DOSE:

1 hit

inhaled

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

Before I get into my experience, I think I should let you know my frame of mind. For the past 4 months I have been depressed, out of work for the first time in years, and at a place in life where I am stuck and unsure what my next step should be. I usually get out of these ruts fairly quickly, but this time around it has lasted substantially longer than I am used to. Also, I am feeling disconnected from most of my family, a little rejected. I am usually a confident woman, but have notice insecurities popping up recently. If I had realized what Salvia was about, I would not have used it at this time. As a person who has used LSD in the past, I know that your trip has a lot to do with your frame of mind at the time. This is why it’s always good to do research on a drug before you use it.

Experience:

Today my husband and I went over to a friend’s house for what was supposed to be a quick visit. While we were talking another of his friends showed up. He had brought with him Salvia 20x. As he was talking with my husband and friends about preparing for the use of it, I had been doing other things. Six years ago I had tried smoking a small amount of Salvia but I didn’t like the way it made my body feel, so I had no intention of doing it on this day. I was about to run home for a minute when they began to smoke the Salvia from a pipe. My husband was the last to go and as he began to come back down I asked him if it made his body feel bad, he replied “no” and looked as if he had had fun. My husband and friend were excited and asking that I try it again. I thought “what the hell”, I had an idea of what it did from the time before, and it was short lived... how bad could it be? As I smoked the Salvia from the pipe they had packed I listened to instructions to hit it harder, so I did and it burned. I held it for the 30 seconds mentally preparing for what I thought was going to happen. No sooner than I exhaled, I had reality smacked from my head.

Whoa! Where was I? What the hell did I do?
I had been sitting on the floor of a poorly lit room with my back against the couch, casually hitting a pipe...now I was in a new reality. The room was gone and replaced with almost a 2D background. It was a bright (cartoon-like) pastel rainbow tunnel with thick, horizontal stripes. The tunnel slowly moved to the back and right of me, and I was feeling pulled in the same direction (my friends tell me that I scooted back and up the couch and was pulling myself that way). My body felt very uncomfortable, there was pressure and tension, I was hot and my heart was beating faster. I knew that this new place was the real reality and I just wanted to go back to my life as I knew it. I knew I was stuck there, how did this happen? I remembered smoking something but there was no way that a drug could do this to me, what the hell had I done! I thought I might need to go to the hospital, but I wasn’t sure if hospitals existed in my rainbow world and I didn’t think I could make it to one if they did. I was stuck, heavy, and being pulled back and right.

My husband and friends came over and they were all smiling...I thought they had tricked me. None of them mentioned anything like this had happened to them when they did it minutes before. They were acting like they knew exactly what was going on and they were part of it. I was scared of what I had done to myself, if only words could do justice for the way I felt. I was stuck in this new reality where I was miserable and the people I thought I knew were apparently in on it. I felt like this was just like the Matrix and I just wanted to take the magic pill to go back to the reality I knew, even if it wasn’t the real one.

I tried to talk, I heard my friends say “listen to the music, it will tell you what to do”, then the music turned into instructions for how to handle this experience, sung like a children’s song that I had to struggle to understand but at times I could. Later I was told that nobody said that to me. I was trying so hard to wake-up or come-down that I was growing more irritated. It was like being in a really bad nightmare that you are begging to wake-up from and even though you question if it’s a dream, part of you knows you can wake-up... only in this instance the part of you that knows a dream is a dream, knows that this isn’t.

My friends were asking me questions and it took all of my energy to come up with some kind of answer that I immediately knew didn’t quite make sense, then forgot. All four of them were kneeling in front of me on the couch, staring at me and asking questions (they were super imposed on my cartoon-like background). I told them to stop looking at me. Finally, after remembering that I told him it helped, my husband hugged me and it must of allowed me to relax. I had been so worried that he had tricked me into this world and was against me, so when he hugged me I felt some relief and I squeezed him tight.

My friends told me that I should be coming down by now, but I wasn’t and it was really freaking me out. It felt like it had been forever and maybe it wouldn’t change. They walked me outside onto the porch in the daylight and it started to get a little better. The background of the scary reality had changed, I was now outside, back on earth as I knew it...almost. My surroundings were still shaky visually and my body was still very uncomfortable. The physical irritation of this trip was the worst part for me. I was still distrustful of my friends and maybe a little angry. They didn’t seem to be messed-up at all. If this had happened to them there was no way it wouldn’t have been mentioned unless they were messing with me. Slowly, this reality reassembled itself, and I have never been so happy to be here on this plane, in this reality. It was so overwhelming that I’m still shaken several hours later. The sheer joy of being back was so intense that I couldn’t be angry about the experience or mad at anyone, I’m just grateful. I love this reality, depressed or not.

I asked my friends and husband what it was like for them, and at best, they had some altered version of the room we were in with overlapping images moving around. I must have done a lot more than they did because the world as I knew it was gone and for all I knew I would never see it again. Salvia is no joke. I have done LSD, Shrooms, 2CB, DXM, and Ketamine and none of them remotely prepared me for today’s experience. I didn’t know the mind could be so absolute in a hallucination. If you’re going to do Salvia, really prepare, you will be changed.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 64164
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 21, 2010	Views: 7,643
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Difficult Experiences (5), Bad Trips (6), Depression (15), Small Group (2-9) (17)