Salvia Insanity from 1.5 years ago. Saved by the Cat!

Hello Again,

An online friend asked me if i had any salvia reports, so i thought i'd share this group of trips from about 18 months ago. i found salvia divinorum to be a very healing entheogen. With her help i was able to quickly (cold turkey) detox from over 10 years of heavy SSRI (anti-depressant) use. Other, health improving behaviors soon followed. Here are the experiences.

i came to salvia divinorum during a midlife crisis and after a significant break from all psychedelics. Before trying it i did a lot of reading and online research (erowid & sagewisdom).


First Experience 10X:
It took me 6 attempts to penetrate past Salvia levels one or two. The first time this happened i was lying down with my eyes closed. For the first time in my life i actually had a vision. A difficult to recall yet oddly coherant narrative.

After holding the smoke, setting the pipe down and starting a timer, i lay down and closed my eyes. Almost immediately my vision was impacted by sheets of bright colors in blue, purple and green tones. My body felt like it was falling at a sharp angle that i can only describe as 90 degrees from (consensual) reality. Not bad for not owning a linear accelerator. i heard voices.

Very rapidly the sheets of color coalesced into a green athletic field on a bright summer day. People i knew but could not name were there. They observed, spoke and joked about many topics - mainly the kids on the field. But, there was an odd undertone - as if everyone kept expecting me to get up and do something. i believe that in this vision i was lying on her back on the green field.

It feels insane to write this, but for me it literally felt like months, i.e. the Summer passed. That odd feeling of expectation continued. i remember joking with one of the other women, making the punch line of some sort of play on words that caused everyone, including me to laugh.

Very soon after i realized i was on my bed laughing. i had a residual buzz and minor visual "trails" for awhile longer but the main experience was over. Incredibly, my timer indicated 4 1/2 minutes.

i had never experienced anything like this before and took some time off for contemplation. i felt very good and positive for the next day or two.

My feeling in hindsight is that this scene was lifted from my childhood somehow. It was reminiscent of weekends when i played on a soccer team as a child. But, this time i was with the adults watching the kids. And yet something wasn't being done (by me), something was still being expected of me. . .


Second Experience 10x - saved by the cat:
About a week later i decided to try again. i had had a couple of unsuccessful attempts so i made sure i was plenty buzzed on Cannabis. i then cleaned my water pipe and filled it with ice water. i loaded a small bed of Cannabis then laid a generous amount of Salvia on top.

Before proceeding in this description, i must mention that my brother's black cat, Scorn, was spending the night with me (at the time i was living apart from my husband). Scorn is a simple, loving cat, who is easily confused. The first few times Scorn had stayed over she had been confined to my bedroom. But, the past few overnight visits she had been allowed the run of my large, two-bedroom apartment.

i had heard and read accounts of somnambulistic behavior (sleep-walking) on Salvia and was worried about the stairs. i barricaded the hallway and locked myself in the bedroom, hoping this would stop any potential dangerous, walking-off situations. Ha!

Well, Scorn did not appreciate the closed/locked door. She thought the new order of things was that she got free run of the entire apartment. It took me awhile to realize that i had caused Scorn stress by closing the door. By this time i was fully in Salvia space!

i had smoked the bowl of Cannabis/Salvia and held the smoke for 20-30 seconds, set the pipe down and started a timer. i immediately (and without any sort of memorable transition) was blasted into an extremely foreign world. i felt that i could communicate (almost telepathically?!?) with my brother who had recently exited my place. i felt that the walls and rooms were melting into each other. Complete and utter non-Euclidean geometry took over. i had my glasses off and for the first time ever had some trouble with double-vision. The weird geometry made everything seem connected, made large distances seem tiny. i had my eyes open and could "see" into all of the rooms of the apartment. i also thought i could "hear" her brother speaking (perhaps to his wife or children in their apartment down the street).

The next thing i knew i had rapidly jumped off the bed and was standing up. Scorn was at the locked door meowing and looking at me. Scorn was perfectly clear. Scorn was not part of the weird, melding geometry where i felt i could take a single step and be down the stairs and out on the street. My vision was hitting me in layered, melting waves. i could feel an intense, eerie and extremely familiar sense of presences just beyond my sensory reach. It seemed if i could just "shift" a bit more that i would actually be able to see people standing around me. These people were clearly stationary and ephemeral.

This was familiar, i quickly came to realize because i had been here before! Holy shit!

Over 20 years ago i had had a bad LSD trip, that among other things, sent me to what i can only describe as "The Realm of the Dead." During this scary experience (actually terrifying and harrowing but that is another story . . .)i saw many "people" who were not really present in consensual reality. They were dressed from different eras. They all had bleached, bluish faces. i could not (and did not want to) communicate with them. They seemed strangely and completely disconnected, neither benevolent nor directly threatening, yet inherently terrifying.

