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Welcome to the Real World
Salvia divinorum (10x extract)
Citation:   SMortis. "Welcome to the Real World: An Experience with Salvia divinorum (10x extract) (exp61537)". Erowid.org. Oct 16, 2008. erowid.org/exp/61537

 
DOSE:
4 hits smoked Salvia divinorum (extract - 10x)
BODY WEIGHT: 11 kg
I was in a tent in my garden with one of my best mates ‘J’ and his brother, whom I don’t know too well, ‘M’. I had four hits from a bong loaded up with salvia. The first two simply seemed to emboss everything that I was seeing. Everything began to have a shaky, scaly and colourful look to it. I felt the need to laugh - I simply thought about the fact there was nothing in the room funny to laugh about, and for that reason I found it funny and began to laugh.

I had a third hit, J said to me ‘How are you feeling?’ I said to him ‘I feel drawn to this side of the tent. I feel like I need to sit over there’. Felt some kind of rotating energy to everything. Like a spinning tunnel. I was pointing to the corner of the tent. I don’t know what it was, but I just felt like some kind of warm, caring feeling was coming from the corner of the tent. So I sat in the corner of the tent. In this corner, I began to feel quite buzzy. Not in an excited way, and not in a pleasant, joyous way. I simply felt like I had pins and needles all over my body, but it didn't hurt or irritate me. Everything seemed amusing. My sense of humour was definately heightened. I felt very 'witty' as oppose to the 'dopey' sense of humour I get with cannabis. I also felt like that warm presence was now holding up the left hand side of my body, it felt like it was stopping me from falling sideways. It was keeping me in place. It was my seatbelt.

I had the fourth hit.

I don’t in fact remember exhaling. There is a black void of nothingness between what I had previously perceived as reality and what I was now going through. All of a sudden I found myself in a completely alternate reality. I was inside my mind. I was walking footsteps upon my mental state at the time. It was an abstract spinning tunnel. J and M seemed to be a million miles away from me. I felt a million miles away from my body. Time seemed to slow down to begin with - completely ground to a halt. What was once 12pm in the afternoon in the tent in my garden ceased to exist. I felt that I had been in this alternate world forever, and that I would forever be here. It’s very difficult to describe what I saw and where I thought I was.

I was definitely no longer ‘me’ as a human being. I had no history, no memories, no emotions. I was all of a sudden in a twisting green and purple infinite corridor. I first remember seeing J and M’s faces looking at me like in a family portrait. Their skin looked so orange and their hair was purple. The strangest thing was that it didn’t feel as if they were there in the room with me, it was as if they’d become a distant memory from someone else. And that someone else was ‘me’. I had absolutely no consciousness of ‘me’ inside that tent. The lining of the tent behind their heads created and infinite spinning prism of repetition. They began to spin within the green corridor. At one point they were above me, and at another they were behind me. It was like nothing that words could possibly describe. Before I went on this trip, I’d always been frustrated by other reports saying that these experiences are ‘indescribable’ in human words. I always thought that it was just the storyteller was just being lazy. But I now know that it is true. The experience you go through completely incomprehensible until you do it yourself. And even after the experience, it becomes incomprehensible again.

J & M were now there but times ten. There were hundreds of unbelievable repetitions of them all around me. They were looking at me, talking. I felt their presence increasingly strong, and suddenly I felt as if they were both staring daggers at me, saying things about me that I didn’t want to hear. It’s like when you look at people whom you know are talking about you and that dreadful, helpless feeling kicks in. But instead of having the ability to act upon it, I was helpless. The way they were talking about me seemed to be as if they might have well been laughing at my soul, my existence. They were saying things like ‘Oh there he goes. He's just messed himself up. Do you reckon he'll come back? Is he going to come back. Look at him! What is he doing!?’ I didn’t hear them say it, but it was more like that telepathic blonde elf woman who speaks to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings using her mind to speak. I felt alone, in this spinning dark green void. I don’t remember really hearing anything, I kind of heard the normality of what was going on in the tent but it just seemed so slow. The sound wasn’t remotely slowed down, it just seemed like I was in that tent for an eternity.

The only way I can describe it is literally being a floating mass of nothing which contains all of my memories, all of my emotions and everything I’ve learned about the universe. This orb I became is within this infinitely spinning and infinitely infinite multi-dimensional tube. There are a billion exits from this state but I feel absolutely helpless. I feel like my new existence is some kind of alternate, funny and colourful world to what I normally perceive. I feel intensely naïve. So naïve to the power which now stands in front of I. I don’t know if I was in contact with an entity, but more like I was a metaphoric ant on the skin of something which was so much bigger than I am. I was in contact with something which had always been there since I was born, and somehow felt like a deja-vu.

The way to describe this state is as helpless as describing the state which contains all the wonders of what I think when I wake up from a dream. When I do wake up from a dream I think ‘How was that possible to exist and why did that happen?’ How I feel in one of those random weird uncontrollable dreams is just exactly what salvia is but I am conscious of it but I cannot control it. It is not a lucid experience - because in an experience like that, you have control. The strangest thing about this place I was in is that it felt terrifyingly familiar. It’s like the subconscious brain-patterns I have in every day life are completely exposed right in front of me. The drug abuses whatever I am seeing or hearing to tell me some kind of message about myself. During my trip I felt as if I was myself when I was a new-born baby. I’d forgotten I had taken salvia and that this new dream world I was in was the re-birth of myself and my mental state.

