DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 10x)

BODY WEIGHT:

175 lb

My best friend and I had recently come across some Salvia, which I guess isn't that amazing, it is legal. Anyways, we were rather excited, and both relatively experienced in the drug world (him more so than I). We both do extensive research before taking any substance, and always sit each other. I trust him with my life.

We had just finished dinner in downtown Seattle when we decided that it was getting close to time. We then drove to a place my family has just north of Seattle and decided there would be a good place to do it seeing as no one was around and it was a fairly familiar location.

I got in and began to disconnect all the smoke detectors simply because I didn't want them going off and freaking us out, and I wanted to smoke inside after hearing about how strongly Salvia kicks in. I'm glad I did this.

We turned on the TV and I set up my laptop for each of us to use while the other was tripping simply because we assumed we wouldn't want to be interrupted during the excursion.

Usually my friend is the first to take a new drug whenever we explore together, but I got to this time. He loaded his pipe with what I'd like to say was a generous portion of Salvia, although I'm not sure because I've only done it once. I nuked the bowl. The smoke tasted very strong, but not bad. I liked the taste. The Salvia was very dry and went very quickly. The smoke wasn't too hot.

I passed the pipe to my friend and held the smoke as he counted to 30. Upon reaching 30, I was feeling slightly dis-oriented, but not too terribly different. I made my way over to an open window and released the smoke just to avoid making the whole place smell like whatever Salvia smells like.

Then it hit me. The best way I can describe it is like a train, but not like a train that just hits at 60 MPH and that's it, this train seemed to hit me at about 5 MPH and rapidly increase its speed to some astronomical amount. It's a very, very steep coming up.

After having trouble making it back to my chair I sat and looked around the room. I remember seeing patterns everywhere. I was aware that I was in the room, but I couldn't make sense out of anything around me. My friend's face, the chair, the counters, anything. And superimposed over it all were these strange patterns that were opaque. I could see the patterns, and then see through them to the objects behind them that were in the room. The best way that I could describe the patterns would be to say they looked like table cloth patterns, or possibly like basket weaved patterns. I remember one very clearly that was made of squares and rectangles. It was green. Aside from that, I don't remember much.

King of the Hill was on the television and I remember that for the longest time I was trying to fight the drug, which I knew inside that I shouldn't be doing. I was trying to make sense of my friend's face and trying to make sense of my surroundings but I couldn't. Every time I'd get close I would get distracted by a character on the TV who would say something. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I remember clearly that they had their arms raised and were almost yelling as if on top of a mountain. I said something to the effect of: 'That needs to stop.' and motioned to the TV, which my friend turned off.

Then the skin irritation began. I figured it was just the drug, but it was really bothering me. My clothes felt very uncomfortable and every chair I sat in, every bed I laid on, was just not comfortable. I thought about taking my shirt off, but told myself it was just the drug. After that a slight twinge of an emotion I can only describe as terror set in. I began to wonder how long this would go on for; I began to look at the open container of Salvia on the end table and think of it as some evil substance. I remember thinking very clearly that this was the first time I had taken a drug that made me loose complete control of everything around me. I was terrified at my lack of control over anything. I felt like crying, like finding someone to hold on to, but I stopped myself with knowing that it would all be over shortly. I remember telling myself I would never do this ever again, and then I began to come down.

I began vocalizing my fears and my apprehensive thoughts about the drug. I told my friend that I hated it, that it was awful. I pleaded with him not to do it. He told me that he had to see for himself, and for some reason that terrified me, as if I would have to go through this again. Or perhaps it was just an extreme sense of empathy for someone else going through what I had just gone through. Either way I was very adamant about him not doing it. However, I didn't know when I'd be straight again, and he couldn't drive a stick, so we were stuck there. I tried to find things to do to distract me from the drug, but nothing was working. However, I had crested and I knew it was getting better.

Nervousness took over and I began to walk around as my friend filled the bowl a second time. I wanted to accomplish something, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was exactly. I found that walking around helps a lot. It calmed me down quite a bit.

After my friend hit he went off into his own world and I continued to come down. Since he had finished smoking, the goal I put myself towards accomplishing was putting all the smoke detectors back and putting the place back to the way it was before we got there. That distracted me quite well. By the time I was done with that my friend was coming down. We swapped stories and I told him about how I never wanted to do it again. We finished cleaning up, packed everything we had and about 20 minutes after we had both come down we left the house.

The drive home was uneventful, and we continued to talk about our experiences. The further away from the experience that I got, the more I realized that it was amazing. The more time that had elapsed from when I had come down, the more I realized I had learned from this experience. We tried to explain our trips the best we could to each other but each came up dry on most fronts. Salvia did a cold restart on my brain. Salvia created some sort of fatal error, and the resulting trip was my brain physically restarting, slowly booting up parts of the brain at different times. Hypothalamus, visual cortex, auditory cortex, frontal lobe, etc. Until finally I was down and my brain was fully operational. The only difference between dreaming and what Salvia did is that I still had all of my senses intact when salvia activated my dreamlike state, where I was dreaming. I was in complete sensory deprivation.

The bottom line is Salvia taught me a few things:
1. No matter how much research I did, drugs are truly an expedition, and they can hit harder than I think.
2. It reinforced my knowledge of the whole: 'It will be over' idea. I had not used that in the past as extensively as I did when I took Salvia. It is was an important thing to be able to tell myself that while under the influence. Very important, actually.
3. Salvia Divinorum is amazing. The more I think about it the more it amazes me. I was trying to fight this drug way too heavily the first time I took it and it still managed to draw out empathic and cognitive abilities that were not present when sober.

I will definitely do Salvia again in the future because I want to be much more open with it and just let it take me away.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 48252
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 1, 2022	Views: 742
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Personal Preparation (45), Guides / Sitters (39), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)