DOSE:

6 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 10x)

BODY WEIGHT:

175 lb

It was late Spring of 2007. I was attending school and living in Seattle, had recently split up with my wife (it was a good split, and we have remained very good friends), and found myself moving into a huge house shared by nine other people, most of whom were students as well. It started out as a strange living situation for all of us, as the landlord had just opened the house for rent, and none of the tenants knew each other, so we all started out as complete strangers. There was something comforting about that too, as none of us were alone in being the new guy.

It didn’t take long for all of us to learn each other’s quirks to where we felt comfortable around each other. Within a month I had a small group I considered friends, and others that would remain likeable acquaintances. Out of social necessity, I learned who was drug friendly in the first few days, as I enjoy smoking marijuana on occasion. When E first invited me to her room to partake from a giant hookah, she mentioned a potent hallucinogen she had heard of called Salvia Divinorum, that it was not illegal, and that you could purchase it in tobacco stores and head shops. Other than that, she really knew nothing about it.

The next day, I visited the nearest tobacco shop that carried an assortment of water pipes. Sure enough, they sold Salvia Divinorum that was infused with different strengths of tinctures of the plant’s active ingredient. They had 10X, 20X, 60X, and 80X. Not knowing anything about Salvia, I asked the shopkeeper if he had tried it. He said he had smoked some of the 60X, just one lungful from a bong, then he “hit the floor and went away.” I asked what he thought of it, and he said he enjoyed the experience but didn’t think of it as a recreational substance, but more like a shamanic journey. He really liked that the peak of the high was no more than five minutes. I liked the sound of it, so I purchased some of the 20X as I didn’t want to overdo things. It cost me about $20 for one gram.

Upon reflection, I should have asked the shopkeeper a few more questions involving the setting, and if I needed someone to be there spotting me.

I hurried straight home to tell E that I had purchased some Salvia, but she wasn’t back from work yet. Without any real mental preparation I decided to go down to my room, close the door, and give this Salvia stuff a try on my own. I tore open the 1 gram package expecting to find dried leaves, but it looked more like small, inky-black twigs. Like dried spider legs. The twigs had a pungent, earthy smell. I didn’t like the look of these twigs. I had never smoked anything that resembled licorice jerky, and my eagerness to experience this stuff was taken down a couple notches. I told the little black twigs that I had only good intentions, and since we were unfamiliar with each other, I asked them to be nice to me. I had the feeling they were going to do as they pleased, no matter what I asked. Wanting to see if the high was really as short as I’d heard, I waited a couple minutes until the clock read 2:30 pm.

Wanting to start off small, I loaded a few pine needle sized twigs into a brass pipe and lit up. The taste was indescribably nasty. Smoking a plastic coated cat turd is the best I can describe it (not from experience, but from my imagining). I held the smoke in for as long as I could, exhaled clean, and took another hit. After the second hit, I waited a couple minutes. I felt nothing, so I took two more hits equal to the first two, and waited again. Now I was feeling a little different. A slightly giddy feeling in my chest and gut, and that sense of being a point of consciousness housed inside a skull with limbs and body hanging below it. I figured this was going to be like a 5 minute shroom trip, which seemed disappointing. I loaded a few more twigs into the bowl and took two more hits. The giddiness increased a little more, as did the feeling of being a little man sitting up inside my control-tower skull, but there was a new awareness that made me laugh nervously.

This new awareness was the feeling of being beckoned from a hidden realm. It was not subtle. I was feeling the presence of invisible people nearby, and they were calling to me, telling me to come toward them, or come back to them. This was not an auditory sense, but purely the sense of presence, like when someone stands next to you and you have your eyes closed, you can feel them occupying space near you. These presences seemed distantly familiar; they knew me and I knew them, but the familiarity was like that of characters in a long forgotten dream. I found myself laughing, but nothing humorous was driving the laughter.

I loaded more twigs into the brass bowl. This time I loaded roughly a tenth of the 1 gram package, more than half filling the pipe. It occurred to me that taking small hits might not propel me any further, so this time I let the flame saturate the twigs, and I slowly inhaled a hit that surely outweighed all the previous ones. Again, with great difficulty, I held the smoke in as long as I could, and when I let it go there was quite a bit of smoke that I didn’t absorb.

Now I had done it. As soon as I exhaled I could feel my lower extremities begin to disappear. My toes felt like they were dissolving into tiny particles and vanishing - not going numb - but vanishing. This vanishing act started to work its way up my legs. I took a couple steps forward and my feet came back, but as soon as I stopped, they began to dematerialize again. I could feel a mild panic coming on. I wasn’t expecting to dissolve. Each time I moved forward, my feet would come back. I thought to try and outrun this dissolving force, but I would have to leave my room, and I didn’t want my roommates to see me freaking out. I had to ride it out in my room. I realized I still had the pipe in my hand and it was still glowing hot. My feet were vanishing again. Quickly, I set the pipe on a shelf next to me, then lay on my back on the floor.

