DOSE:	1 hit	smoked	DMT
	1 bowl	smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract)
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

200 lb

It was an impulsive decision to smoke the salvia but the failure to launch off of the DMT was a factor in my choice . Since first trying salvia in the summer of 2008 I have had a strange relationship with the plant. My first encounter with salvia was so intense and unlike anything I could have been prepared for that I still rank it as the most difficult trip I have had. As a 4 year old child, I was hit by a car and escaped with only minor injuries. On that first salvia trip, the trauma of that event was relived. The effect came on before I exhaled and it was like a truck crashed into the campsite where I was with my friends. I saw friends get killed when the truck slammed into them, the fire was scattered and the tents caught on fire. I was hit by the truck as well and a portion of my skull was missing. Burning nylon from one of the tents had landed on my torso. A feeling of being pinned down came over me and I tried to stand up. Two friends tried to hold me down but I pushed them both off of me and started staggering across the campsite trying to hold my brain in my head because my skull was missing a chunk. For some reason I was kind of stumbling in circles and with each circle a little more reality seeped back into my consciousness. After what felt like a long time I stopped moving and looked at everyone. Everything was fine but everyone was looking at me uneasily. I went and picked up my folding chair and sat back down. Then I sat in the chair not talking for an hour. I was wiped right out.

On another occasion, after smoking 50 mg of N,N DMT, I went to a place of bright lights and great medical concern. I felt that I was on an operating table and was being examined. There was a great concern and urgency to everything that was going on around me. Arcs and lightning bolts of colour flashed across my mind’s eye between me and what I was seeing.

Recently, I had begun working on myself as a person. I’d wanted to move beyond my old patterns of behaviour. A large part of this work had been the use of psychedelics within a like-minded peer group. This group of friends has been extremely helpful and supportive. With a group like this we are able to openly talk about our experiences and then better integrate what we’ve learned. By this point in my work on myself, I had made great strides in dealing with issues of anger and some progress in regard to fear.

After an incredibly long day of working and other obligations, I was at home on the couch and I suddenly decided to smoke some DMT. I only had a little but it was dark and I figured I’d still get decent closed eye visuals. I placed approximately 20 mg of DMT into a freebase pipe and applied a torch lighter to the pipe. There was tape on my pinky and that’s how I controlled the carb. The living room was too dark to really see how well the DMT began to smoke but I was still able to get a hit. I set the lighter and pipe down on the coffee table and lay down on the couch and waited for some mental fireworks. Nothing substantial happened beyond a slight quickening of the visual aspect of thought. Essentially, it was just the hint that there were visuals around the corner.

With a failure to get a good launch from the DMT, I went back into my stash box and grabbed the 20x salvia smokable extract. Still leery of the experience 6 years after my initial meeting, I only filled the bowl of my pipe to 2/3 full. I sat for a moment in the dark room, closed my eyes, and focused on my breath. Part of me wanted to forget about smoking and the other part wanted to revisit that space with intention. While I continued to sit and breathe, I focused on my intention. I opened my eyes, put the lighter to the pipe, and inhaled.

This time, the effects came on much more gradually than my first experience. Perhaps my view of this stems from my ability to compare salvia and N,N-DMT experiences because both can come on quite suddenly. But, in my personal experience, I find salvia to have a heavy jungle/organic feel and DMT to feel more technologically oriented.

What I felt on the bowlful of salvia was of suddenly standing in a greenhouse, rising to the ceiling, and then getting pulled and twisted backwards. I could feel every beam as I moved backwards even though I was lying on my couch. The greenhouse got darker and reminded me of the hall where I went to flea markets with my great grandparents when I was a young child. Then, while still being pulled backward, I was in my great grandparents’ car near the old neighbourhood where they used to live. But the scenery was all from 30 years ago. The houses all looked like they did when I was 4-5 years old.

From there the scene shifted to when I was hit by a car when I was 4 years old. I woke up on a gurney—as I remember actually doing—and I saw everyone around me freaking out. It was also at this point that the main sensation of being pulled backwards stopped. When I woke up I knew I was hurt, and badly. I knew I was dying and all of the doctors and nurses did too. There was no panic, just a sense of acceptance and an awareness of a shift or transition. The hospital room started to fade and I found myself returning to awareness of my living room.

My bookshelf seemed to resemble a large slope of thick jungle growth with a predominantly green and purple colour palette. There almost seemed to be an accentuation of triangles and patterns revolving around triangle motifs. It is hard to say whether the N,N DMT provided much of a visual boost or not. My inclination is to say no. I consumed so little that it seems unlikely to have provided much of an effect. The salvia experiences I’ve had since then have been consistent with the visuals I received on this trip but without the presence of N,N DMT. I do know that others combine 5-MeO DMT and salvia to boost the effects. That is an experiment for another time. As far as the combo with cannabis, I consider it to be a relative non-issue regarding this experience. I consume cannabis regularly and can tell when it colours an experience. My opinion is that it didn’t play a noteworthy role in shaping this experience.

I closed my eyes and returned to focusing on my breathing. The world as I remembered it had re-emerged but it was changed. I laid there. In that salvia experience I learned that instead of surviving when I got hit by a car, I died on the gurney in the hospital. Everything I had experienced since that moment in my life was nothing but the fading projections of a dying child’s mind. Teenage depression, a workplace injury requiring two months of physiotherapy, marriage, children…nothing had actually happened. It was glimpse of what would have been. With that realisation, I suddenly felt liberated. In that moment, it was like the heavy weight of anxiety and fear slipped off of sore and tired shoulders. I realised there was no reason to walk through life with fear or nervousness. Having been a shy kid, I always felt nervous in social situations and sometimes that would morph into a fear of having to endure those situations in the first place. That feeling wasn’t there anymore.

The imagery and message of being dead were, on the surface, quite heavy and sound very much like a negative trip. For me, it was quite the opposite. True, it was a difficult journey but that seems to be my relationship with salvia. Salvia will grant visions forcefully and with a widely noted set of physical sensations. A close friend describes salvia as the “Dominatrix” and I have to agree. Having knowledge of the process and a willingness to work with the situation, it is possible to glean great insights from the uncomfortable situation. In learning that I was a dead child, I was freed to live my life. There is no longer any real reason to fear a new situation because what bad thing can happen when I’m already dead and this is all a dream?

Now, I am starting to enjoy going out and meeting new people. New experience is something to look forward to. I also started looking at that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling the same way I did as a child; with wonder and excitement at something new rather than fear and apprehension of something unknown. It was just a matter of perspective to see that subtle difference.

[Cannabis Dose: "approx. 2 bowls during the entire evening"]

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 105526
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 34
Published: May 24, 2020	Views: 1,176
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DMT (18) : Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Combinations (3), Alone (16)