DOSE:

125 mg

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

75 kg

Without the luxury of a sitter, I heeded warning and began my experimentation with Salvia using extremely small doses. The first was perhaps the tip of a teaspoon full of the dark green fragments from a 15x extract. This and the subsequent doses were smoked in a water bong using a turbo-lighter.

For the first try the experience was extremely short-lived. Things of note include perceptual scrolling - like when a tv is in between stations and the picture repeatedly scrolls, a little strange association (a stuffed toy in the background might have resembled a face), and a very small amount of depth alteration (things appeared 'zoomed in'). The most significant and strange effect however, was that I became externalised from my own narrative voice. In other words, I could hear myself think but as if that person was in fact someone else. This did shake me up somewhat, but as I said, the effects were very short-lived and minor.

The second time round a marginally larger 'pinch' was taken. I also put on some soothing music. Immediately after the hit I had a moment which seemed drawn out to last a great deal longer (I could poetically say an 'eternity' but this would actually be an exagguration), a note in the music playing seemed to sound without change for far too long. Ambient noises around me (the computer fan, a plane flying over) became more noticeable and weaved themselves into their own exuded, dreamy choir (something I often experience when high). I recognised the feeling of alteration and strangeness as not dissimilar to the more subtle murmurings of marijuana. This was clearer but the same kind of thing, it seemed upbeat and almost euphoric. As the effects faded (after ~15mins) I felt energised and uplifted for about an hour. After returning to normality some positive mood remained.

Encouraged by this I went for a third time a day later. Again using a very small dose, but larger than the second time. The best I can estimate is about 1/8th of a gram of 15x, but it could well have been even less than this. This time the issue surrounding the narrative voice of the first experience resurfaced. It's hard to patch together the details because they shift as I try to recall them, if they were ever set at all in that strange world.

I basically split into two people and we were arguing about what I should do. The voices, or the voice that wanted me to get up and do something, seemed very threatening. Now I can't remember if this was the voice that wanted me to get up or the voice that wanted me to stay put - they've now become confused. The voice that wanted me to get up was frightening because I felt like it wanted to take me out into the night and induce me to malice. The other voice wanted to resist this temptation, that I had to resist it at all costs and stay put - this other voice was the 'real' voice if you like, this voice was 'me' trying to keep it together (although as I say, both voices were confused). Only actually, the real me was neither one voice nor the other but at some part removed, listening to the two, but mute (and powerless?) itself. This probably doesn't sound like much but at the time it was not at all fun tinged with an absurd, mocking malice or evil.

Eventually I got up and lay down on my bed - I wasn't sure which voice this was giving into but once I got there it was a good way of evading both of them. On the one hand I had got up, but on the other I hadn't gone out into the night and was staying put.
While on the bed I seemed to commune with another presence which could have been an embodiment of Salvia itself. It was not openly threatening or malicious but stark. It saw through me and all my faults and spared me further entry.

Part of its problem with me was my self-consciousness, my narrative voice is so strong and omnipresent that it can often be a hindrance - it stops me getting swept up in the 'moment'. It leaves me always one step removed from whatever is actually going on. I knew that I was already thinking about what I would tell my friends or what I would write down of the experience - and it didn't like that. It didn't want me to be thinking 'Oh wow look at this, I mustn't forget to write that down' it wanted me to stop being a bad tourist - to drop the camera and actually engage with the experience. But I couldn't do that, I had to cloak myself with my ever-present companion, my own self-supporting voice. Maybe its the prominence of this inner voice that makes it vulnerable to a shattering or a subversion. To thine own self be true, but what if there is more than one self?

Salvia wanted me to grow up and stop being a tourist. It didn't like the fact I tried to dissect it, patronize it even. I had been looking at my digital watch during the initial moments to see if I could corroborate the dilation of time as felt with its ticking. This was seen as trying to double-cross the salvia or to hem in and prod a wild animal or something. I was to engage with the Salvia on it's own, magical terms. No mystical fantastical journeyings to another land here - just the quiverings of a stupid, scared, boy. I wasn't ready to abandon the fear that made me trapped at the first outpost, but I'm glad Salvia rejected my boarding pass on these grounds because just THINK how much more fucked up it could have got.

As it wore off I had sensations where colour seemed to pulse through my visual field and where the identies of colours was mixed around. Music was also enhanced as it was on both previous occassions - songs seem to last longer, with greater stereo separation, and each beat is heard as if new without the skip of familiarity.

Salvia itself does not seem malicious, but something that can act as a gateway for your own demons. My paranoia of schizophrenia was of course noted and used. I can't hide anything from Salvia, she knows my doubts. I do now feel unsettled and have had an insight into a madness. A madness which I fear but which I gravitate towards as if by fate. There's no glamour in tragedy because tragedy is waste - waste of an intellect or a passion or a soul that was precious.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 62582
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 17, 2009	Views: 8,264
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Entities / Beings (37), Difficult Experiences (5), Alone (16)