Like Getting a Limb Caught in a Lathe
Salvia divinorum (5x extract) & Cannabis
Citation:   Bach Choy. "Like Getting a Limb Caught in a Lathe: An Experience with Salvia divinorum (5x extract) & Cannabis (exp98950)". Erowid.org. Mar 26, 2023. erowid.org/exp/98950

 
DOSE:
1/2 bowl smoked Salvia divinorum (extract - 5x)
  1/2 bowl smoked Cannabis (flowers)
BODY WEIGHT: 115 lb
Dose: 1 hit smoked Salvia divinorum extract/plant material 5x actual salvinorin A. content, sprinkled on ground marijuana. Time: About 11 PM, Sunday, February 26, 2012

After at least a week of planning on ordering some Salvia divinorum online, mostly due to pure curiosity, my friend Ms. F gave me a call with some interesting news: she was picking up some salvia in the nearest city that day, and that the two of us would split it with our friends Ms. T and Ms. M. I was thrilled, and the whole rest of the day I was just waiting till she got back. That night, we all met up at the house where Ms. F and Ms. T lived, as well as Mr. S. I found that Ms. T had unknowingly to me brought over Mr. K and Mr. C, two acquaintances who live in our town that I had partied with before. Although I like both of them and would normally be glad to have them around, I wasn't thrilled they were over this specific night solely because I wanted it to just be the four of us and Mr. S (who would act as a sitter) for our adventure, which was the first time trying salvia for any of us. After a while it's apparent that Mr. K and Mr. C aren't planning on leaving any time soon, and I don't want to be rude and just ask them to leave. Eventually impatience gets the best of us (mostly me), and we decided to smoke in the narrow upstairs bathroom.

Ms. T, Ms. M, Ms. F, and I all gathered in the bathroom, and divided up the contents of the small container of salvia extract in to fourths. We decided we would each load a bowl of marijuana in to Ms. T's bong, and sprinkle our portion of the salvia on top. The order we decided we would smoke in was first Ms. T, then me, then Ms. M, and finally Ms. F. After preparation, Ms. T brings the bong to her mouth and takes two small, shy hits. Within seconds, her face lit up with an enormous grin, she started laughing uncontrollably, and kept saying, 'I can't believe this!' She was clearly having a great time, and this made me even more eager to take my hit. Not one to be outdone by a girl, I brought the bong up to my mouth and lit a perfect hit, burning at least half of the bowl. I 'white walled' the bong with as much smoke as possible, and took the biggest hit my lungs could hold. I almost coughed, but managed to hold the hit in for about 10 seconds. The taste was not at all unpleasant, I found it had a nice earthy bite. I remember Ms. F asking me how it tasted, and I responded, 'A bit peppery.'

Moments after (probably about 10 seconds after first inhaling), the effects hit me so hard and so quickly that I don't even remember exhaling. In an instant, my vision became extremely distorted. I felt a great physical sense of heaviness and a powerful body buzz. My fingers pulsed with an electric feeling, and it came in quick and forceful pulses, much like the jets in a hot tub. I looked down to find that the hairbrush on the bathroom sink was 'mirrored' many times, and appeared very warped and stretched. Much like when you turn the mirror on a bathroom's medicine cabinet to face the other mirror, and see the cascading reflections. I just stood there in a daze for several seconds as my ego, sense of gravity, and sense of three dimensional space were all completely dissolved. 'Stupefied' would be a good word to describe my reaction to these initial effects. In a matter of seconds, things became truly maddening.

My mind was immediately racked with a sense of profound confusion as my entire grasp on reality was ripped from me and thrown in to an unimaginable universe at a thousand miles per hour. I saw absolutely everything mirrored and stretched now, with such vivid clarity that I didn't for a second even consider the fact that my experience was induced by what I had just smoked. I felt the multiverse I had been teleported to collapsing, folding, and rolling in upon itself. In blind confusion and terror, I bolted. At least, I thought I did. I tried with every ounce of my energy to escape being caught in the ever folding realities around me. In actuality, I had apparently fallen backwards in to the bathtub, and was thrashing around like a wild animal in an attempt to run and escape these terrifying hallucinations. I have no recollection of being in the tub, because at that point what I was seeing was not at all what was in front of me.

I was disoriented beyond what I could have possibly imagined. Capacity for rational thinking was nothing more than a distant memory at this point, and all that I knew was fear. I had to run for my life. I didn't know where, why, or how, but I was left in such a detached state that all I could do was react like a startled animal and bolt. I managed to get out of the bathtub somehow and frantically crawled out of the bathroom and into the hallway, though at this point the traditional concept of space had totally been eliminated from my mind. Non-Euclidian only barely begins to describe it. It's as if I was suddenly able to perceive reality in 5-D as opposed to being confined to just three spacial dimensions. I looked upwards from the floor in to the hallway and saw everything continuing to fold in on itself to the point where I felt like the universe was being continuously 'rolled up', all from the left side of my periphery.

