DOSE:

repeated

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I just tried Salvia for the first time after reading about it for months. I tried just a small amount of 10x first, just about enough to cover half of my pinkie nail. I expected some sort of body rush, maybe a feeling of vertigo or heaviness from what I read, and that’s what I got. It felt as if the world was turning counter clockwise, not very fast, from upper right to lower left. I also felt like I got heavier. The feeling was very much like riding a tilt a whirl at the fair. It lasted just about a minute, and then faded quickly.

Next I took about the same amount of 20x. The experience, also while not “taking” me anywhere outside of myself, was extremely strange and wonderful. I set up some music designed for Salvia, lit up, and sat on the bed. This time, the whirling sensation passed very quickly and I was looking over at the edge of the couch to my left. The couch began fractalizing and folding along the fractal lines in time to the beat of the music I was listening to. But more strange and wonderful, along these fractal lines, the whole room and my own body felt like it was also folding and unfolding along those fractal lines in time with the music. It was a lot like fan-folding a piece of paper, but along much more complicated lines. The feeling was profound, very body-gravity-oriented.

After a couple of hours, I tried a bit more 20x with a sitter. I had an intense feeling of pulling from front to back and down. Then space curved inward at multiple and evenly spaced points around my field of vision, like the inside of an outline of a flower, at the same time rolling and pulling outward at the far edge of each curve. Because I was sitting at the far curve of one of those “petals,” and the sense of stretching and pulling was so strong, the feeling was not exactly pleasant. It felt like trying to resist the pull of a very strong water current, one that was about to take me someplace really strange, someplace behind me where I couldn’t see, someplace where I would be completely alone. Just before I started coming down, I thought “Now I know what they were talking about,” and “Now I know what it feels like to be turned into a fruit rollup.” For the next several hours, I felt a bit spooked because the thought of having a stronger experience where I would be forced to let go meant that I would definitely go someplace and experience something that I simply can’t imagine, a place where no one would be able to help me if I got spooked. All I had succeeded in these first three trips was to establish a familiarity with the beginning stages.

About 5 hours later, I decided that I needed to do a little more experimenting with low doses to take the edge off the unfamiliarity of the experience. So I broke out the 10x and smoked a small amount. Once again I experienced a folding sensation and movement, this time outward from a central plane. Reality flattened out like a round piece of paper. I was sitting with my chin propped on my hand, and at one point it seemed as if the edge of my hand was the edge of reality, and my head and chin were hanging off of it, just peeking over the edge into the plane of reality. I felt the motion of folding, with the top of my mouth as one of the creases of the fold, and the folding pulsed slowly and rhythmically at about 1 second intervals.

A little later, I played a 10 minute long video sequence of fractal mandala / kaleidoscope images with music and nature songs, and smoked another small amount. Again, I experienced the pulling and folding sensations, this time in a more complex way. From the center of the kaleidoscope outward, the image seemed to become 3-d, with folds up and down outward toward its edges. The pulling was toward the center of the image, and it seemed as if it was trying to pull me in and through the center. It seemed as if someone was inviting me to let go and come through, that it was necessary, but I wouldn’t be forced, and that was why space was folding and unfolding, to form a series of ladders or bellows to help me through. This was my first taste of what others have called “the Salvia people.” One of the folds again went through the top of my mouth, and it felt like I was folding and unfolding too. I was just about to say “o.k.” and begin the ascent through the image, when I realized, “Wait a minute. That’s just a flat image on my computer screen. I can’t go ‘through’ that!” The experience was very dream-like in that sense, the dream logic giving way to reality logic as I came down and the sensations faded.

Next, I went over and sat on the bed and smoked a little more, to see if I could go somewhere without the computer images. This time, the pulling sensation was nearly absent, although I did experience vertigo and an overwhelming urge to close my eyes. I had no open-eye visuals, but when I closed my eyes, I could see very complex moving fractal patterns, like parts of the Mandelbrot set dumped to swirl in a puddle of milk. They weren’t very colourful, but extremely intricate.

The drug screws with not only my perceptions, but my logic ability as well during the experience. Interpretation of perceptions follows dream-like logic in forming strange associations that seem to make sense, to connect the dots, so to speak, but that wouldn’t follow without the influence of the drug. For instance, the perception that everything is flowing, following complicated fractal geometries, like eddies in milk and that this is how reality truly operates, flowing, eddying, forming complexities out of simple refolding gentle fractal flows. Everything seems to be formed from folding and refolding space. Of course, this makes perfect sense, since I was watching mandalas, listening to music with lots of nature sounds. Coming down has a lot of dream-like qualities too, including the in-between dream state of sleep. It seems to be calling me to close my eyes and transition into the next dream.

From the experiments of the day I have concluded that for me, this substance is about experiencing strangely strong gravity, motion, complex topology, stretching and folding. There is definitely a fear factor, about being pulled off the edge of reality into the complete unknown in the full knowledge that there won’t be any parachute to slow the decent. The body sensations are so strong that there’s no equivalent. People have talked about riding a roller coaster or a Ferris wheel, but those are tame examples that only peripherally involve the person experiencing them. In this trip, you become the motion, acceleration, and every twist and fold of space.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 70149
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 29, 2016	Views: 4,190
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)