I began to attempt to realise that I was simply in a tent in my garden. I refused to get sucked into this dark world I was now in and wanted to return to reality. I kept thinking to myself ‘I know that I know these two people in front of me’. I know that I know them, and so I was trying to discover who they were. They felt so familiar, but I was terrified by their piercing eyes. I began to understand that I was somehow able to escape from this sense of being inside a tent inside a tent inside a tent… infinitely. That was truly terrifying to comprehend. I began to think to myself ‘there is an escape from this weird world. I am in a tent. Suddenly, I felt as if I was now being lifted out of this incredibly strange world. The infinite number of tents aka, ‘repetitions of this dimension’ began to fold up and become nonexistent.

I felt myself buzzing. I felt the weird aching feeling in the left-side of my body again. I felt like I needed to lay against the side of the tent. I thought I was, but as I began to return to normality everything suddenly began speeding up again back to normal. I felt like I the top half of my body had constantly been spinning around on its own axis, and the visuals began to return to normal. M, who was sitting to in front of me to the left suddenly looked like he was a smear of himself, like a smudged, slowed down, spinning person, and suddenly he became himself again. It became M. I felt a sense of being home. I immediately thought to myself - ‘What in creation could possibly explain that experience without repeating it again?’ J said ‘Do you think we should get out of the tent.’ I still lacked the ability to talk, and tried to nod. I felt as if I’d been dribbling and spinning my eyes around in circles, but apparently I hadn’t been.

J opened the tent and I immediately yelled out ‘Oh my god - the dear sweet outdoors of this tent’. I felt as if this tent was some weird dark portal and that the only escape from the state of mind I was in was to actually get out of the tent itself. I don’t remember closing my eyes during the whole experience. God knows what I would have seen if I had. I don’t remember even feeling the need to blink. I didn’t even realise I’d been sat down in a tent smoking salvia until I got outside. As soon as I escaped the outdoors everything seemed refreshingly normal. Not at one stage did I think ‘oh no, I’m back to reality’. If anything I became completely thankful that I now realised I was in my garden. I’d apparently been in the tent for at least 2 minutes, but it felt like I had been there for a lifetime. I’d just experienced the depths of my mind from 18 years living as a human being all within two minutes.

When I got out of the tent, everything seemed pretty normal again - literally I felt like existence snapped its fingers and I returned to the dimension which I am suitable to. I then decided to walk inside and lay down on the sofa. I don’t remember seeing any open-eye hallucinations whatsoever, but I remember that I kept forgetting where I was, and even ‘when’ I was. All I knew when I was on the sofa was that I was laying on the sofa in my lounge post-scary experience. After each new thought about the trip I’d had I forgot the social situation I was in. Possibly the worst situation to be in post-salvia trip is to be asked questions which relate to absolute reality in such a strong way that it is extremely irritating to the point of wanting to cry. I felt bullied by anything that anyone says to me. I remember when I got inside that M was walking next to the sofa and behind me. He was acting so ‘normal’ that it now felt alien to me and I felt incredibly angry at the question he would ask me. One such question was ‘Oh cool, you’ve got this game. Is it installed on your computer’?

At that point I was so past caring about reality at it really angered me that he didn’t understand the state I was in. What he was saying was so normal that I thought he was taking the piss out of me. But he was acting normal while I was recovering from possibly the most intense experience of my entire life. The only way I can compare it to anything else is how you would feel if someone threatened to kill you, set you up in some kind of dark room and then began taunting you of all your insecurities. That’s how I felt whenever M spoke to me. It’s possibly because I’m not fully comfortable around him and don’t feel such a strong friendship and understanding or history between us.

Following from that, I began to sober up, but I was in a strong but strange irritable mood. For example the phone would ring and I would get incredibly angry at the fact it was ringing, but at the exact same time I wouldn’t care. It’s a weird state to be in, and all that I can ask for following on from an experience like that is to simply unplug your telephone from the wall and not have a television on.

The trip had long-term effects on me, lasting up to at least 10-12 hours after the experience. I felt intensely calm inside my head, and any external stimuli which would distract my calmed train of thought would irritate me incredibly strongly, and the moments later I would stop caring about it. I felt very selfish. I had a night of strange erratic sleeping patterns, and in the morning I felt like I had only had about one hour of sleep, whereas I can guess I must have slept for about 4 hours.

The following day I had work and was still experiencing strange states to reality. Such as, in the kitchen where I work, the lights seemed really dim and yellow as if I was wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was the salvia or something. A day on from this strange experience I still feel slightly different as a person. I feel like I’ve lost some kind of innocence that I’d carried from my childhood. In retrospect, I feel as if the trip I had completely raped my body and mind and I emerged as a wiser, and different person.

Exp Year: 2007ExpID: 61537
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 16, 2008Views: 17,523
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Mystical Experiences (9), Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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