DOSE:		oral	Vitamins / Supplements
	repeated	inhaled	Nitrous Oxide	(gas)
	1 bowl	smoked	Salvia divinorum	(extract)
		inhaled	Nitrous Oxide	(gas)

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

A couple of weeks ago, totally bored, I decided to do a bunch of nitrous. What happened from there was a lot of fun, and it was unexpected to boot...

My set was good. I was pretty tired (classes were just ending), but I was pretty happy. About five days before this experience had been the biggest party of the year, which for me involved: more nitrous than I can remember, a lot of opium, a lot of pot, a few bumps of ketamine, and mid-sized doses of 5-MeO-MiPT and 2C-T-21 taken with about 3 mg of DOM.

My prior experience with dissociatives has been a mixed bag. I've tried DXM twice, both times by drinking Robitussin maximum strength. The first time was absolutely terrible (see my report 'Neither Fun Nor Enlightening'), and the second time (with a smaller dose) just gave me a little floaty buzz. I seem to have some sort of sensitivity to ketamine, since two small bumps can knock me over for hours. As for nitrous...

Well, nitrous is a peculiar substance, as everybody knows. It's a simple molecule, but its effects aren't just due to oxygen displacement. And it's easy to get and not as terrible for you as, say, poppers. Therefore, I've tried it many times. The weird thing is that I've never really *enjoyed* nitrous, even though it makes me laugh. The throbbing in my ears is unpleasant, sure, but the main reason I've felt ambivalent toward nitrous is its mental effects. Whenever I use it, I feel depressed, as though I'm wasting my life (which is, at least while I'm doing nitrous, probably true). And I often reflect on my place in the world, and on the nature of life in general, through something I could best describe as 'the nitrous filter.'

'The nitrous filter' is an aspect of my nitrous experiences in which I focus on a single quality of the world around me. An example of its working is as follows: One time I was doing some nitrous in my friend G's room. I was sitting opposite his bookshelf, and each time I used a whip-it, I would notice a different quality of the books. So first I noticed their different colors; then I noticed their genres; then their authors; then the nationalities of their authors; and so on. Nitrous affects my ability to focus on more than a single idea at a time.

On to the experience: I went into my friend D's room, where he informed me that he had some boxes of nitrous. I decided to splurge on a box (24 charges), with the intention of doing the whole thing. My friends J and A came in, and I took some B12. Then, as we started talking about the end of school and such subjects, I began to use the charges.

A common thread in my nitrous thinking is contemplation of whether it's possible for anybody to exist indefinitely. It's hard to explain exactly why I think about this, but I think it's partially because of my nihilism: I want for my existence to propagate as far as it can, even if die. The way to do this is to affect the lives of as many people as possible before I die in a way that will travel with them. My existence will end, in an absolute sense, when everyone who remembers me has died - but since they may have mentioned me to other people, I have a slim chance of surviving beyond my immediate circle, etc. In other words, it's a degrees-of-separation problem.

Because of the nitrous filter, I tend to approach this subject at the level of one-on-one interaction, and then - usually as I move to the next whippet and filter to more fundamental levels of the subject - I think about the nature of existence: the necessary union of observing subject and observed object. I usually end up at the same conclusion as modern physics (after the resolution of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox): if no one is able to observe the world and probe it in some way, then the world's every quality and quantity is in some way undetermined or nonexistent.

Thinking about this and talking with my friends, I eventually got down to the last few charges. I was disappointed that the experience would come to an end so soon, so D offered me some of his 20x salvia. Relishing the chance to try salvia again, especially with the added bonus of being able to hold it in longer because of the effects of the nitrous, I decided to go for it.

My salvia experiences have been pretty interesting, for the most part. I've used it as a tincture, unextracted, and in varying degrees of extraction. Usually I just feel the salvia push (which I think is an effect of salvia somehow affecting the motor cortex so that I can't hold my head up correctly). Sometimes, though, I've blended into furniture (feeling like part of a couch or a bed). I've also had one prior ego-dissolving experience (after a night of failed attempts to use 5-MeO-DMT [and, trust me, I smoked, insufflated, and vaporized enough to drive most people nuts - something like 30 mg]): the world seemed to be covered by or extruded from a greyish-red plastic sheet with the word 'Because' written in it. The sheet divided the world into two halves, defined by me and the people I was with: our necks and above, and then everything below. It took me about two minutes to know where I was, who I was, and what had just happened; I'd estimate that that particular experience lasted about thirty seconds to a minute.

All of these experiences are unified by the sense that the world has gained an extra dimension, somehow. Sometimes it's like I'm looking at the world side-on, somehow 'just to the side' of the normal three-dimensional universe. Other times it has been as though I've been looking at slices of spacetime: I'll see objects map out static four-dimensional objects, but they'll still make sense to me and possess the correct directionality (I won't perceive things as occurring opposite from how they really proceed).

I was intrigued by the possibility of another strong ego-dissolver, so D packed his homemade bong, the Blue Fairy, with 20x salvia. With the few nitrous charges left sitting in my lap and a torch lighter in my hand, I smoked the bowl in two big hits. I remember taking the hits, but then...

I found myself rolling around on the ground, laughing. Whatever had just happened was totally amazing, and I was really pleased by it. My friends say that I was howling like some kind of subhuman animal, and that the howling slowly turned into understandable words: 'That was awesome! That was SO COOL!' I yelled this over and over, still affected with a total lack of equilibrium, until I'd recovered enough to sit back down on the couch. Since my friend had saved the charges from my laugh in a great show of foresight, I sat down and finished them off to help calm myself down. I still felt weird for about an hour afterward, though, and I kept admonishing my friends with just how cool the experience had been.

It took me about two days to really process what had happened, and I still can't remember how I got from the couch to the floor. But the best I can articulate the experience is as follows: while I was rolling around on the ground, the world retracted into something. If you've ever looked at a chapstick, you've seen how turning the tube causes the chapstick to move in and out. This experience was like the world was being both retracted and twisted into a point just behind my butt, such that my view was of a spiraling shape that had spokes in it, sort of like a half of a lemon or lime. It was like tumbling about inside of some cosmic chapstick tube. Neat!

In any case, I was really impressed by this experience. I had started to think that I would never have an experience like the plastic sheet again, or that maybe salvia would only affect me that way with some 5-MeO-DMT primer. I'm glad I was wrong! As far as possibilities for future use, I'm still not salvia's biggest fan - I only want to use it every once in a while. And I've not found salvia to be very profound: although it can be extremely consuming, I haven't found very much meaning in it. But it's a good substance, and it's worth a try as long as one is receptive to something so aggressively weird.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 33763
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 28, 2004	Views: 18,541
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Salvia divinorum (44), Nitrous Oxide (40) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Retrospective / Summary (11), Combinations (3)