DOSE:

1 hit

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

185 lb

I had come back to my hometown in Alabama for the Christmas holidays. On Christmas Eve, I decided to cut loose and kick it with an old friend (who I knew was up to no good...perfect) and maybe meet some new friends.

I met P at his duplex and we went to his buddy, S's duplex next door. We had a few drinks and P asked me if I had ever heard of Salvia, since we had tripped on LSD about 100 times together. I told him I had not and asked him what it was like. He said to ask S, because P would not ever trip again. So S tells me a little about it and I am totally skeptical because I had never heard of it. I mean, the stories he was telling me about his experiences made my acid trips sound like a visit to the petting zoo! Then he showed me the stuff and It had the appearance of fake bud. I told him that I would love to try it but I did not think it would do anything.

He took me to a back bedroom he had made for tripping, totally equiped with psychedelic tapestries on all the walls and the ceiling with a round couch stretched out around a little table with nothing other than a hookah on it! So he asks me if I want to say a prayer or something (looking back, he was a very good sitter), because I am not about to be in Kansas anymore, so to speak. I think this hippie has lost his mind. Pray? Meditate? I am trying to get dosed up here, and I highly doubt anything that he described will happen to me.

So he packed about a quarter gram or so into the bowl. I know now that this is an extremely high amount of 20x. I don't think he was deliberately trying to get me freaked, but I had just totally and ignorantly disrespected Lady Salvia. S also made it clear that after each hit that he would light, I would decide if I wanted another. So I take a huge rip and hold it. When I blow it out the room fills with smoke and I am complaining about the flavor. We decide I need another hit so he lights it and I hold it and....... OMG!

S is giggling quietly at my reaction. I take his laughing to mean that he understands that I just found out that the earth does not exist. I start to get up and run but S says or does something to stop me. I am terrified of S. How could he think this is funny? I miss my family. How did this happen? Everything that I thought was my life never existed. It was just some long, sick dream. But now I am awake, because I understand the familiarity of this space that now holds me. It is more familiar than what I thought was really my life before! De ja vu is intense. I get the feeling I have been in this black, purple and pink expanse for all time while I am able to also watch the life that was the lie! The room begins to tilt. I am struggling not to fall off the couch as some force is tilting the back of the couch up, so as to set me on my feet. I am set onto my feet and the couch falls backward into the void! Any way I move takes an enormous amount of labor. And when I do try to move, I feel that I have done wrong. The only way to keep the peace with my environment and its seemingly magnetic energy is to do like everyone else and hold still. Wait a minute...... everyone else?
'This is a peaceful place; why does there always have to be someone in a frenzy?'
Who said that?
'It seems to me if you just relax we can go on like we always have.'

It becomes clear that I am only part of a grotesque vertical landscape of perfectly equal parts! The jigsaw-puzzle pieces of which the landscape consists are actually humanoid figures! All but one of the consciousnesses are at peace with the monstrosity they are combining to create! And the one that is not at peace will surely lose the energy it takes to continue to resist! The easiest thing for him to do would be to forget the reason that he is disturbed and just............relaxxxxxxx. I can not look down at ourselves because of the centrifugal gravitational force that keeps us in our cookie-cutter stance: side by side and standing on top of each other like a real-life scale-model heiroglyphic nightmare masterpiece! But what is the scale to which we might be measured? Furthermore, what are we? And what are we creating? I now come to the horrible realization that every 'person' involved here is only a building block of a more superior being: me. But who am I? Because from what I can tell 'I AM' everything! But at the same time, 'i am' also stacked up like canned goods within a two-dimensional tower of peaceful figures in some dark and infinite zen-limbo where a mile is the same as an inch and a day is the same as a century. Oh yeah, and all form one and one form all (yes 'one' needs to be plural in this case)!

This false reality is once again layered over the actual room I'm in at S's place, so I can see both. I am still terrified and I trust no one. As I break for the door, S tries to stop me, probably thinking I am still tripping, which I am, and not wanting me to fall and hurt myself. Well I think he may be trying to keep me in the other place where as I attempt to flee the cartoon wall of ambiguous characters, they all start to fall down! It was as if I lost a game of Milky Way Jenga! I was the piece that held them all together! What now? It should be noted that running in reality is difficult to say the least while simultaneously falling with all my imaginery friends into a bottomless abyss! Somehow, I get past S and as I am now heading for the front door, my friend P is laughing and saying, 'that stuff made you trip out didn't it?'

Now I am torn between these two possibilities:
1) My friend P has been in on the twisted, cosmic joke or
2) It was only the salvia (whatever the hell that is)!!!!!!

I blast through the front door with S closely behind me and I am sooooo happy! I can see the stars! I am alive! I am me! It is Christmas Eve! I have been given another chance to live! There is Miller Lite in the fridge!

In closing, I would like to add that 9 months after this experience I felt the need to get clean. That's right, clean like no drugs, no nothing. Having been a substance user and abuser since I was 13, I felt like I needed the help of a 12 step program. I stayed clean for almost four years and it was exactly what I needed to build a future for myself. I get high now and I do not feel ashamed about doing so. It is the path I presently wish to follow. If I had not asked for help in my life when I did, and if I had not done the things it took to get clean, I may not feel like I have the option to choose to get high today. I can not help but wonder whether or not this Salvia experience led me to do these things.

It may have sounded frightening and it was! But it was also the most beautiful and spiritual experience of my life. I smoke Salvia occasionally now, but never that amount! I am constantly amazed at the power of this special plant! I have even written every member of my state's senate in order to sway them not to make Salvia illegal. Don't worry, I didn't tell them anything about my experiences with Salvia! But I did point out the media circus that creates an umbrella of fear, under which two certain senators placed their pulpit against Salvia in an attempt to sway Alabamians to give up one of their personal liberties: the legal right that we now have to enjoy Salvia Divinorum, if we choose to do so! It probably has nothing to do with me, but the bill to criminalize Salvia died on the table this year in Alabama! Not bad for a red state! I guess I have at least one year more with it.......legally!
Swyftyswyf

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 72373
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 20, 2020	Views: 759
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Difficult Experiences (5), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Entities / Beings (37), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)