DOSE:

3 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 6x)

BODY WEIGHT:

340 lb

Firstly, let me say that my initial experience with Salvia was very positive. It was a group experience with one gram of the approximately 6x Fortified Leaf and some liquid extract shared amongst three people, the details of which have been described in the previous post 'Talking to God'. In fact, I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided to order some more Salvia 6x extract from the same reliable vendor, TWO grams this time, to learn more about this amazing substance and it's entheogenic potential. I was so impressed by its positive effects, I wanted other people I knew and cared about to try it. This was an enormous mistake. I was not prepared for the extreme intensity and variability of experience which the Fortified Leaf can provide, especially in a heterogenous social setting.

When I first got the new batch, my uncle Xander immediatedly wanted to smoke some. He was the most strongly affected by the last batch, and not entirely affected in a positive way, but he wanted more. Uncle Xavier did not want any more, after having 'merged' with the fishing show we were watching on T.V. the first time we smoked it together. I think it affected him profoundly, and he chose not to do it again.

However, inevitably, Xavier and I found ourselves in a group setting of about 10 people who smoked pot. They were all close, but not near as close as we three had been the first time we used Salvia together. Everyone was doing bong hits (except for me, because I don't use Marijuana), and Xavier asked me to break out the Salvia, since we had not had a chance to smoke the new batch then. He was trying awfully hard to convince people to give it a try, and two other people did, including one of my in-laws. Also Xander and myself tried it again, about one or two tokes apiece. This was enough to produce the familiar hot flashes, sweating, and temporary somatic 'body buzz' feeling, without the full dissociative effects.

However there was a new component to this experience. The people who tried it ALL reported that, in addition to the effects described which we all experienced, there was a profound feeling of wrongness or embarassment, like everyone who was not doing it was watching them. My cousin-in-law even said specifically, 'You feel like everybody is watching you, like you've done something wrong'. I know exactly how he felt, because my experience had the same component as well in this more heterogenous social environment, where not everyone chose to partake.

A few days later, I found myself at the house of two of my friends. I say 'friends', but really, their house is like my house, I consider them family, and I am comfortable crashing in their home from time to time. But they also strike me as somewhat insensitive, self-absorbed, and high-strung at times, and I am always a bit on guard emotionally when I am with them, because of that. (Doesn't mean we can't be friends, they're just a little different than me, you know?) Anyway, they were doing bong hits, and offered me one. I declined because I don't smoke pot, but told them about my recent positive Salvia experiences, and that I had some of it with me. I offered it to them, and they declined, but after hearing my description of it, they said they wanted to watch me smoke it once.

So I fired up one hit, which was just enough of a threshhold dose to get the hot flash and the sensation of vibrating skin. However, during the experience it became paifully apparent that these people, especially my buddy's wife, just had absolutely NO IDEA what I was going through. She just kept talking to me like I was smoking your basic homegrown or something, but I was going through a profound experience. I was looking in her eyes, listening to her talk, and I guess I went a little above threshold, because for a minute or two I could not respond to her verbally, as if I was a little aphasic. But I had the profound feeling that every word they said was contrived, like a T.V. commercial script or something, and I found that very annoying. And I got that self-conscious, defensive, embarassed feeling again. Once I came out of it, I felt as perfectly normal as before I took the hit. I silently resolved not to smoke anymore until I was alone, because of how it made me feel about people in social groups who were not using it.

So, they eventually went to bed, and I was the only one left awake in the house. I went to their computer desk and sat down. I immediately noticed the really cool fractal computer wallpaper, and thought it was pretty. I was so happy to finally be alone, so I could hit this Salvia and go a little deeper into the experience. It had been so long, and last time was so good. This time I did one hit of the extract, with predictable results. I follwed it up with a second hit, and passed the body-buzz phase.

After that, I did not have a full-blown dissociative halucination, but I was looking at the fractal wallpaper, and I noticed that the computer screen seemed to be bowing slightly inward, as if it were a stretchy concave membrane. When the membrane flexed in, it seemed to crack along the lines of the fractal on the screen, revealing blackness between the cracks. The cracks got bigger as it flexed in, and smaller as it seemed to flex back to its original position, like elastic. I also saw some motion along the edge of the cracks, and I thought I heard what sounded like the din of a crowd, only very very far away. It sounded like they were saying 'he's in our world now, lets talk to him', and stuff like that, like they wanted to confront me or something. It made me a little uncomfortable that these feint voices were referring to me in the third person, and seemed annoyed. Then, the voices faded, the cracks healed, and I came out of the experience.