I remember looking in pure terror as I saw the house I was in assume dimensions to something resembling that M.C. Escher painting with the staircases going all different directions, and it started rolling up and enveloping me. Every time I turned my head (or was it my whole body?), all of my surroundings spun on a constantly revolving, Non-Euclidean loop and constantly changed perspective, form, and angles, until I felt I was in an infinitely collapsing room beyond the realm of traditional space and time. This was possibly the most sickeningly horrifying moment of the experience, and of my entire life for that matter. If I wasn't panicking before, I sure as hell was now. I can quite honestly say that the ineffable level of terror I experienced was beyond even what I would imagine possible feeling if I were to have been a soldier in World War I in the midst of trench warfare. I then had a strange sense that everybody else knew what was going on but me, and thought they might not want me to escape this (whatever 'this' is). I'm sure that makes no sense to explain, but they're all such absolutely alien feelings and concepts that I have no idea how to effectively verbalize them.

I had no idea who I was or had ever been by now, and in fact I didn't remember a single thing that had ever happened to me before smoking the salvia. The only thing I knew was that the multiverse was flipping like the pages of a flip book while the entirety of the universe was collapsing behind me and chasing me, and if we didn't run we would all be sucked in to it and die.
The only thing I knew was that the multiverse was flipping like the pages of a flip book while the entirety of the universe was collapsing behind me and chasing me, and if we didn't run we would all be sucked in to it and die.
In my mind, I thought I was sprinting at full speed, but in real life I was crawling and struggling with no regard whatsoever to the physical reality around me (walls, objects, people), since I was perceiving things vastly dissimilar to my actual surroundings. At some point (though I'm not sure exactly when, my sense of chronology during this trip is very skewed), I remember Ms. M holding the bong and offering me the remaining contents of the bowl which was still mine. In my delirium, all I remembered from my life before these wild visions is that whatever it was in that bong was responsible for the terror I felt, and in my panic I yelled, 'Get that the fuck away from me!'

According to my friends, I dove head first down the hallway staircase. When I say 'dove' I mean it in the literal sense; my body in midair was at a 45 degree angle or sharper, with my head towards the ground. Mr. S somehow caught me, and tried to carry me downstairs to Ms. T's bedroom (I'm an incredibly small and light man, so it's not a big deal at all to pick me up and carry me). I still thought I was running as reality was twisting upon me and threatening to envelope me, and I was acting accordingly. As he's carrying me I'm struggling and flailing and trying to run on the walls. I must have gotten loose at some point, and I try to crawl towards or under the metal woodstove, saying that it's a bed and I need to lay on it. In my mind, I thought I was pulling myself towards a bedroom doorway, the one safe point from the horrible hallucinations of the universe collapsing around me and sucking me inwards towards it. Mr. S picks me up and takes me to Ms. T's bedroom, and lays me on her bed. I lay for only a moment, as the spacial distortions are still disorienting me beyond what I could handle and the sense of confusion and pure horror are still through the roof. I ran to the corner of the room to escape reality's collapse. I think it's around this point I start to come down. I collapse on to the bed again. I was hit by a sudden awareness of the fact that I had somehow made it downstairs, and that other people were trying to help me for some reason. I think they must have been running from the same thing as me. In this instant I had a sudden suspicion that the 'rolling up' phenomenon that I was visualizing might be slowing down or have stopped.

What a relieving moment it was when I started to realize that I just might be okay and that I had nothing real to run from. I remember talking to Mr. K at this point, and explaining to him that I was trying to escape from something, though I couldn't effectively explain what it was. I tried to communicate my perceptions and fears and hallucinations to him. To my surprise, I was able to speak perfectly articulately, and I remember acknowledging that at the current time. By now I was fully aware that I was under the influence of a psychedelic, and with relief I realized that I was definitely coming down.

I laid on the bed for a few minutes, just trying to get a grip on reality, as Mr. K went upstairs to check on Ms. T, Ms. M, and Ms. F. I quickly found that the second I closed my eyes, I was still experiencing some extremely intense visuals that were still very frightening to me. The feeling of bewilderment and shock still lingered slightly, so I made a conscious effort to not close my eyes, even being afraid to blink too slowly, lest I suffer through the closed eye visuals for even a fraction of a second. I was sweating profusely and visibly shaken, and I felt very overheated, as if I had just ran a mile in street clothes. The total length of the trip's plateau was about three minutes, and the comedown was about an additional three. A slight afterglow persisted afterwards, providing an added sense of relief that my nightmare of a trip was over with.

The whole experience was so real and vivid that when coupled with the stupefying confusion, it didn't even occur to me that I was tripping. I cannot emphasize this enough. With all other psychedelics I've tried, even when overwhelmed by a trip's intensity, there's always something in the back of my mind that knows it's just hallucinations. Not with salvia at all. It hit me so swiftly that I had no time to grab any sort of bearing on reality.

Exp Year: 2012ExpID: 98950
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Mar 26, 2023Views: 982
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Salvia divinorum (44), Cannabis (1) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Guides / Sitters (39), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3), First Times (2)

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