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Salvinorin: The Psychedelic Essence of Salvia Divinorum
by D.M. Turner
1996
#3  Anonymous - approximately 1.7 mg salvinorin 


The following report of a highly alarming experience is excerpted from any early experiment utilizing approximately 1.7 mg. of salvinorin. The subject was highly experienced in the use of other psychedelics and gave the following preface to his report.
    "I have smoked DMT several times, it was the ultimate disembodied, colorful and blissful realm I had known. I have taken full doses of ayahuasca where the DMT is allowed to become orally active after mixing with another plant, with its own array of psychoactive properties. I was healed by ayahuasca, and saw her face. I have used a large dose of ibogaine and was propelled through multiple universes, breaking through barrier after barrier, out of body for 4 hours, and had seen the spirit of ibogaine. I also had climbed over the shoulder of a Kuan-Yin several hundred feet tall. I have been injected with Ketamine, and was flung into a pin-ball universe of feelings having colors, and thought I had been taken to a hospital, and had been cared for a long time, tube-fed, helpless, and realized that was fine. I was looking forward to a disembodied journey into heretofore undescribedblissful realms, perhaps occupied by entities with whom I might relate or simply marvel at, all the while. I knew my drugs, and was a relative "hard-head," needing more than most to break through. It was a minute amount of material, and flew into the pipe immediately upon vaporizing. There was no taste, nor any throat irritation. I remember thinking 'This is just a little bit of material, but I got it all.' I had plenty of time to lay back, and during so, laid my glasses to my left. I exhaled. and the vapor looked like my breath condensing in the cold dry air outside. I closed my eyes as I felt the onset of effects. I began to say, as I have so many times before, 'Welcome. I'm back. It's nice to be here again.' My face began spreading in a wide grin. It felt like my face could not contain the grin. I must have lost consciousness briefly. Or, there was no transition. The next thing I experienced was the feeling of my stretching grin extending outside of my face, or, beyond the borders of what I have learned to experience as my face. Was there a ripping sound? Was there a painful feeling of pins and needles, a feeling of the skin being stretched beyond what is normal? I was laying on my back, on the bed, and the right half of my body was being stretched out and somehow below me. The left half of my body was being pulled up and out. The vaulted arch ofour ceiling opened up, and a Caucasian man, with a hat like a bowler, leaned down to his fight, down to the brown leg of his slacks. He looked at me, from what seemed nearly a hundred feet, and said, 'It's time to GO NOW,' and began moving his right leg forward in a step. As his right leg swung forward, my body was merging into his pant leg, below his knee, this part of his body being as tall as I am. Rather, most of my body was being pulled into his leg. My neck, arms, and head were being dragged forward as the bed was being stretched.

    The visual experience was as if the world, including my body and all that I saw, had become flat, two-dimensional, and was a sheet, or a thin rubber skin, a layer. As the pulling forward and out was taking place, the colored forms of what I saw were smeared, as if a running palette of colors, pulled, stretched, thinned. I pulled back, wondering if I could pull away from this tearing of the world. 'It's time to go now.' My body and the world as I knew it, was being pulled into the black universe, stars studding the space, while the outline of this man was covered with the "being pulled", "smeared" reality, of which I was an integral part.

    I was stunned, frightened, disbelieving. I think it hurt, but even more painful was the idea that 'this was it.' My mind began trying to sort out what had happened. I saw my wife, (who had not smoked any salvinorin) I was in our room, on the bed. I was looking at my arms, my legs, and they were being pulled like rubber cement into the surface of the world as it was disappearing, moving forward into the brown material of his pant leg. 'Is this all the world is? Part of some big man's pant leg? Its just too bizarre.' But it was happening. 'It's time to go now.' Almost with some impatience, as if I were so muddled as to not know that this was the end, the end of this reality, gone. going, being rent, stretched, pulled into another very small and insignificant part of something so big it was incomprehensible. It did not seem right. I tried saying 'I can't believe this is happening to me. This is too weird. Is this how it ends? A pant leg, being ripped out and forward. I had no warning, this is not what I expected.' I was completely convinced that this was taking place. But the right half of my mouth was not there to properly form the words. My wife later said that I was speaking gibberish, but there was a sense of wondered revelation to my tone. She said I looked relatively normal when I opened my eyes, no enlarged dilated pupils. But she knew, when she heard me, that I was far gone.

