DOSE:

3 hits

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract - 10x)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

A friend and I were interested in beginning to experiment heavily with psychedelics. Hallucinogens were available at school but only from time to time and could be hard to come by. Fortunately, we went to school in Maine where we knew Salvia Divinorum was legal. After noticing it was being sold at a local head shop, we figured this would probably be the easiest to start with. I knew very little about the drug, only that it produced a ten minute high though it seemed to last hours and that the experience was almost exclusively bizarre and often terrifying. I heard that many people see the devil.

Similarly, we had limited knowledge on how to properly ingest the intoxicant. What we did know was that it needs to be inhaled tenaciously and deeply with plenty of flame. So we bought a few of these purple lids of saliva in varying potency (I believe we had some 10x and 140x) from the local head shop and procured a couple methods of consumption. We packed it in the bong as well as my personal favorite: roulette joints in which we packed large amounts of the leaves in the middle of a joint so that it would be passed to someone randomly in the circle and we agreed that if we tasted it we would proceed to add flame to the j and inhale ferociously. We set the mood with Animal Collective music, a psychedelic group.

It was the aforementioned friend, another friend and myself that night. First we passed one of the joints and I believe I was the first person to get a Salvia hit. I ended up smoking it a few times that evening, but my first experience was something like this: my perception was almost instantly warped and everything I saw was twisting and misshapen. Things appeared to be drooping and almost swirling about the room. In addition to this I was hit with a sense of synesthesia, or the phenomenon that crosses wires in your brain and causes you to see sounds or hear colors etc. This synesthesia, however was so profound that I was seeing the world through the pores in my skin. This was really weird as I could view the world from a 360 degree perspective able to see what was behind me, in front of me and to the side of me simultaneously. This lasted for all of ten minutes and only really felt like ten minutes. I was disappointed by the brevity of the incident but the sensations were enjoyable nonetheless. I resolved to try again eventually and see if it could get weirder.

On my second attempt that night the results were probably even less intense than the first dose. This time the warping effect and synesthesia returned but the synesthesia was less severe while the warping was more intense in its place. Everything I was seeing seemed to meander to the left or right interspersed with bloating and shrinking, bending, twisting, and swirling. This was particularly amusing as I noticed my friends were also being warped this way. I burst out in hysterical laughter at the mangled psychedelic shapes they had become. This time it also lasted and felt like about ten minutes, maybe as much as twenty and peaked when the synesthesia returned more powerfully and this time my vision also swirled and I was viewing the world as if I was on a carousel rotating me around this funny swirly world.

I had fun, but the way my surroundings were melting and morphing and the extrasensory sensations may have been unsettling to some, but I have always had a good disposition to psychedelics so I was content with the understanding that Salvia does weird things and to just enjoy them as they unfold. Additionally, I never try to fight any experience because it’s like trying to fight a tidal wave. It is a battle you will loose ten out of ten times, yet if you surrender yourself to the sensation, the psychedelic tidal wave will eventually wash you gently to shore.

Now to completely contradict everything I just said, my third toke that night was something I was not at all prepared for and did not know how to react. By this time, we had switched to ripping the bong vigorously, searching for more potent journeys. Once my lungs were full of copious amounts of the sage-like smoke, I was instantly transported to another dimension. This was the first time I encountered the full power of psychedelics. The catalyst for this potent experience was probably the fact that an exceptionally strange Animal Collective song was on, this was my first bong rip of the stuff as well as my third time partaking that night. Not only was I immediately transported to a strange dimensional portal, but I essentially passed out instantly. I do not think I lost consciousness at all, but I swiftly dropped to the floor and landed face down, crouching over a bean bag chair with my face smooshed against its surface.

Unlike the first two trips, which seemed to elevate my senses to higher dimensions, this time I was reverting below the third dimension into the “Flatland”. The theme of this trip was flatness and almost everything therein had an unsettling two dimensional quality to it. The first phenomena I recall is feeling as though I was a page in a book. My movement was completely independent of my command and I could only move when pages were turned by some giant's hand. The page turning was not particularly pleasant either, the complete loss of control was somewhat scary and I started to notice I was not alone. I could somehow sense other people on different pages of the book going through the same phenomena. We were all being simultaneously flattened by other pages only getting light or air if our pages were lifted up, only to be brought down again, flattened with the weight of consecutive pages.

