DOSE:			Alcohol - Beer/Wine
	2 hits	smoked	Salvia divinorum
	2 hits	smoked	Tobacco - Cigarettes

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

I've done several other hallucinogens before (LSD, TMA, shrooms, weed), so I felt up to trying a new one.

It was hard for me to believe that something legal could be of any real consequence, since plenty of milder things have been outlawed, so I was a bit skeptical. I ordered some 6x potency leaf from a web site, and it arrived several days later. Unfortunately, I don't have a pipe, so my method was to empty about a third of a cigarette out and fill it up with the Salvia, using a paper funnel. It's tedious, but probably kept me from doing too much. I had a couple of beers, and felt mellow enough to give it a go.

The leaf I'd put in the cigarette amounted about two decent drags, which I held in for ~10 seconds apiece. By the time I was exhaling the second drag, I began to feel a definite effect. My extremities were the first to tingle (my toes and fingers), and the feeling crept up my body a bit. I had a general sense of things closing in on me, but no identifiable emotions. I was watching TV, and kicked my feet up on the chair in front of me to see what would happen. As I watched the show, I began to feel heavy, and had a vague sense that the TV show was a portal to another world. I felt my toes pulled toward the TV, and felt as though the show was real - that the people were there with me, and we'd been in the room together for quite a while, chatting. I also felt like I was in a trailer home, for some reason, and that it was raining outside the screen door to my right (there is no screen door to my right and it wasn't raining). I continued to smoke the (now regular) cigarette, and let the experience unfold. This lasted maybe a minute, and then things moved smoothly back to normal, like waking from a dream.

I repeated this experience the following two nights with similar results. I never lost contact with reality, or experienced any stimuli that weren't present. The people on TV did look very real and three dimensional, and space in general felt kind of 'narrower.' It's very hard to relate, but I think that dreaming is the most apt analogy. In dreams, I have an unspoken knowledge of whatever unusual situation I find myself in, and don't question its reality, just as I do in everyday life. Things simply always 'were' that way, seemingly. Such was true of my Salvia forays. Beyond that, there is another odd dimension to it (at least for me) in that I also seem to know that it's a drug trip. Having two realities coexist is a difficult conception to describe. I felt at times as though there were two versions of my room, both quite similar, but somehow in different geometries, like out of phase pictures on a television screen. I existed in both, or neither, or who knows? The gradual transition from peak to baseline results in this odd shifting of realities.

My experiences seem to be much milder than many of the other posters here, but that's probably because of my crude ingestion method. I can see where smoking a big bong rip would be quite different than a couple of drags. I actually tried to use the leaf as dip (under my tongue) but nothing resulted from it after 30 minutes, so I swallowed it (still nothing).

A couple of other observations: The intensity seemed to peak very quickly after smoking, usually within 10 seconds, and would begin to taper off quite quickly as well. I felt mostly normal within a couple of minutes, each time. Also, it seems like subsequent hits after the first don't have as much impact. This could just be because the difference between true baseline and ripped is more dramatic than 'kind of' ripped and ripped. I guess it's like getting used to cold water. Once you're in, future dips aren't as noticeably cold. I would still feel like people on TV were real, but it wasn't as unusual. Still, I feel like I would get the most effect from smoking more at one time than some repeatedly, since the peak is relatively brief.

I didn't come back with any mystical insights from my experiences, but maybe that's because I'm somewhat autistic. I dissect things dispassionately. I imagine that the experience from Salvia is the brain's reaction to losing input from the body; without the train of usual stimuli to establish a coherent narrative about the world, the brain assumes it is asleep, and begins to substitute typical dream fodder for reality. The more drug taken, the deeper the dream. Because I'm not really asleep, however (certain areas of the brain are still aroused that aren't normally during sleep), the dream incorporates the degraded input into the story. If you've ever had a hypnogogic hallucination, the two feel quite similar, right down to the feeling of my body shifting and floating, a presence, a portal or locus, etc.

I plan to try a larger dosage at some point, but I'm in no hurry. It's not the kind of drug you do just for the hell of it. I'll wait until the progressively narrow sameness of adult reality needs a slap in the face. That's what drugs are for, imho.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 53976
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 11, 2008	Views: 11,196
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Salvia divinorum (44), Tobacco (47) : Combinations (3), Alone (16)