DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

I held the bong, as my friend steadied my hand, holding the flame from the cheap plastic lighter to the bowl I had packed. I milked the hit, inhaling a thick cloud of sweet white smoke. As I cleared the chamber in one breath, my friends commented on my lung capacity, and I showed off, holding it in. I mimicked the motions of chugging a beer and taking a shot to prove that I could suicide a bong hit, and, as I took my imaginary shot, I felt a strange fluidity take over my motions, it was beginning.

I leaned out the window, god only knows how far, and exhaled luxuriously, as I came to the threshold of a world I had never entered before, it was too late to decide whether I should cross it. I returned to the existence I had known within my room, my companions questioning my actions. I was unable to verbalize my explanations, I had barely thought them before they became alien to me, changing before they had even formed in my mind--REDNESS. I found myself plunged into a plane of red, the poster on my wall extending to envelop my entire existence, I knew no memory of myself or my life or even my friends who had been sitting in front of me moments earlier. I saw the creatures from Where the Wild Things Are, morphing into the outlined trees of the red forest background and back again as they danced round their fire to a melody that none could hear, they danced to the rhythm of nature, to the wild force that flowed through them all.

I was the red, and I was the monsters, and I was the trees and fire, I was alice in wonderland, slipping backward through the monsters, and geese and purple polkadot patterns, and crazy scenes of superfluous color out of lewis carroll’s unconscious acid trip. I saw a light at the end of the infinite red that had engulfed me, it looked out on a place I had never seen before: the view from my window, the view from the bed that I had slept in for the last 3 months. I saw another light, flickering against a stone tower, an obelisk rising from the urban jungle through which I was wandering in the window view that had grown to take on a life of its own. The view that I had become a part of, a lost little boy, wearing a newspaper boy cap, in a foreign city seen only in black and white, the way everything looked back in the 1920’s, before they invented color.

The city fell away before the stone tower. I was on the edge of the redness, looking out into the vacuum of blackness in front of me, as the tower grew two eyes, the only things I could see. Like a giant Mayan sculpture, the face stared into me with a haughty seriousness, lit eerily by the flickering flame, a torch on its obelisk nose, chanting. I tried to retreat into the fuzzy warmth of the unknown red behind me. It had been my entire existence moments before, but now, as I leaned back into it, I wondered what it was, having no idea whether it was safe or what it contained, afraid that I would fall into the abyss of the redness but not caring. The eyes were talking to me, repeating and repeating that I had taken a drug. “Are you there? Remember? You took a drug.” I became aware of my body again, that I had one, more accurately that I had a face. The rest of my body was not a part of me, it was disconnected. Gone.

The eyes seemed to be informing me of a plot which I had been thrust into, it was secretive. Some kind of Soviet plan to erase my former existence and use me for a dangerous mission. That plan was already in action, and the eyes, my mother, or my adoptive mother, tried to impart upon me the memories of the life they were inventing. They introduced me to my father, on the other side of the hallway, in the kitchen, the only lit place I could see from the dark room I was in. And I remembered, slowly, but in an instant, some of my real existence. I tried to explain this to the eyes, mumbling something about the pool deck, and purposely using my teammates names to prove to myself that they were real and that this was all some kind of weird dream. That it was some kind of joke that the entire world was playing on me, pretending that I was crazy and that the pool, and the names which were so intimately woven into the emotions of it, were completely imagined.

I feared that they WERE imagined, and that I really was all alone. I felt like I was on some kind of game show, sitting at the bottom of a dark pit of bright swirling colors, and, at the same time, that I was being interrogated by the agents of big brother in some kind of white, sterile room from the Ministry of Love. And I looked down, surprised by the arms coming out of whatever was connected to my face. I could feel an electric prickling running through them, and I sat on them to hide them. To make them not real again, so that the prickling couldn’t hurt me the way it did when they were exposed to the air. Looking away I forgot them again, and they were gone. I realized that the room was actually brightly lit. I saw B, my roommate, not my dad or the man the Soviets had put in charge of me, and D my friend, not my mother or the nurse that the soviets had taking care of me.

His eyes still mesmerized me, mocking me, not allowing me to feel coherent as I tried to prove to myself that I was. The music was repetitive, like an ad that brainwashes you into the mindless frenzy of consumer materialism, it was something from the chili peppers that I hope I will recognize someday soon. It increased the gameshow feel to this place in which I was trapped. The eyes gained a body, and they were trying to comfort me, to help me feel better and regain normalcy, their mocking now more subtle. And the pattern, the strange pattern of fractal bubbles that had engulfed the darkness around his eyes was now translucent, merely covering what was already visible in the room, filling the empty spaces.

I realized grand, important nothings about my life in the next few minutes as those moments dilated, seeming to fill hours. It was time I had to think, reeling back and forth, still a part of the rhythm of the creatures, maybe. These were important insights, but I don’t remember them now. They were probably meaningless, but next time I will write them down, if I can. I thought I felt normal, though my words were odd and my thought processes awkward. My insides still felt disconnected from my outsides, and my limbs were just starting to work properly again, doing a better job when I could see them than when I couldn’t. I had returned to my old life, the life of which I had had no inkling fifteen minutes earlier. My journey into my mind was more or less over, and like a theme park ride, slowly rolling to an end, the earth was falling back into my senses with every moment, resting its weight upon them once again.

I still felt weird, slightly awkward and kind of playful for about 30 minutes or so. I continued to misinterpret my friends statements, attempting to explain what a grocery store was to dan when he asked where I bought cheese-its. I had just remembered what stores were, and I thought he needed to have them explained as well. It was a strange trip indeed, some parts were slightly disconcerting, but I was never too scared, never tripping out in any sort of bad way. The giggles throughout were uncontrollable, and I enjoyed the trip as a whole.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 58198
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 14, 2008	Views: 17,228
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Glowing Experiences (4), Music Discussion (22), Entities / Beings (37), Guides / Sitters (39), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)