After some consideration my roommate and I decided to trip on LSD together. My fiancée L was present, but chose to abstain. I took two and a half hits of gel acid, my roommate took a single hit of paper. He went into his room to await the onset while L and I sat on the couch, talking and cuddling.

It announced its presence quickly, less than twenty minutes after I ingested it. I began to feel a sense of stimulation, accompanied by a familiar sense of tension in my solar plexus. It ramped up quickly and within forty five minutes of take off I was starting to get visuals, mostly trails and splashes of color on everything I looked at.

L put on some music and we sat together, kissing and talking. The music sounded fantastic and I was really enjoying L's presence. Our kissing and cuddling began to take on a more urgent angle, but we chose not to follow up on it, since I was tripping with M (my roommate) and it would have been a bit rude to just disappear after asking him to trip with me.

An hour and fifteen minutes into it I was going pretty well. I was tripping fairly hard. Each movement of my head triggered streamers of color and there were rich tapestries of color forming in the corners of my vision, or whenever I closed my eyes. L put on Spiritualized and we sat down to groove on it. It sounded incredible. I have listened to the same album (Lazer Guided Melodies) several times while psychedelically altered, but it sounded better than it ever had before. Each note and sound seemed to be a warm sonic caress.

We had a few nitrous cartridges and I decided this would be a great time to do them. I retrieved M and the apparatus and we all sat down to hit a few balloons. As usual the nitrous was fantastic, greatly enhancing the peak of the trip into a chaotic, swirling maelstrom of silly "cosmic" thoughts and explosions of wah-wah sound and colors. After we did the balloons we sat around chatting for a few minutes about nothing in particular. After a few minutes M returned to his room.

L and I sat on the couch listening to music. Before long she had slipped off to sleep, leaving me alone. I let the album we were listening to finish, trying to decide what to do. I thought about putting on more music, but decided I had explored that stimulus enough. Instead, I decided to try and meditate, something I have been curious about mixing with psychedelic mind states.

I sat down in a high backed chair in my usual meditative position and took a few deep breaths to prepare. As I began my meditation I tried to clear my mind of all thoughts. This proved to be much easier than usual. However, my time sense was quite dilated, so only a few minutes of meditation seemed to stretch out forever. I would meditate for a minute or two, then get distracted and have to start over. Once I finally got it working I was fairly amazed. Time seemed to stop. I was aware of every sound and the space between them. The profound silence and small noises of my house made me realize how finely one can tune their consciousness. I sat and enjoyed this for a little while, maybe as long as ten minutes.

As I finished my meditation experiment I remembered that M had mentioned he might like to smoke Salvia on this trip. I was also considering trying it, either smoked or chewed. I went into his room and asked him if he was still interested. He said he was, so we got everything together and went into the living room to do our experiment.

He sat for a few minutes, preparing himself and gathering his courage. Finally, he held the lighter to the bowl and inhaled the magical Salvia essence held within. He laid down holding the smoke as I moved the bong out of his way.

Within a minute it became obvious he was feeling it strongly. He began to move in a strange circular pattern, lifting the upper half of his body off the ground and rotating it. It looked like he was being attracted by some force while being held in place. This lasted for five or six minutes before he seemed to come out of it.

He sat up and said "Weird! That stuff is so weird…" or something to that effect. I asked how it was and he tried to tell me a little about it. It became obvious to me that he was still feeling it, as he wasn't making much sense as he tried to tell me about it. He wasn't totally incoherent, just cryptic. He seemed to expect that I would understand what he was talking about, but I didn't. He did say he seemed to be being pulled towards something in a cyclical fashion.

After trying to explain it to me for a minute he mentioned he might try it again. I said I was also considering smoking or perhaps chewing some. We both sat back to contemplate the possibility of further exploration. He lay back down and I noticed a minute later that he was still apparently tripping on the Salvia. I watched him, waiting for it to fade. Instead it seemed to grow stronger.

