For some time I had wanted to try mixing Salvia with another psychedelic. My one experience of this type, in which I smoked Salvia on the tail end of a 2CB trip, was very positive, one of my best Salvia trips ever. Since that trip I had planned to try mixing it with mushrooms, but had lost my nerve due to the unexpectedly intense effects I was getting from the mushrooms alone. Several other times I had considered it, but I always found some reason not to. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and try it. For the last several months I had been exploring LSD, due to my newfound access at raves. I decided that LSD would be a good entheogen to mix with Salvia, due to my familiarity with it and it's transparent nature.

My roommate and I dropped at 11:00 p.m. I took three hits, he took two. Before dropping I meditated for a half hour, a practice which I find clarifies my perceptions during the experience and afterwards. After dropping the acid we lit some candles and started some music to launch us into the trip.

Spiritualized's Pure Phase propelled us into the first hour and a half. We were in our living room, candle lit for a relaxed yet trippy atmosphere. It was a typical acid buildup. M and I conversed about recent trips and expectations for this one. The trip started to be visual and have a real presence about one and a half hours into it. I was planning to smoke the Salvia right before the acid peaked, at approximately one hour forty five minutes.

I loaded a hit of a commercially available 5X salvia extract into my bong and sat down on the floor. I was tripping fairly well, in a relaxed psychedelic state. I was excited but not particularly nervous. The stereo had progressed to some ambient electronic, which I stopped before doing my hit. I thought the sound might distract me from the Salvia and serve to ground me. As I took the hit I was thinking about some of what I'd read about DM Turner's trips with salvinorin-a and Salvia on LSD, in particular a trip that involved visions of marine and plant life.

The small amount of material was easily burnt and the smoke inhaled. I held it and set the bong down. After a few seconds I thought I detected a change in my visuals, a tendency to pull to the left. I closed my eyes and the space behind my eyes seemed to explode. I saw silver, red and blue flashing lines made of intertwining, morphing plant life and sea life. Vines, leaves, fish and crocodiles all intertwined and bled into one another in chains of light crisscrossing an impossible space that was somehow above me. I felt I was in a domed space. More than that, I felt I was part of a domed, or curved space. Information seemed to be pouring into me, far more than I could interact with or even perceive. The overall feeling was positive and strangely familiar. I felt there was a definite message that was being transmitted to me, but I am not sure I understood it on any conscious level.

During the trip there was a sort of vague awareness of where I was and what I had just done. As I opened my eyes I felt strange and definitely in a different state of consciousness than a regular acid trip, but back from whatever weird "space" I had just visited. I looked at my roommate and started to laugh and mumble about how weird the trip was. I felt odd, very spacey and distorted. It felt like reality was painted over me or imbedded in me somehow. I felt I had a perfect conception of what was occurring, but as soon as I tried to verbalize it, to explain it to my roommate I not only couldn't do it, I could no longer understand it myself.

These effects slowly faded as I lay on the floor trying to describe them and understand them. The trip was very dreamlike and surreal. M and I started discussing Salvia, the experience and it's possible implications for reality. We agreed it was a very convincing experience, a brush with another reality that was compelling in its utter strangeness. We'd both been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick and his ideas had affected our conception of reality. Salvia seemed to almost confirm these ideas, or at least to encourage them. We agreed that the things Salvia had revealed, as strange and cryptic as they were, seemed benign and almost universally positive. After close to an hour of discussing it my roommate tried it at last. I watched him as he had a seemingly pleasant experience, a perception he confirmed as he returned.

After our conversation, and observing his successful dip into the Salviaspace, I decided to try another hit. For my second hit I loaded some of our own home made 6X extract. I smoked it easily and sat down, expecting something of similar intensity to my previous experience.

