DOSE:

2 g

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

My anxiety I had suppressed, because the coming experience was to be entirely new to me. I drove my roommate’s car home from the bar, while the bong we’d bought before our shifts rattled more noisily within our heads than even it had in the trunk during the drive. Tyler and I were trying a still-legal drug commonly known as Salvia. The general idea we both had of the substance was that it apparently caused vivid, dream-like hallucinations, the experience of which was altogether distinct from similarly powerful psychotropic drugs.

Our prescribed conditions for our ‘trips’ were as follow: clear a large indoor space of valuable and dangerous items, remove any person whose character may negatively influence someone’s hallucination, burn ½ gram dried Salvia with a blue-flame lighter in a glass water-filtered pipe, hold in for ~30 seconds, and use a babysitter. Since I’d smoked Salvia (in a failed experiment) before, I volunteered to have Tyler sit for me first as I tested the waters.

He began recording video, and I took a final sober-eyed look at my friend before I burned the glass cone clear of all plant matter. As I drew the particularly distasteful smoke into my lungs, I felt an unfamiliar tinge affect my body as my arms and legs felt as though they were being kept suspended about my frame like a cloth wrapped upon a pincushion. As I took the water-pipe away from my lips and puffed up my chest, holding in the poison, I was experiencing a paralysis taking hold. Tyler intercepted the bong and lighter as I tried in vain to reach them to the table in front of us. As I blew out my lungs as heartily as I could, I perceived a lightness rising quickly in my mind and senses.

“Oh,” I uttered, “That’s interesting.”

My vision was starting to blur in digital patterns. My left eye first perceived a vertical line of pixels in the center of my vision, extending from top to bottom, began to extend itself outward to my left. So were the colors of my living room obscured into a latitude of approximated information for the left side of my vision, while my right eye still beheld the t.v. case, the game systems, the dark window, and my observing roommate.

“Ok. Alright. Oh man. Ohhhhh Jeez…”

As the last of my vision slipped away I became panicked. The moment from my childlike astonishment of the sensual obscurity to the next is not accountable, because my world had suddenly left me, and I found it now featureless.

I heard what can be described as static. I saw, through a colorless shade, the vague impressions of recognizable objects lingering on my periphery.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s cool, man,” my roommate would later be heard on the video, trying to comfort me.

“Dude! What’s going on?” My words came out like a sputtering engine as I yelled through my paralyzed confusion, and sounded on the recording as a polite request instead of a panicked yell.

“It’s cool, man.”

I tried to move my body, writhing, suspended, and barely visible as a speck of motion through the gray dimensions. Tyler watched me stamp on the ground and feel for my knees. My main perception was that I had caused some tear through all fabric of our cosmos. I identified in my view a scrap of reality, all dimensions fluttering and torn, wavering near my reach. I crawled my presence toward the fringe, vainly clinging to the burst reality which I’d known, slain, and autopsied. It looked like a farce-- one too horrible to be true though which I knew was; the zipped seam of my universe had been thoughtlessly opened apart. As I had hold to the last images of reality in my mind, the plane of limbo was falling into further chaos. My feet and legs began slipping over the high waterfall of my purgatory and falling black from grey.

My book-bag sat over the arm of the sofa by whose side I writhed. Its presence was the most prominent remembrance in my mind of my previous blissful consciousness. I bemoaned my carelessness; I’d exploited a crack in reality’s shell, and scratching it had fissured up the uneasy depth of eternity into my view.

I would be seen crawling slowly and ineffectually up on the armrest of our couch, wailing and grabbing at the top of my book-bag while Tyler looked on with an expression of laughter paused for horror. My screams have been described repeatedly as ‘shrieks.’ Indeed, their short durations filled the air and the recording with melancholy, and all my composure was grief.

In as unexpectedly a pass as had it gone, my vision returned. The gray static that lies behind my immediate perceptions was again cloaked up by the flapping whimsy of our world.

“Are you kidding me?”

My predicament dawned on me and I was left naked on God’s stage, speaking directly to Him and wondering if my limbo had really been a necessary joke for Him to play.

“No,” Tyler tried his sympathies.

“What… I don’t know what’s going on,” I squeezed my head and pressed my shod feet against the carpet, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I settled back into the living room, looking toward the book-bag with a confused sense of object-worth as I remembered how its presence had been the only scrap of memory that had kept itself in my view all throughout the journey.

As I calmed down I tried to relate to Tyler just what had gone on from my perspective during the previous few minutes. I began to try to dissuade him from trying the substance himself. Though it was obvious to him that I’d undergone not an entirely enjoyable experience in my descent into entropy, his persistence proved too powerful for my passive perturbations.

It’s a part of my experience in everyday life now to, when I happen to think of its significance, entertain that my vision, sound, and knowledge are but specious facades to the gray beyond. Since, I began thinking of Time as our great master, to whom I should pay particular reverence for my deliverance from that moment of eternity to which I was tossed.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 75874
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 17, 2011	Views: 10,002
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), General (1)