He continued moving in a very similar fashion to what he'd been doing before. As he did this he would occasionally move into a different position. I watched him, fascinated and then increasingly concerned as he continued in this manner for some time. He eventually got to his knees and then his feet. I had to move a candle several times to keep him from being burnt and he attempted to go outside several times, all while still in a deep trance.

Several times during this I attempted contact. M always responded, though it seemed clear to me he was not focused on me in any way. What little he said basically amounted to "I'm ok, I want this to continue" so I mostly let him be. I did follow him around, moving things out of the way. Several times he became visually upset and I attempted to console him by making contact and letting him know I was present. This seemed to help and each time he returned to the same trance like state. For the most part he moved in circles throughout our house, finally ending in his bedroom. There he sat on a chair staring into the light for another ten minutes before finally seeming to shake the trance and communicate with me. Two hours or more had passed since he smoked the Salvia.

As he returned I began asking about his experience and he tried to explain it for me. Basically he was experiencing the end of time, a moment when all things would happen simultaneously. He was being pulled toward this and when he would nearly arrive, he would have to stop and return, as time flowed backwards. It sounded very interesting, not unlike my own Salvia experiences and quite a bit like my Ketamine and LSD trip a few months before. We talked about his trip for about an hour. I asked him to promise me he would never smoke Salvia without someone watching and observing him while he did it, fully informed about what he was doing, for safety's sake. He agreed.

M asked if I minded if he tried again, under my supervision. I indicated I didn't, but that we should do it immediately since I was nearly ready to turn in for the night. He smoked a similar amount to what he had done earlier and again seemed to go into a trance. This time it lasted only a few minutes before he returned to his baseline level of acid charged consciousness, reporting that he had had a similar but much less intense experience.

After that I decided I had to try it myself. The time just felt right. I loaded and smoked a small hit of our 8X extract and laid down to await the onset.

Behind my closed eyelids I detected light and color in a striated pattern. This seemed to seep into me in a maddeningly familiar way until I was deep into the Salvia consciousness. I felt charged and inundated by it.

I perceived being at some sort of nexus or juncture from which I could reach into what appeared to be other worlds, or other points in time. It felt like a strange multidimensional space that I was unsure how to navigate. I was vaguely aware of my "true" location in my living room and as I thought about it I remembered Salvia's previous assertion that she was Goddess and suddenly it didn't seem so far fetched anymore.

I manage to croak out "This is so WEIRD…" and began to laugh. I was fully in the Salvia state. When I opened my eyes the entire room seemed to be pouring into my head. I again had the perception that I was standing on the verge of some gateway to multiple realities, perceiving a very small bit of each of them. Again I thought about how weird the whole thing was and began to laugh.

My laughter carried me softly out of Salvia's domain and back to the world of more or less ordinary consciousness. I felt elated. As I returned much of the experience slipped away from me, but I still managed to retain much of it, much more than usual. M and I talked a bit about what I had experienced as we smoked some cannabis.

We sat around stoned and enjoying the glow of our leftover trips for about an hour. After M went to bed I listened to music for a while, then made some breakfast, ran an errand and went to bed. When I awoke five hours later I felt good, although tired.

This experience is definitely promising. The Salvia experience once again amazed and humbled me. This is definitely a powerful plant to be treated with the utmost respect. The thought of someone smoking this and having a similar experience as M's without a knowledgeable sitter is chilling. I definitely encourage anyone experimenting with this plant, her extracts or sprit to be extremely careful. Informed sitters are a must to prevent a possible tragedy. I do believe that with the proper precautions Salvia has the potential to answer some of the most profound questions we can ask, and maybe show us a few more to seek answers for. The technique of smoking Salvia while tripping on another psychedelic has proven to be extremely promising. It definitely enhances and clarifies the experience, while extending and intensifying it. I plan on exploring the combination of Salvia with other entheogens with an eye towards maximizing effectiveness of the technique.