhale exercises to get that much more volume before expelling every possible amount of air. I felt like my lungs were about to collapse from how flattened I made them and then I slowly dragged in my toke. The smoke was harsh and my lungs, unused to this smoky insult, protested but my will to continue was stronger. I kept on taking it in looking all the meanwhile at the bright orange embers that were consuming the leaf bits and once I could breathe absolutely no more I stopped and laid the pipe down and then myself too on the bed.

I expected something and I got *something*. Within a few seconds I felt the heaviness of head and body that others have reported. My legs got sticky from sweat and I had to pull the blankets off because they felt hot. Then with eyes closed I got a sense, but not exactly a visual, of motion. A circular, viscous motion that suggested a pinwheel but only in an abstract sense.

And that was it. That was the peak. The after effects diminished quickly. Obviously feeling that there must be more to it than this I spent the next hour repeating the process every few minutes with equal results. I sat up against the computer, a large flat screen LCD, and ran psychedelic screensavers to kickstart my own visuals but ended up simply staring at the monitor and cycling through other screensavers all the meanwhile considering the irony that if I was really tripping I shouldn't be able to maneuver around my desktop so skillfully. I smoked and smoked til the bag was almost empty and then just gave it a rest and went to sleep.

The next day I analyzed my experience and came to the conclusion that the strength of the Salvia must be at fault. That I was not inhaling sufficiently enough Salvinorin fast enough to overtake my body's ability to metabolize the intoxicant. So I ordered an ounce of 20x online and within a few days I received a gram of finely shredded leaves in a round pillbox. Again I tried to arrange for my friend to come over to play sitter, feeling that was the most responsible thing to do just in case but again logistics prevented the possibility and again my eagerness trumped patience.

Last night I gathered the necessary paraphernalia and put some of the super-strength leaf in the little pipe's bowl. This time I put on music, not too loud, and felt quite clever for choosing Mozart's Requiem *on loop*... who thinks to play classical for a moment like this? And not just classical but a particularly somber and dramatic piece no less. I had Winamp on the full-on visuals, pumping out colorful swirls and patterns so intense they were just about enough to send one into a seizure never mind any outside help. And with that background I took my first uber-drag of the 20x all the meanwhile keeping the flame on until I felt my thumb dangerously close to catching on fire.

Well, now what do you expect the climax of the moment to be? All I had was the familiar tug and the swirly motion that really reminded me of being inside a taffy machine making candy cane mix. Despite the Requiem's pained chorus and the strain of a thousand strings the music barely registered. The crazy screen saver visuals seemed interesting but I kept thinking it would be better if I could configure them to slow down and not morph into a different set so quickly. I began thinking about all my surroundings, how I could optimize them to elicit a stronger response and in doing so realized the very fact that I was thinking all of this meant that I was far too aware and steeled to my senses to achieve any sort of the so-called 'breakthrough'. I wasted no time in packing in a second bowl and smoking it, hoping that while the present effects were still strong I could suffuse my brain with a renewed assault of the foreign molecule to finally catapult me to the other side. Or at least take me to level 2!

The sense of motion, when I lied down and forgot about the computer stimuli altogether, was stronger on the second hit. The twirls were still colorless, if that's the right word, but registered at some sensory level against the featureless backdrop of my eyelids in the dark. It reminded me of different liquids merging into each other. My mind became more vulnerable to suggestion. I could picture, with difficulty, my arms or legs moving but stretching like heated rubber that yields to a pull without sacrificing its integrity. Everything in my imagination was elastic and flowing. I could summon detached voices to converse with myself. I could elicit, for example, a meretriciously lofty rhetorical 'Are we there yet?' to which I could then summon an equally inauthentic response 'Maybe next time'.

Maybe time for a third bowl please. And I inhaled an impossibly large volume of smoke and held it for an equally impressive period of time. It seemed that I could control how long I wanted to hold it, that there was no urgent pressure from my brain to command me to the usual rhythm and that only my conscious will was enough to determine when I had withheld my breath long enough. And with the third and then fourth and probably fifth toke I could never attain a stronger response than what I've already described. In all I killed about a third of that gram within the span of an hour.

I was aware of my surroundings at all times and particularly in tune with time. I told myself that the sense of time passing would be the most vulnerable of all and that as long as I could trust the alarm clock with its red numbers to not play tricks on me that if I could guess how many minutes had passed between an arbitrary period of my choosing that that would be proof that I was either in or out of it. And rather disappointingly I guessed the correct each time I checked to within a minute or two over the course of that hour. The most telling aspect of the experience is that while I had these sensations, and they were strong if not outright palpable or visual, the key was that I was in control at all times. It is true that I resisted the effort of Salvinorin to take me under. It is an uncontrollable reflex for me just as when I make love I withhold my climax until I can't any longer and the resolution feels that much more rewarding. I felt that if I could totally relax and let my guard down perhaps my senses would register something a little more bizarre but, realistically, I have doubts even to that much.

For what it's worth I like the feeling so I'll keep doing it as the mood strikes and if, God willing, the feds don't ban it ;-)

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 70412
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 24, 2022	Views: 582
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), First Times (2), Mystical Experiences (9), Alone (16)