My feet were no longer vanishing, but my new horizontal position triggered something even more horrifying. This is hard to picture, but I will do my best to describe it. I was laying on my back on the floor with my bed sitting several feet to my left. I had accepted that I was going to pass out in some manner, but what happened next was something I never could have imagined. Sprouting from the right side of my body from head to toe was a thin membrane that was curling up over my body and trying to swallow me. Picture the boxed roll of aluminum foil everyone has in their kitchen. My body was like the box, and this membrane was coming out of my side exactly like aluminum foil coming off the roll. As this membrane extended further, I realized it was another dimension, a separate reality that was trying to pull me from my own. I rolled on the floor to my left to escape it, and I was succeeding. I could out-maneuver this creeping membrane if I kept moving, so I kept rolling to my left until I hit the legs of my bed, and could roll no more.

All the while, the feeling of being beckoned never stopped. Now I knew that the ones who were calling to me were calling from this alternate reality that sprang from my right side. I gave in to it. As it swallowed me, I could feel my body dissolving again. It wasn’t until my body was gone and I felt my neck and inside of my throat dissolving away that I felt real Horror. As the back of my head and ears gave way, I felt my memories and my identity vanishing. Everything that made me Me was being taken away. As the last of my head was dissolving, I saw a vision of these strange, organic bulbs set neatly in a row. One by one the bulbs were popping. As they popped they released a little wisp of smoke and they were gone. Everything that I was: my ego, identity, memories, beliefs, and all that I loved was in those popping bulbs. As it got down to the last three bulbs I begged for it to stop. Then there were two. Then one. I silently pleaded, “take them all, but please, please leave the last one!” What had I done? I smoked the little black twigs, and now I was going to die. All my last thoughts were as one mosaic containing farewells to family and friends.
The last bulb popped, and I was gone.

But I was still conscious. Not as a man, but as a stump. I was an old, half rotted, moss covered stump about a foot and a half tall with a diameter of about ten inches. I was sitting at the edge of a dirt path that curved through a forest of evergreen trees. A ways down the path, a woman in her mid thirties with shoulder length blonde hair was walking with her German shepherd. I was a stump, and even though I didn’t have eyes, I could see my surroundings, I could see the woman and her dog, and I could see myself. I didn’t think thoughts because stumps don’t think. I was not a stump that used to be a man because that man never existed. I was conscious without thoughts, I was aware that I was this particular stump, and I silently observed my surroundings.

As the woman and her dog got closer, the dog took notice of me - the rotting, moss covered stump. The dog came right up to the stump and buried his nose in the moss that covered it. I, as the stump, could feel the dog’s nose as it sniffed, and I felt the wetness of his nose. Where I felt the wetness was on my right cheek, even though stumps don’t have cheeks. I could still feel the wetness on my stump-cheek as the dog pulled away and continued down the path with the woman, and it felt cool as a slight breeze touched it. Without eyes or ears, I watched and heard as the woman and her dog disappeared down the bend in the path. I was alone again, the old stump beside the path. There was no future or past, no memories of once being a tree, just a stump existing in the here and now.

I was vaguely aware of being on the floor next to my bed. I was myself again, but didn’t notice when I quit being a stump. There was a cold, wet feeling on my right cheek. I wiped at it with my hand, and saw that I wasn’t imagining it. There was definitely a thin sheet of cool moisture on my face. I sat up, feeling a little dazed as my reality came back more and more solidly. I thought about the stump that I had become. I thought about the woman and the dog. I wiped at my face some more, wondering if it all really happened and I had somehow brought the dog’s kiss back with me. Then it occurred to me that I must have been laying on the floor and drooling on myself. Part of me accepted that as the case, but another part of me said it was the dog because there wasn’t a line of drool running down the right side of my face, there was a thin sheet of moisture spread across it. That, and I woke up laying on my left side.

The clock read 2:39 pm. I cannot say how long I seemed to exist as a stump, for the stump only knew of the eternal now. I felt very relaxed both physically and mentally for about a half hour after my stumpification. Once I fully recovered my wits, I replayed everything that happened in my mind. The physical dissolving and loss of self identity was terrifying. Even if I knew what to expect before going in, the feeling of slipping away into oblivion is scary. It is the feeling of death. But finding my consciousness was still there even after I had died was very revealing, very reassuring. And being a stump with no sense of time or sense of mind was blissfully liberating. I also realized that walking into that other dimension unprepared with absolutely no idea of what to expect, and not having someone there to watch over me was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. I gave E and another roommate the rest of my Salvia and told them to use with care.

To this day I still wonder if the woman and her dog was a real event that happened somewhere, and I had astrally traveled there to witness it as an old mossy stump. And the wetness on my cheek still bothers me. I thought about what the shopkeeper said about it not being a recreational experience, but more like a shamanic journey. He couldn’t have put it in better words. Salvia Divinorum is not a substance like LSD or shrooms, where you trip out with friends and see distorted things and ponder the deep. Divine Sal will lay you bare, she’ll strip you mercilessly of everything that you think you are, and show you how vast you really are.

I waited another two years before I tried Salvia again, and that was only because a friend wanted to try it and didn’t want to do it alone. It was Summer and we were camping, so the setting seemed right. He had a package of 20X that was from a different supplier than I had tried. We both smoked bowl after bowl and got the giddy giggly high, but we never dissolved. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time. I think he got a batch that was either old or bad, because I smoked enough to “stumpify” myself several times over. I will try it again someday when I feel the time is right, and if that day never happens, I won’t feel I missed anything.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 90719
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 40
Published: Dec 7, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Difficult Experiences (5), Entities / Beings (37), First Times (2), Alone (16)