That was 20 years ago and this was now. As i stood up and rapidly opened the locked door (That didn't work too well.) Scorn exited my bedroom and i followed Scorn. Scorn led me on a silly and merry chase through two different rooms, meowing anxiously all the way. As i followed, i kept saying "Scorn!" ifeel that was the only English word that i possessed at that moment. When i tried to explain this to my brother he asked if i couldn't speak English what could i speak? My answer was something bizarre like, "pre-verbal space."

It was very odd. i realized that i was back in the Realm of the Dead (at least on the left hand side of my vision) but could not see the "spirits," although si he knew they were there. There was absolutely no fear or terror this time. More a sense of wonder and amazement. A realization that i had been here before and a strong sense of inquiry into why i was here again and what it might mean? i felt that i had not completely penetrated to this other realm, as had happened previously, but that i was incredibly close. If i could just step a tiny distance more into that "other" parallel universe, i would be able to see the presences.

On the right hand side of my vision, something strange was happening. The entire view had broken up into rectangles that were the height of the room. Shimmering 3-D, smoke-colored rectangles with black borders. It was obvious that each of these rectangles was a door! A door into another dimension. i was just about to pick one and step on through (or at least stick my head through), but i was concerned about Scorn's anxiety. i knew Scorn didn't want to be locked into a single room anymore (even tho i had already let her out - Sage Space Logic). Reality had completely dissolved into a science fiction fantasy but everything and every thought about Scorn came through clearly. Just when i thought i was going to see those who inhabit the Realm of the Dead and/or peek through a door into another Universe, Scorn came through alive and well. i am grateful for this because i knows if i had tried to step through that inter-dimensional door that i would have smashed into a wall and probably broken a tooth or my nose! Reality gets in the way of the most interesting, fun and intriguing fantasies at times . . .

As i walked Scorn back to the bedroom the effects began to rapidly subside, though i still had those "tripping hard" feelings and perceptual distortions, but i could see the room(s) re-coalescing nicely around her. i kept saying "Scorn," while petting the cat and laughing. Scorn was so incredibly soft and very appreciative of the attention (and the now open bedroom door). i stopped my timer and saw that just under seven minutes had elapsed this time. Perhaps i was beginning the process of "getting to know the plant." i hoped so, because the failed attempts were weird and frustrating and these were the kind of experiences that i came away from feeling intrigued, fascinated and excited by.


Transition:
There were a couple more trips, whose content was either unnotable or too personal. One in particular allowed me to make a breakthrough in an supervisorial/employee relationship that i was involved in at the time. During this time, among other effects, i experienced reverse tolerance. That is, where it used to take multiple tokes off of 10x, i could now have a full-blown vision experience with a single toke of 5x. Also, i had quit timing my sessions.


5th Salvia Trip, Journey into a Matrix-Like Parallel Universe: 5x standardized
Again, i was descending into a feeling of familiarity. i was with other presences who had expectations of me. Something needed to be done. i was alone in my bedroom but felt that others (other me's) were also lying down . i quickly came to realize that i was not in my bedroom at all but floating in gray space while lying in a body-shaped capsule which looked like the bottom half of a sarcophagus. In fact i was floating among a group of bodies positioned in these sarcophagae. These bodies were arrayed out in truly huge hand formation.

i rapidly came back to my bedroom and enjoyed a very pleasant, colorful psychedelic drift.

This "other dimension" seemed somehow calmer, more at peace. The usual sense of tension/something needed to be done was there, though there was lacking a certain previous intensity. It felt more comfortably familiar.

Looking back on this vision, all of those me's laid out in a hand formation was very comforting on an extremely simple and genetic level.

Though many interpretations are possible, for me it was like a subconscious message that everything was literally in hand! Seeing that all the other me's in all the other nearby parallel universes were doing the EXACT same thing that i was doing was very reassuring and assuaging of recent feelings of lonliness.

i have come to learn that my subconscious lives in my childhood neighborhood and realm and is very young and simplistic in its messages. It is also apparently somewhat religious. This is endlessly fascinating to me. . .

Peace & Love,
Spicey Cat
Brrrrp!

 

nice report, made me want to try some 5x. this kind of experience is what i want to have on salvia, the full blown breakthroughs i was getting from 20x were always making me dissociate, and i'm lacking the courage to travel in salvialand again because of this. dissociation smells terror. shamanistic journeys with your ego still intact are different, positive feelings. i'm missing those.

