DOSE:

1 hit

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 10x)

BODY WEIGHT:

152 lb

Intro:

It was Sunday night. I had just been out to Fire Island for the weekend with a bunch of friends. It is a strange place. The vegetation and everything sort of looks out of this world. So the whole weekend leading up until this point put me into a strange mood. It was also depressing. I was really hitting my peak of being Bi-Polar and it was actually before I had been diagnosed yet. And I wasnt on any type of medication to stabilize myself. So, they were very dark days I was in. This feeling had been building for a year now, and smoking marijuana every day was making my feel really bad. In a strange way. Everything was SOOO hightened just by smoking pot, that I couldnt stand anything. Music was too beautiful but too sad. The sky, the moon. I could barely function. I would always feel every emotion at once. I could not seperate them. I didn't think drugs had anything to do with it. I just thought I had some special connection with the world.

I had actually started to think very manic thoughts. I thought that I understood the universe. Not all the little things that made up the universe, like how chemical bonds work, but I could see the energy and connectiveness. I even thought I figured out a way to freeze time in a small boxed in area. But I wanted to go deeper and deeper with these thoughts. I thought that they would free me from my depression and I could be happy if I understood things better. But I was just digging myself into a hole.

Another thing to note is that over the past year or so leading up to this point, any
psychedelic experience through mushrooms or acid was not particularly good. Each
one seemed to be worse than the last. Also I had an experience while taking 4 hits
of acid and half of a pill of ectasy that led me to believe I understood the whole universe and that it would be fine if I had died that moment, because there was no
such thing as time and that past present and future were the same. Time
was just an illusion, and the meaning of one was so obtainable. In fact I completely understood it.

No one ever seemed to understand the things I felt while I smoked marijuana with them. I even had a scary experience where I though I had finally gone crazy. It was about 3 months or so before this experience. I was smoking marijuana and I thought I figured how the 'Universe is discovering itself' and that it is nothing more than an evolved state of energy opposites, who's patterns are now soffisticated enough to realize its own existance. I was scared I was going to end up in the hospital.

Experience: (Beginning of May, 2004)

I received some 10x extract of Salvia Divinorum. So I prepared myself in my bedroom apartment. I got into my boxers, packed a wooden bowl, and meditated for about 10 minutes. I felt ok. So I put the bowl to my mouth, lit the Salvia, and inhaled. I was aiming for 30 seconds. I had problems with regular salvia leaves doing anything so I tried to get as much out of it as possible. I put the bowl down in case something would happen. 17...18....19........20..............

All of a sudden I forgot what I was doing. I felt dizzy. I didn't know how I got on the bed, in my boxers, and what I was doing. I felt a force pulling me back. It grew stronger. I couldn't hold myself up. There was no resisting it. As I fell back on the bed, I saw many layers of time unfold before me. It is as if time shattered into many dimensions. I was apart of all of them. Someone or something was there with me. It was not good spirited. It whispered to me, 'That's it. You really did it this time. There is no turning back. Once you fall into the void and the universe ends, that will be it. It will be as if nothing ever existed'. And it was all my fault! I yelled out my roommates name.

My arms stretched out, and out, and out in all directions, melting into infinity. My arms became the space around me. Then, after they reached as far as I could see, the universe started to turn in on me, against me, closing in from all directions. This was it. I was now in a completely different world. I was no longer in my room. My room had melted into a multi-dimensional field made of fractals and geometric patterns. There was nothing I could do. I was glued to everything. I was part of everything. I couldn't escape it. How can I escape myself? There was no where for me to go. I felt the most extreme clostriphobic feeling I could ever have.

I no longer had arms, or legs. or a body. Everything had melted into everything. I had just my head left that was also melting into everthing. The universe closed over my ears. I could no longer hear. It closed over my mouth. I couldn't breathe or speak. It closed over my nose. I could not smell. As soon as it would cover my eyes, I knew the universe would disappear. And it did. For a split second my universe ended. I do not know what happened at that moment, or for how long it lasted. Supposedly, the whole experience lasted barely over 5 minutes. I don't know.

The universe started coming back to me. I couldn't believe it. It was like I was given my life back. And everyone else too, since I destroyed their lives as well. The first thing I noticed in my room was the clock beside my bed. I was laying down on my back with my head turned. I tried to turn my head. But the strange part is that I turned my head to the other side, but to me it was like I turned my head 50 times just to do it, every time I would get a bit closer. Time was still in multiple layers. The room seemed very dark. The light however was on.

