DOSE:

3 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 5x)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

Setup: This 5x Salvia extract trip happened about 10 years ago. I was taking no medications or supplements. I had tripped on Salvia, LSD, Shrooms (Cubensis), DXM, and Dramamine up to that point.

Set: Now, I would be tempted to automatically qualify this as a Shulgin +4, but Salvia is a different brand of animal, and I didn't get all the way to the top exactly. Instead, I'll use Daniel Siebert's SALVIA Experiential Rating Scale. For those unfamiliar, the levels of the scale are:

S – Subtle effects
A – Altered perception
L – Light visionary state
V – Vivid visionary state
I – Immaterial existence
A – Amnesic effects

By this scale, I had only reached the Light visionary state with my previous Salvia experiences. The Salvia experience I had come to expect, from both leaf and 5x extracts, was a lot of melting body sensations, prominent CEVs with unusual geometric characteristics and the occasional OEV if the dose was high enough. I was, however, about to experience the Vivid visionary state. Boy howdy.

Setting: In my buddy B's walk-in closet, of course. Where else would an experience of such intergalactic proportions occur? B and I had tripped on Salvia several times, and that day we were initiating J into the Salvia club. We had the lights out and a candle lit in the center of the circle for dramatic effect.

Administration: Three “one-hitter” sized bowls of 5x extract through a bong, taken in rapid succession.

Timeline: Normally, I would break down the Timeline with a subdivided Shulgin scale for clarity, however, all conceptions of time became irrelevant almost immediately after exhaling the third hit. I'm guessing the experience lasted the usual 5 to 10 minutes of spaced out drooling in real earth time.

Subjective Experience: B and I gave J his bong hit first. I'm pretty sure he only took one. I remember his eyes rolling up in his head like he was trying to burn a hole through the ceiling with his gaze. He came down soon enough, and seemed to have had a typical experience relative to the size of the dose. I had already experienced taking more than one hit in succession with other brands of 5x, so I wasn't expecting any difficulties. We were smoking a new brand, however, and I'm guessing it was a little stronger than the others. The experience sure was!

J handed me the bong, and he and B start chatting about this and that. As I was taking my bong rips, I remember B talking about getting cigarettes from the store. It was probably around the third rip I really started feeling it, and I remember wishing B would shut the fuck up so I could experience my Salvia in peace. I looked into the candle. Then time ended.

My perception of the room became an orb which began slowly descending into a perfectly black eternity, taking my ego with it. The closet, my friends and the candle were perfectly contained and existing as usual inside of the orb, but as it continued to descend, it became “apparent” to “me” that this particular orb was one of millions. Around this time, B's voice had fractalized into millions of voices, each emanating from an orb of its own. “My” orb, the one which contained “my” former reality continued to descend away from “me,” joining a shining, vibrating, “crab shaped” fractal. What had been my entire perception back in the closet had become a singular pixel in the “reincarnation machine” I was about to experience. Each pixel was a lifetime, each singing its own song about getting cigarettes from the store in every possible rearrangement of B's voice. Even though the pixels were irreducibly small and distant, it was possible to “see” each lifetime churning away inside of it. It is impossible to tell how “fast” this happened. It seemed that the lives being lived inside the pixels were running at regular speed, but outside the “machine” time had no particular function.

After about three aeons, “I” was rapidly propelled in to one of these pixels...one which was not “my own.” I was on the street. The sun was hot, the concrete was hard. I was walking to the store to get some cigarettes. I bought the cigarettes and talked to the clerk about cigarettes. I could bloody well count the snack cakes on the shelf. At least “15 minutes” of “normal time” passed. It was impossibly mundane and completely realistic. There was absolutely no way to distinguish the quality of that experience from everyday reality.

All of a sudden “I” popped back out into the big space with the “reincarnation machine” and time was back on pause. The popping in and out of different pixels happened a couple more times...I'm not really sure how many times it happened. I was in no position to count up to three at that point. All of the content was just as mundane and realistic, and all of it revolved around the quest for cigarettes on a hot summer day. I popped back into the timeless space one last time, and found that “my” pixel was rising to meet me from the exact spot where it had come to rest in the “reincarnation machine.”

As my pixel ascended to fill my vision, I could see that I was still staring at the candle in the closet. I knew then that I had a body that I was returning to, but there was still no ego to be had. As my world returned, something disconcerting began to happen. I had overshot my body somehow and now the candle was growing so as to overtake the entirety of my visual field. As the flame continued to grow, the light became impossibly strong, and I realized that I wasn't returning to my body. Instead I was going to merge with the light. That realization, coupled with the astonishing size this open flame was quickly becoming in my visual field, freaked me out, quite frankly. I think it was half not wanting to overshoot a return to reality and half not wanting to burn myself on that goddamn candle when I finally returned. Somehow I managed to get up and shake the end of the trip off. B and J followed me into the apartment as I struggled to walk, regain my ego and decipher what the hell just happened.

The apartment was dark, alien and womb-like compared to the heat and light of the sun inside the “reincarnation machine,” not to mention the light of the candle. I had to lean on the wall for support for a minute as I continued to slowly regain my identity. Apparently, I hadn't done or said anything strange during the course of the trip, and I hadn't been gone any longer than usual. That was hard to accept at first, and the world seemed plastic and artificial for a while. Rubbery.

I've smoked Salvia a bunch since and have never had another experience of that intensity. On the other hand, I've never really tried to replicate that level of intensity. It just hasn't seemed necessary. Some other day, perhaps.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 96055
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Jan 1, 2020	Views: 608
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Mystical Experiences (9), General (1)