DOSE:

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

120 lb

I’m sitting on a step to the back door of my friend’s house beside a barbecue at about 8:00pm. As I looked at the full bowl in my pipe, I knew that there was more than I should be smoking at once. It was more than I gave to the previous tripper and he didn’t even finish it; two people got high off of the last so-called hit. So I ignite the salvia and listen to it crackle up as I think to myself, “Oh shit. That’s a lot more than I thought.” I was told many times by my friends that the hit should be held in for a long time or it won’t work, but it was a huge hit and I exhaled almost right away. I put the pipe down on the barbecue shelf as everyone bitched about exhaling too soon, but I soon realized that holding the hit in was not needed.

It’s hard to remember the first feelings. It was as if my vision was distorted, but I still could not pinpoint any difference in anything I looked at…. for a while. Some of my muscles also felt very heavy(a cool feeling that you get even on small doses, one of the only effects after taking a small hit other than some cool vision changes similar to those of mushrooms). The heavy feeling is followed by a stage that makes the user feel as his or her body is being stretched and smeared around.

This is where it gets hard to remember(I still don’t remember a lot of what happened in the physical world; it took a lot of work and talking to the people who were there to piece everything together afterwards) but I will explain it as well as I can. At this point, according to my friends, was when I tried to get up. There was still some salvia on my scale tray sitting on the barbecue’s shelf next to me. Apparently I wasn’t able to support myself and put my hand on the tray and salvia as I got up, but my friends managed to save it and get my hands away from it. I believe this is when I started leaning on the top of the barbecue.

My elbows were on the surface with my hands supporting my head. I do remember being in this position for a little bit and I think I was there for most of the trip but this is still unclear. I then started to go into a different world. While I was leaning on the barbecue, I remember wondering why I couldn’t stand, and my goal was to figure out how to stand up(we discovered that most people had important goals during their trips, which are focused on intensely, that they want to accomplish). My goal was to stand up. I will discuss these goals in more detail later.

While leaning on this barbecue, I felt as if my body was turned horizontally and I lost touch with the ground(the ground disappeared and I paid no attention to where my body was), but I was very low to the ground(or where it would have been if it was there). I remember being above the barbecue and then feeling myself move down to about knee-level and seeing, up close, the side of the barbecue from that level, but according to some people I was leaning on the top of the barbecue the whole time. At that point, my body felt as though it was twisting up, in an uncomfortable but painless way. I was still thinking of how I was going to stand up, but it was getting harder because my body was twisting around the barbecue in ways that my joints would never be able to bend(remember, I’m still lying horizontally in the air).

All of a sudden, all the colours of the barbecue, the wall behind it, and everything else in sight twisted together in one big swirl. That was when I lost touch with my body, which was strange because I was still focused on my goal of standing up. This is when it got really scary. I was in another dimension of many colours that cannot be described. In some trips, salvia erases reality and then rebuilds a new reality that I believe is real, even though it’s nowhere close to real. For most of the time, this world that I was in felt like the only world I ever knew and I was completely ignorant about the real world. I literally did not even know there was another world; I was in the only world I knew. Sometimes my eyes would see the barbecue or the wall behind it, but my mind would not process it. My mind felt like it was touching the whole universe and what my eyes saw did not matter.

The following is the strangest part. As I was in this colourful dimension, I was still thinking about my goal of standing up, even though I was unaware that I even had a physical body. I might as well just say that the physical world and my body never existed, because in my mind, they didn’t. So I’m in this world of moving colours, hoping to stand up even though there is no physical world at all and I only know of this new, strange universe, and nothing else.

This is the peak of the high, and the part that made it a scary trip. During the time of the new dimension, I felt that I had a master that had complete control over me(do not ask what this master was because it cannot be explained). It was like this higher being was disallowing me to stand up and I remember thinking, “Why can’t I stand? Why won’t you let me stand up?” I was constantly begging and pleading for permission to stand up with a body that didn’t exist. I felt helpless and I did not know what else I could do because this higher being did not give me permission to stand. It felt like I would be stuck there forever, since I had no knowledge of reality.