I waited about 5 minutes, and then decided to go back in. I was familiar with the stages of descent by now. The first hit produces a sense of hotness or elevated body temperature, sometimes with actual sweat. The second hit causes a distinct (and very powerful) somatic (body) sensation of my skin vibrating all over, as if being massaged by an electric percussion massager. After that, the threshold visual patterns occur, which for me usually involve bricks, or cracks, and plasma surrounding things. After the second hit, I began to see the same hallucination I saw before, the stretchy membrane cracking along the fractal lines of the computer screen, the activity at the edges of the cracks, and the din of the distant crowd.

Then I decided to take the third hit.

Upon taking the third hit, the cracks in reality grew much wider, several inches and growing. I began to feel sucked uncontrollably toward the growing blackness between the cracks. I cannot tell you why, but I was in abject terror of the blackness between the cracks, and had the overwhelming feeling that if I were to touch it, I would die. I looked away from the computer screen, and then realized something frightening. It wasn't just the screen that was cracking and fissuring, it was REALITY. Reality was concave, and being stretched at the weak points (usually at the borders and edges of objects in the visual field) beyond the breaking point, and I was being sucked through the void that was left.

I kicked. I screamed inside but nothing would come out. I fought not to fall in, but it was useless, I was slipping further and further. And the voices were getting louder and louder. As I fell closer, I began to see that the 'activity' I was witnessing at the edges of the cracks was, in actuality, the motion of what looked like strings of paper dolls, connected at the hands, 'lining' the boundary between reality, and the blackness. And they were looking to the person on their left, and saying something, and then looking to the person on their right and saying something. They were saying different things to each other, like 'here he comes', 'he's in our world now', 'now we have him', or 'don't let him get away'. It was the din of a crowd getting louder. And I was careening toward them into the blackness.

By this time, I was in abject terror. The experience was so real and overwhelming that I was completely in the moment and had no memory of having just taken a drug, even though I knew who I was, and my identity as 'I' was intact. As I fell farther an farther, what originally looked like paper dolls at a distance, now actually had color and shape. As they got bigger and bigger, the began to look like (and I know this sounds crazy...) PEOPLE, little plastic Mexican Fisher Price type people, only they were malevolent. Some wore hats or ponchos, and they all had very circular heads, and their hands were connected, with cylindrical bodies, and no legs or feet. And the were moving their heads back and forth, and talking to eack other. And they wanted to hurt me, to trap me there, and never let me get back.

Then, right before I fell through, the falling stopped, and one little Mexican Fisher Price man with a poncho and sombrero zoomed out of the chain of Weeble-looking people where he was, and put his face directly in mine, nose to nose. His arms were stretched so he was still holding on to his neighbors, but we were eye to eye, and face to face. And he looked directly into my face with a mean look and said 'What are YOU doing here!?! YOURE not supposed to BE here!'.

I had no response. I tried to talk, but I couldn't. Then, the concave field of vision started to flatten, the black fissures started to close, and I started to recede from the fissures. The little plastic Mexican man got sucked back into his line where he was (although, he was the one fighting unsuccesfully, now, to stay where he was at), and the line of people began to grow smaller and smaller as I receded farther and farther away from the cracks in reality, and the cracks began to heal. The din of the crowd eventually died to a whisper, and then nothing at all as the cracks closed, the fissures healed together to present the familiar scenery I saw before reality cracked, and the blackness was hidden once more.

The next day, I gave the remaining 1 and 1/2 grams to Xander, and told him what happened. he laughed at me. Made fun of me, actually, and said I should have known it was al in my head. In actuality I knew it was not real, and all in my head. In retrospect, I could see clearly that the mumblings of the crowd were likely my own Super-Ego warning me against the potentially damaging recreational use of such a powerful psychedelic. Lookinng back, I knew in my rational mind that the blackness probably represented my unconscious, which remains hidden from the conscious mind for good reason, beacuse that's the way the brain is MEANT to work. But, I also remember how REAL it seemed. I remember the entities, and how unnervingly ego-dystonic they were. It felt like they were really external entities who wanted to hurt me, and I was powerless to stop them. It felt like they were not me, and not part of my mind's own creation, while I was under.

And that was the last time I did Salvia Divinorum.

Now, It's been over a year since this happened. I might not be opposed to trying it again someday, but my advice to others contemplating this journey is...

Be Careful. Even if you expect a good experience, you never know what you're gonna get.

God Bless.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 40161
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 11, 2007	Views: 14,742
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Various (28), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), Bad Trips (6), Difficult Experiences (5), Retrospective / Summary (11), General (1)