My roommate was standing over top of me, looking at me like in a very confused manner. I never told anyone I was going to do it. I went through the experience alone. I tried to get off the bed, but it felt like I got up 50 times. And each time I got up a little further. This force just PULLED me. There was no stopping it. I couldn't walk so I had to crawl on the floor. I was still part of everything. I was part of the floor. I was sliding along it because I couldn't seperate from it. I needed to get out of that evil room.

My other roommate was on the phone and I was talking jibberish so she thought it
was funny that I just had some bad experience and so she put me on the phone with her friend. I didn't know what was going on, so it seemed to me that they were behind the experience. They were laughing at me. I knew it was them! They were all in on this big scheme. They were the masterminds behind what reality was and it was a big joke they were pulling on me. I eventually thought differently after about 10 minutes. But I was still unsure if I should trust them or not. That took a bit more time.

One thing that could have attributed to the experience is that I am unsure of how long I continued to hold my breath after I became confused and forgot what I was doing. One could say that it is possible that I progressed to the state where the universe closed in on me because I held my breath and I eventually blacked out. I was checked months after for signs of a stroke. The test showed no signs of brain damage.

Post-Traumatic experiences I have had since then are as follows, but not limited to:

1) I was sitting in a restaraunt with a friend a few months later. All of a sudden, I felt like I was stuck. I started to panic. I could feel that I was apart of everything. The universe. But not in a good way. A very bad and helpless way. It was like there was no way of deciding your own fate because you are only doing things as a result of forces upon you. I knew I was just a result of something else and I would be stuck like this for eternity. Everything seemed different, like we were living in a 'block' instead of what we normally appear to be empty space. We were just sliding around inside this block of energy and molecules.

2) Another bad part of the experience, and probably the worst out of all side effects, is that I can become very very frightened. I personally believe I experienced the most frightening feeling possible. And now that I have experienced a feeling like that, I can now make up scarier things in my mind than I could before. And I can think about them in a new light. For example, I could easily imagine the sky opening up and
angels and demons start pouring out. And I can really feel the fright that one would
feel if that were to happen.

3) I can not watch movies that involve death very easily. I have a very hard time sitting for more than a few minutes through a movie that involves a topic about someone with a mental problem or if the plot revovles around experimenting with the brain.
I am still not sure what happened to me, and I am afraid to think there is something
wrong with me.

4) I saw the world as only energy for a long period of time. I finally can go a day or so without thinking this way. It has been a very intruding feeling that takes up a lot of precious time. There are other things that I would rather think about.

5) Sometimes I question (but less over time) if I am really alive. I wonder if I died
during that closing moment during my experience. I have wondered if this is all a dream of mine that has some how continued from where my life ended. And at those times I become scared and everyone around me becomes empty.

I tried smoking marijuana a week later. I was in my same bedroom. I started to
get very nervous. I looked out of my window to try to calm down. It was at night
time. I looked out at the tree along the street and I could see nothing but billions of chaos theory patterns and fractal designs construct the entire universe. It was so clear! I could see inside of everything. I started to become extremely terrified. I did not want to see the world this way. I thought to myself, I can't live my life like this. I thought, if this doesn't end I would have to kill myself. I could feel my body as only energy, along with the whole universe. I was scared my consciousness, my spirit, my soul, would just dissolve into the rest of the universe and I would no longer exist.

The next 8 or 9 months were a living hell. The immediate 3 or 4 after, I couldn't tell what was what. At first I was ok, but I guess the denial was helping me stay straight. But things just fell apart. Other things also contributed to the manic states I went through. I was prescribed anti-depressants twice. And since I am bi-polar, each time I went into a manic state seemed to have a long lasting effect. The first time I was hospitalized for 3 days and was told for the first time I am bi-polar. Eventually I was put on Risperdal and finally Depakote.

I feel better now. Better than I have in about 7 years. I don't know that I would if it wasn't for the worst experience of my life. I will, though, never be able to forget the Extreme Terror that I felt that night. It will always haunt me. Even if it is very occasionally. Like being in the same room with Satan I guess. I hope others have had more pleasant experiences.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 44258
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 28, 2007	Views: 24,017
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Salvia divinorum (44), Endogenous (86) : Bad Trips (6), Post Trip Problems (8), HPPD / Lasting Visuals (40), Health Problems (27), Alone (16)