I think it hit like a truck, out of nowhere. I should have been expecting it, I was expecting it, yet it obliterated my perceptions in a fraction of a second. When I did become aware again, I was in a seriously strange place. There are simply no words to describe what I experienced, and even if there were I'm sure I don't know them. I felt my reality come apart and become texture mapped over every crazy thought I'd ever had. There was a sensation of SEVERE time distortion, weeks and months and maybe even years all squeezed into one big weirdness. All my salvia trips came together and then came apart, pulled into thousands of different shapes and all twisted around in seriously bizarre ways. It was completely overwhelming. I stood up and fell against the wall. I had to ask my roommate and tripping companion, M to stop talking for a minute so I could get my bearings... but he wasn't talking. The room was quiet except for a strange song playing on the stereo. A voice I recognized as Terence McKenna's was sampled, saying "I'm into what's weird...I always have been". Terence McKenna is a person I associate with Salvia, and it seemed really weird that I was hearing his voice. I was seriously unsure of where and when I was. I felt the presence of people who weren't there, friends of mine and my daughter. I felt we were being pulled into something and being merged in some way. I began to feel that I had finally broken through to a more complete reality, accessing its base levels and witnessing the singularity that contained the manifest universe. My past and future, as well as impossible parallel realities seemed to spool around me. My perceptions were constantly being pulled apart and I felt like reality itself was splitting into strange configurations, like fingers pulling apart from themselves.

All this happened fast. These are just my impressions of a few dense and confusing minutes. The heavy part of the experience lasted maybe fifteen minutes or so. It was the most intense psychedelic experience of my life. I was left literally gasping and amazed, with a feeling of unreality and a fair amount of anxiety about what was happening (or had happened). I slowly pulled myself together and started to make sense of some of my perceptions as others disappeared into nothing. My first trip had been intense, but it was only a taste of what was waiting. I sense that there might be considerably more there too, at higher doses. While I am eager to try this experience again, I think I will stick with a conservative dosage for the present time. I had smoked a fairly small amount, but my trip was intense and incredibly concrete. I wasn't having a trip, I was just experiencing a new and very bizarre reality.

We sat and talked a bit as I shook the last effects of my Salvia hit. The disc we were listening to ended and Orbital's Snivilisation started. This exceedingly odd electronic album provided a near perfect soundtrack for the strange state of mind I was in. Roughly half way through the album our doorbell rang. I opened the door to reveal a friend of ours standing there. He came in and started goofing around, trying to trip us out a bit (he knew we were zoomed). He and M got in a discussion that didn't interest me, and I found myself zoning out, sort of half wishing he would go away so I could listen to music in peace again. Before long he decided to go home and go to bed, leaving us alone with our trip again.

I decided I was going to push the envelope a bit further. I wasn't really feeling any effects from the Salvia at this point, but I was still in an awed mindset after my shattering experience. I decided to see what a hit of 5-MeO-DMT would do to my trip. I loaded a medium sized hit and inhaled it with ease. The harsh, plastic taste caused me to gack a bit as I exhaled it. Within thirty seconds of exhaling I was consumed by swirling psychedelic geometry. With my eyes open, I saw the room, shimmering with a sort of turbocharged acid visual presence. When I closed my eyes I saw complex, fast moving geometric designs in black, white and shades of gray. There were no colors whatsoever with eyes closed! I shifted about and twitched a bit trying to get comfortable during my 5-MeO launch, ending up lying down on my couch as I flew through a swirling grayscale universe of complex geometric designs. This jaunt lasted less than ten minutes and I felt pretty good upon return, other than a slight nausea and a horrible plastic taste in my nose and throat (the former caused by the latter, I believe).

After all of that, the remaining acid seemed almost non-existent by comparison. By then it was five hours or more into the trip. The peak was over and although I was still pretty high, it felt almost baseline compared to my earlier levels of experience. My roommate and I managed to find enough roaches and shake left to smoke a bowl of pot. It left me quite stoned and nearly obliterated the remainder of the acid. An hour or so later I added a gram of GHB to the mix. After a shower I was ready to slip off to sleep, which I did without any problems.

The mixture of LSD and Salvia was incredible. The LSD served as a launching platform, giving me a higher and more opened state with which to experience the Salvia. It also seemed to remove many of the blocks and distractions that usually pull me back from Salvia space. In addition it seemed to somehow encapsulate and give definition to the ethereal Salvia experience, allowing me to comprehend and recall it better than almost ever before (only 2CB allowed me to bring more back). I am eager to try Salvia with other entheogens, mushrooms in particular. However, the combination was extremely powerful, not for beginners in any way, shape, or form. As I mentioned it was incredibly disorienting and somewhat frightening. For someone less experienced or prepared for the power of it, it would be outright terrifying I think. Along those same lines, I think the mushrooms plus Salvia combo will be the most powerful and bizarre combo I have ever experienced, a thought that is somewhat sobering in its implications.