 

Spicey, I can't believe I'm only now finding this. Reports like these are what make me think that anything above 10x is superfluous. I really don't think Salvia was meant to be extracted into such high concentrations - bad things happen! The only similarities I find between our experiences is the sensing of "presences" all around, talking but not being able to see them clearly and the distinct feeling of them wanting/expecting me to do something (they wanted me to "join" and become part of them as I was merging with everything around me). The rest of my trip was completely dissociated from my body, mind, this "reality" and all content of the trip. Although it was the most intense drug induced experience of my life, I could not find anything significant or profound about it because it was too chaotic and moving way too fast. There just was not enough of "me" to process what it was trying to tell me and I could feel the disappointment and annoyance all around me - one of the sensations I retained through the whole trip was that I had done something wrong and that I didn't belong there (shame, embarrassment). There were so many different themes and elements to my trip, all going by so fast I can't even begin to put it all into a coherent report. The closest thing I can come to describing it was like I was reliving every negative, embarrassing, scary memory of my entire life all in 5 minutes - that's not exactly right as there was much more to it than that, but the eerily familiar feeling of having been there before was unmistakable. It was the strangest, most alien bizarre place I'd ever seen, yet it felt like I'd been there a million times. I still can't comprehend that.

I am officially scared off of trying to smoke anything higher than 10x (I did 25x, I can't even imagine why they even make 60x and higher). When/IF I ever decide I'm ready to revisit that place, I will go with a sublingual tincture or similar. Salvia made it clear to me it does not like to be extracted and burned...

 

Interesting commentary SB, thank you.

What follows are my impressions from my recent first experience with this magical plant.
I crossed paths with a bit of 10x after having read a bit (not alot) and thinking I had a moderate sense of what to expect. My psychedelic background goes back 25-30yr range, I'm only recently reintroducing myself to experiences for a few personal reasons.
Wanting to slip into this comfortably, I loaded an approximation of 1 hit into a pipe and made myself comfortable, centered my thoughts and downed it. I felt a mild warping of perception of space and senses, pleasant, non threatening and quite mellow. I giggled a few times involuntarily, as if being tickled.
Deciding this would be a good thing to explore further, I revisited my 'normal' thoughts and opened my mind, turned on some spongle along with a visual accompaniment on the large flat screen in the room. Loaded approx 2 large tokes. Took one deep for 15 or so secs, and took the second and set down the pipe. Almost immediately went straight to a very heavy 'salvia gravity' state very much like I have read about. It was the kind pulling me down. It was VERY intense, I vaguely retained the sense of being supported (by the comfy couch i was in) but the gravity pulled so hard I felt like pieces of me were being pulled off and falling away, but not. It was inexplicable. The audio in the room reverberated even more, adding to the glow all around. I think the best way to describe that first stage was like being on a linear accelerator as Spicey Cat described, with none of the machinery around. My eyes focused on the visuals keyed to the music (the program is called Milk Drop, an add on to WinAmp.) There is an LED light on the collection of electronics along with the flat screen that shines straight out, not blue but not quite white. As I looked at the visuals I could see the individual photons emanating from this led, streaming towards me as I felt pulled towards the visuals...
As the 'blast off' effect subsided a bit it transitioned to a spiritual feeling that was quite odd. SB's post above is what made me contribute this.

"The only similarities I find between our experiences is the sensing of "presences" all around, talking but not being able to see them clearly and the distinct feeling of them wanting/expecting me to do something (they wanted me to "join" and become part of them as I was merging with everything around me)."

I felt this 'presence'... in no way describable. But I could "hear" "it" communicating to me (not in a voice) something akin to... "so you thought this plant was a toy, not to be taken serious but to be played with for entertainment...? well now you know different. Welcome, this is your introduction. Not what you expected is it? " It was the feeling of being introduced to a big secret, a sacred "place" that you've heard stories about but thought they were exaggerated.
It was very remeniscent of my first experience with LSD. A sudden " OH!!! "
As was the case for SB, I wasn't able to retain much of the good psychedelia from the experience, but for slightly different reasons. Yes, for me too it was too fast and chaotic... I felt like it was impossible to keep up, part of the 'shot down an accelerator' feeling. So I just let it take me and I took on the role of observer, just trying to take notes. I had none of the negatives she describes. The only one I have is it's too short. Given time to adjust to the incredible speed, I feel I could dwell in the environment and soak up the lessons and experiences. But it's just to short.

In my previous experiences with LSD and mushrooms, I came up slow, could readjust as the new world unfolded, keep pace and navigate. In the different levels I could adapt to the environment and hold on to my explorations. And coming down slow they I could continue to hold on to them. Salvia will have none of this. For someone's first experience I would put in the tourist's pamphlet, Leave all your belongings here, you won't be able to hold on to them anyway. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.
After the ride, you gather up your stuff and try to assimilate the experience, still playing catchup.

Further explorations required to understand this psychedelic.

 

There is a sticky thread section of I think 3 topics at the top in the salvia forum where in one I posted what I believe to be the most efficient techniques to journeying with salvia. Most of it is 'common knowledge' so its not really strictly my viewpoint though some of it is. I think its worthwhile to check out though, unfortunately I can't link it here.

 

Thx GB. I had read that awhile back, good advice and good reading.