DOSE:

repeated

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

It’s a Wednesday night in August 2007, I took the day off work to go to my school to sort things out for the fall. When I got home I felt really tired and kind of wanted to do something that night. A friend of mine in Brampton was having a couple people over to watch a movie but I didn’t have a ride or really feel like it. Then I remembered I still had some salvia, and asked my friend T if he wanted to go smoke it with me in a park.

We found a place in the forest that seemed relatively peaceful and comfortable. I put about half the little bag of salvia in the pipe, lay back, and smoked. I took two decent hits, and held the smoke in for as long as I could. Almost as soon as I let out the second hit, I felt surrounded by entities of some sort. I couldn’t see them, but I sensed that there were quite a lot of them in a circle around me, watching me. I felt them pulling me somewhere and trying to take control. There was one on my right that felt very close to me, and it started taking control of my arm, which still held the pipe. It started telling me to give the pipe to T, and to lie down, close my eyes, and go with them—let them take control.

Upon closing my eyes I saw a wall of moving colourful patterns, and I felt the entities kind of gather closer. This really scared me, whatever these entities were, I could feel that they were not anything good, and that I really did not want to give up control to them and go wherever they wanted to take me. So I opened my eyes, sat up, and just tried to ignore it, stood up and started talking to T, tried to act as normal as I could, even though I still felt kind of removed and almost like a puppet, as if something was still partially controlling me. I had a moment of paranoia, the very common fear that I would be like this forever. Scenes and voices flashed in my head, of my girlfriend and friends and family saying things like, “Man you don’t seem like yourself, you’ve been really weird lately, what’s going on?”

I then put the rest of the salvia in the pipe cuz T wanted to smoke some too. He took two hits, holding the smoke in for a good amount of time, but after a little while he said he didn’t feel anything. So we left the park and walked downtown to use a payphone to try and locate some other folks. My girlfriend dropped by and chilled with us for a bit, then we all just went home. By this time I felt pretty much normal, but still a little dissociated and hazy, and still freaked out by the experience.

I know psychedelics are very sensitive to set and setting, and I have heard that this is especially true for salvia. I am quite an emotional person, and not the most stable of sorts. I must admit that I didn’t feel 100% good about smoking the salvia before I did it, and of course this might have contributed to my somewhat disturbing experience. I had smoked salvia several days ago at a friend’s bonfire, and I was in a much, much better headspace then. It was not as intense of an experience—I didn’t hold the smoke in nearly as long, and there were quite a few distractions—but I found it more enjoyable.

Me and two friends walked about 30 metres away from the bonfire, I brought a comfy lawn chair to sit in. They watched as I packed the bowl and smoked the salvia, taking several hits. Despite my greatest efforts, for some reason I couldn’t hold the smoke in for longer than a few seconds. I handed the pipe over to my buddy and lay back in the chair and closed my eyes to see if anything would happen.

With eyes closed, I could still see my two friends in front of me, but yet not visually. It’s hard to explain…it’s like I could see them a third eye or something, I could sense that they were there, and I also had this image of them in my mind, like I knew exactly what they looked like and could see them talking there in front of me but I couldn’t actually SEE it with my eyes. But at the same time, I did actually see with my eyes these snowflakey shapes coming together and building a wall. Whenever either of my friends talked, the image of them in my mind would flash again, and the wall of snowflakes would break down a little. I realized that they were distracting me from the salvia, so I told them I needed to be peaceful, got out of the chair and lay down a small distance away under a tree and looked up at a cluster of trees further away.

One of the trees had this big bunch of branches kind of separate and higher than the rest of it. I started starring at it, and it looked like the silhouette of a man in different poses, doing different things, one second he’d be sitting in a pensive position, then he’d be dancing with a tambourine. Then I started to notice a greenish glow around this bunch of trees. Upon looking around the trees, I saw green designs light up against the black silhouettes, only for a second, then they’d disappear. I also saw vague swooshing shapes of green and red moving in and out and over the trees. I started to feel connected to the trees, and sympathized with their existence. I felt like they were telling me something, “Trees have feelings too.”

I looked up at the sky at the stars, and felt that all the stars were watching us humans and Earth and what we were all up to. They always have been watching us. I felt a kind of protective all-knowingness about them. They are watching us, and anticipating something huge that is going to happen: the end of the world? They are somehow involved in our history and future more than we know. Then a new star appeared. At first it was vague pinpoint of dim light, but it quickly grew in size and brightness. Then it grew two wings of light, and sprouted a tail of light from the bottom, and started flying around.

The more recent experience, the one I described first, has led me to decide to stay away from salvia from now on. Whatever those entities were, I had this feeling that they were not good. I think that God is telling me that salvia-land is not somewhere I should go. There are some very serious things out there, and some of them are evil. God is stronger than any evil, but even so, there are some things we should not dabble in.

As for my drug history: I smoke cigarettes, I’ve drunk a lot of alcohol, smoked a lot of pot, spent all of last summer in love with DXM (I still have some permanent effects, like visual abnormalities and slight dissociation) did dimenhydrinate once (absolutely terrible), morning glory seeds four times (two of these experience were downright awesome, two were flops), and tried shrooms once last summer but didn’t take enough to notice anything (I was already stoned at the time anyways). These are really the only two times that salvia did something for me. I had tried salvia three or four times prior, with no significant effects, aside from a mild high and tingly feeling, and very, very faint CEV’s. I’m glad I finally got to experience something worth talking about, but I’m also glad I never had a fully immersed, full-blown, out-of-body sort of trip on salvia. Even though this is what I was seeking, I realize now that I probably would have been very uncomfortable and terrified. Some people really enjoy salvia, and some people don’t. I experienced some cool things, but that’s it for me.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 65136
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 19, 2010	Views: 4,955
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Entities / Beings (37), Retrospective / Summary (11), Not Applicable (38)