Soon after, I started to regain consciousness, but that does not mean that things were making sense again. The entrance to reality was just like the exit. All the colours unswirled to become the backyard of my friend’s house, but when I was able to make sense of what I saw, I was sitting back on the step. I later found out that my friends were worried and sat me back down, but I do not remember when. So I find myself looking down at everyone’s feet, but as I was looking at everything, I still didn’t know what anything was. After a while, I eventually saw that I was looking at everyone’s feet and thought to myself, “Whoa, I’ve been looking at them for so long and I didn’t know what/who they were.” When things started to make sense, I kind of felt embarrassed because I didn’t know what stupid shit I did, when I didn’t even do anything stupid at all. I actually assumed that I was previously stumbling all over the place, when I really wasn’t.

Then I got to that stage where I thought I was normal enough to associate with others. During that stage, you think you’re normal enough to describe how you feel/felt, but soon find out that you’re mind is still all fucked up. I’m not sure if this happened before or after I left reality, but I remember trying to talk. I was trying to state how high I was. Every time I tried to get a sentence out, the first word or two made it out, but my voice would cut off and wouldn’t work. I eventually gave up and buried my face in my sleeve to signal to everyone else that I was unable to speak. This was the only logical solution I could think of at the time. It was disappointing, because I was dying to share with everyone what I had just experienced.

After a couple seconds, I was able to speak, and for some reason, my friend’s music from his headphones really got to me. It didn’t make me angry, but for some reason(well, not really), I felt that it had to be turned off.

“Dude, turn that off.”
“Uhhh, what?”
“Do it. Turn that music off now.”
“Uhh, ok. How about I just change the song?”
“No, it has to be off…. Actually, whatever… Doesn’t matter. Change it.”

This was confusing because it cannot be explained for at all. It’s similar to when my friend was tripping out at about the same time I was and his ‘goal’ was to tell our other friend to shut the fuck up. He didn’t want to hear the guy talk(who was also a bit high at the time) and it was important to him that he got the guy to be quiet. He felt pretty bad about that afterwards because it was so random. This is the ‘special goal’ that I’m talking about.

Things came back to normal quickly after this. I remember people telling me that I was out for about five to ten minutes, but it felt like less than a minute. Apparently, I looked like I was going to fall over and black out. I guess that new world was a black out, but I didn’t fall over. Afterwards, there was a strange physical burnout and, in this stage. This stage only lastED a few minutes to leave the me completely sober, awake, and aware, but, also, very relaxed as well.

This was written to the best of my knowledge, and it took a lot of time afterwards to figure out what happened. I even forgot about most of my trip until it slowly started to piece itself together in my memory. A lot of my time was spent that night talking to my friends about what was happening during the trip, which is the key, for me, to remembering the forgotten parts.

The Goal

As for this ‘special goal’, none of us had ever heard about it before and we only learned about it from our own experience. I feel that it is because my mind becomes focused on one thing, and if that thing is a goal that can be accomplished or knowledge I seek, I will not give up until this happens or until I'm back in reality. The best example of this special goal is a friend’s trip later that night. There were four of us in the room. She took her pail of salvia and said some scary shit.

She got herself worked up about a secret that she thought we were holding from her. This seemed liked a strange trip because she had such an intense mental trip while still communicating with us in the real world, although she didn’t remember anything other than the mental world with parts of reality incorporated into it. After making herself believe that we were holding a secret from her, she started to get pissed off. This is a person that most people have never seen angry before and she never raises her voice - the calmest person I’ve ever met. She started yelling violently and swearing at us, asking us to “tell her” but we could not figure out how to respond. We actually thought that she would become violent.

She even described a series of events that happened in her mind that related to this secret(like my mental world involved my goal of standing up, a goal from the physical world). It involved an army or a group like an army marching nonstop with one leader telling her to come march with them. She thought that they too were holding this secret from her and she said that she was skeptical of the people in her vision for that reason. She did not give up on figuring out what this secret was until she became happy and she laughed a lot for a short period of time; strangely, she became sober in an instant rather than after a slow transition. There is much about her trip that I will not describe because I only want to show this idea of the ‘special goal’. I have never seen any source of information mention this special goal, so this matter requires more investigation.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 42679
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 5, 2006	Views: 21,260
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Salvia divinorum (44) : General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)