This went on, but at one point shifted suddenly into a variation on this same theme. This time it was even weirder, I mean a lot weirder. To this day probably the strangest psychedelic encounter I have ever had. The shift I refer to was random and perplexing. I was on the surface of a carpet town, like one of those mats you would find in a doctor’s office with a town painted on them. I was essentially face down on the carpet. I really was in carpet town. The primary colors, green, blue, yellow, red that you see on these maps were also at the forefront of this experience. In fact, everything seemed to be made of these. Once again, I was completely two dimensional, flattened neatly into the surface of this carpet town, where, like the book, other people nearby were going through the same phenomena.

Eventually, I notice a massive object approaching and before I realize what is happening, I am being stepped on. Not only this, but as I am stepped on, I am also picked up by this unidentified object. I am now stuck to the feet of what I surmise is some large creature walking about. Then I realize, I am not stuck to it; I have become part of this creature, synonymous with its moving biosphere; this meandering object is actually a giant human made up of little humans like me and my peers from carpet town. It is gradually walking around the carpet, stepping on us and collecting us to make up its anatomy. We are still two dimensional, but when linked together like this, we can form a three dimensional, human like shape the same way six flat squares can form a three dimensional box.

Initially when I was on the giant’s feet I was frightened and it felt akin to being a page in the book from earlier. I was being squished and flattened when the foot was on the ground, only emerging for brief moments of light and air when the foot took a step. This was how I viewed the world for some time, in strobe light-like flashes. Perhaps most frightening was the eerie sounds. Each time I was lifted off the ground by the walking foot I could hear the voices of my peers and the distorted sound of thousands of little two dimensional beings chattering. This sound coagulated into a monotone symphony that was inexplicably haunting, analogous almost to the unexplainably haunting feeling Animal Collective’s music can have.

Eventually as more and more little humans were picked up, I was able to migrate to what seemed to be one of the legs of the giant. Here I was free from being smooshed every several seconds and could finally breathe and think without being hindered by that odd strobe light-like existence. At this stage, I was finally able to think and ponder. To contradict myself yet again, this trip maybe was not completely mysterious as I gained some powerful, life changing insight from this phenomena. Being a moving cog of a larger organism made me feel like a Who on the dust spec in Horton Hears a Who. I along with my peers made up a larger organism that would have been imperceptible to that organism because of its scale but which was nonetheless vital. This was my moment of clarity I guess where I realized that the whole world and probably the universe operates on this schematic. This is an oversimplified way of looking at it, but I was content in viewing the world as a sort of never-ending, constantly expanding chainlink of larger and smaller organisms living in symbiosis. I explored the possibility, however unlikely, that our whole universe may be nothing more than the organ of some greater being, perhaps nothing more than an atom to some gargantuan entity.

Consequently, I pondered the fact that the atoms of our universe, may contain within them entire microscopic universes similar to ours. It’s definitely a pseudo-scientific, psychonaut way of perceiving the world, but this trippy outlook seems real to me to this day. I now feel like part of this never ending chain-link of higher and lower beings. Additionally, this experience taught me how truly connected everything is, inseparable even, at the atomic level. Nothing is really detached from anything else. Instead it is constantly connected by the soup of atoms bumping into each other in which we live.

I came out of this trip abruptly after this moment of clarity. Meanwhile I had lost all sense of time and being. During the trip I was unaware of who I was, my name, my friends, family, my entire life; it was indeed as if I was whisked away to some alternate dimension. The time it took seemed endless honestly. I’ve described it as seemingly taking 4-5 hours, but that’s not really true as time was really irrelevant at this point, there really is no way for me to gauge it. The trip, however only lasted the usual ten minutes or so.

Coming back into a body that was clenched in some strange position on a bean bag chair was freaky. It seemed impossible to me that I could return to such a state. I had pretty much forgotten that I had even taken a drug and subconsciously was thinking that I had gone insane, was dead, or actually became trapped in some weird dimension, but I was also oddly okay with all this. I experienced no negative side effects whatsoever and returned from thereon to my normal life. If anything, I was renewed with vigor from the fun and insightfulness of the experiment. Yes it was terrifying and bizarre at times, but this did not necessarily make it a bad experience.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 113417
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: May 8, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Entities / Beings (37), Music Discussion (22), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), General (1)