    "I looked at my wife. She, too, was being pulled up and out, the right half of her body streaming into the movement forward. I thought it was happening to her, but she was more concerned about how I was reacting than for her own demise. I thought of the person who had given me the substance, that this was something he knew, and that my taking this substance was the trigger for the end of the universe, space, time, all history, all people and things, and feelings and thoughts, all flattened and streaming forward, into a smeared palette of colors. My wife later told me I was staring in disbelief around me and at my body and saying 'It's smeared, it's smearing. It's the universe. We are moving into the universe, it's ending.' I looked carefully at my left forearm and hand. I saw the transition between my flesh, and tiny bubbles of color, streaming upward and outward into the pulling canvas of matter. My legs were doing the same thing, as was the entire room. 'It's time to go now!'

    The sense continued, hammering. I felt, but did not think, 'No, I'm not ready. There is so much undone, unfelt, unsaid.' I felt I should have been better warned or prepared. I thought of the Buddha, my patron saint, and the teachings he promulgated. There was nothing in them that was even close to the enormity of what I was experiencing. Did he know about this? Was he and all his teaching, the life of thousands of years of followers of his and other religions ending as a thin two-dimensional sheet? It seemed so trivial compared to how it was ending. I wondered about the plant from which this material was derived. Is this the reason for the plant's existence To mediate the ending of the universe?

    "To one of my requests for reassurance my wife said it's happening. relax, lay back in bed.' I'd been twisting and turning, trying to move away from the dissolving edge. I said to my wife 'If this is how it ends, I ought to just relax. I will miss you, I'm glad we met. Please lay by my side so we can go out together.' She lay down next to me and I kissed her forehead. She then lay across my chest. enveloping me with her body. I felt her love, and felt we were ending together. I felt us both merging with the edges of the end, and felt my body merging more fully with the sheet of reality that we were becoming.

    "Some moments later I opened my eyes again. and felt the ripping and pulling diminishing. I looked up and saw that the ceiling was beginning to congeal around a well-demarcated line. I looked at my left hand and saw there was an irregular line, curving in the same pattern as that of the ceiling. My hand was slowly filling in with substance again. I used all my strength to roll onto my left side. away from the force that had been sucking and stretching everything forward. I sat up next to it, and could see the outline of the force in the air. I said to my wife 'It's less, its over. I need to get out of here.' I was afraid it would start up again and felt if I was not in the room 1 could escape it. I said 'I'm down, I'm not tripping anymore, I'm fine. I just need to get out of here fast.' I went to the door leading outside. My truck was outside. a vehicle I'd had for 12 years. I wanted to look at it to verify its solidity and see how it was faring. My wife later said I was crouched and moving extremely rapidly. and appeared psychotic. The deadbolt was locked, and for a second I thought, its because there's no way to escape the ending. I then remembered my wife had locked the deadbolt and went to the dresser where the keys are usually kept. but was unable to find them. On my way to the other door my wife managed to get me back in the bed.

    "The experience continued to subside. The colors were no longer coming off my body. I sat on the bed staring at my extremities, shaken, disturbed, completely baffled, upset, alarmed. exhausted, sad, frightened, stunned. The room now looked fine, I was no longer "tripping," but still altered. I kept saying to my wife. 'I'm fine, now, but I just had an unbelievable experience. I do not know what to say."


This report provides an excellent description of how frighteningly shocking and unpredictable a salvinorin journey can be. It also shows another variation of the bizarre physical dimensions encountered on this substance, and hints at some of the possible dangers that can arise through its use. The next report describes a quite different journey with highly positive results.

 


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