DOSE:

1 bowl

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

The book of eternity
This is to be my first official written trip report after years of considering it. It will be a long and detailed journey for those willing to spare the time. It is hard to know where to start a story like this. It is a story, but it is a true story. The nature of the experience was so bizarre that one of the only viable options I see for explaining it is by creating a narrative.

This is about my first experience with Salvia Divinorum. As a preface let me say that this experience was so intense and created such a schism in my routine of normal life that it actually took me many months to remember what happened. I cannot remember exactly what happened but over the years have attempted to piece together the pieces of the psychedelic puzzle, being that the experience was unfathomably bizarre and disjointed, random, and traumatic in some ways. I say traumatic because I experienced a few weeks of HPPD afterwards, I saw shadow people on the peripheral of my sight, I had intense dreams similar to brief seconds of the experience, it scared the shit out of me, and even to this day some 10 years later I occasionally have overwhelming moments of anxiety or intense pondering as to what the fuck exactly occurred.

That being said, I do not regret the experience at all. It was a turning point in my life and my relationship to the psychedelic experience, something I had been immensely interested in for perhaps 4 or 5 years prior, having dozens of psilocybin experiences up to that point ranging from threshold to beyond the beyond of ego death. Upon learning of this wonderful library of drug knowledge and experience I had been pretty obsessively reading trip reports. This is where I had first read about Salvia divinorum. The experience reports were extremely random and from what I read super intense. I found out that local headshops all over the United States were selling it in extract form. For a few months I had been interested in it and one morning, still awake after a night of partying, I sat in the morning sun smoking cigarettes and decided it was time to try and find some. I was hungover, super tired but dead set on finding this mysterious plant. About 30 miles from me is the state of Indiana, and crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky there is a neat little town I’ve always enjoyed. Anyway in the vicinity of this town there were multiple smoke shops where I bought all kinds of weird shit. It was a December morning, there was slushy snow and ice on the roads and I drove my crappy firebird slowly to my destination- the first smoke shop. To my dismay, they didn’t have any in stock and directed me to their sister shop further out of town up on the hill. This was before I had a smart phone so I was trying to find the place based on word alone, it took me a while to find it.

Anyway I found the shop, it was pretty cliché, lots of cool tapestries, smelled like incense, had a dreaded stoner dude behind the counter. After I inquired as to whether or not he had Salvia in stock he asked me "5, 10, or 15x?" I wasn’t sure what that meant so he explained it to me and I chose 15. He told me to have a sitter and be careful because it was an intense experience, he also suggested I used a small water bong to cool down the smoke so I bought one right there. I already knew my brother, my partner on many entheogenic experiences would be my sitter. I bought the small baggy and sat in my car opening the contents, what I saw was a decent little pile of what looked like purplish black crumbles, almost the consistency of cigarette tobacco. It had a wonderful aroma that I cannot for the moment compare to anything else. It didn’t LOOK like anything impressive, yeah judging how powerful a hallucinogen can be by looks is not the wisest move ever. So I drove back home, put the contents of the baggy into a small corked bottle, sat it aside to wait for my brother to be back around in the afternoon. We live in a pretty rural area with no towns nearby, and our family farm is 70+ acres of woods and a few rocky creek valleys we call hollers.

There is an old gravel road which hundreds of years ago was a county road, which became strangely significant in future psychedelic experiences including this particular one. This gravel/creek-rock goes back perhaps a quarter mile to an area we refer to as the cabin. We had a small wooden building we had tripped in, partied in and hung out for years. It was and still is our sanctuary from the outside world. It had become a sanctuary for exploring the inner world, and remained so even years after the Salvia experience, in fact I am typing this trip report on an old beat up laptop in the cabin right now. Back to the point at hand! Later that afternoon my brother J came home from doing whatever he was doing and I showed him the package, informed him that I needed him as a trip sitter and we walked through the snow back to the cabin. We sat in the snow facing the forward end of an old barn and the hill in front of us. It was December so there were no leaves on the trees, just snow and bare branches all around, some tan colored scrubby bushes around us too. We were both wearing over-all’s because it was pretty cold.

I burned a nag-champa incense as an offering to the universe and prayed for guidance. I didn’t have any particular intention other than to acquaint myself with this new discovery which I would learn later was a sacred plant used in ceremony by the Mazatec people of Mexico. So I sat with the incense burning in front of me, my brother to my right side, the edge of the barn to my left. I told my brother something along the lines of "It’s supposed to send me to another dimension and I need you to make sure I don’t move around and do something stupid here in this world.”, to which his reply was "Dude you bought this stuff in a head shop, there’s no way its gonna do something like THAT." Well, we were both pretty fucking clueless as to the severity of my decision to try this ha-ha. I took a few deep meditative breaths to release anxiety and I took a rather large rip from the little green bubbler. I handed my brother the pipe and inhaled deep. The taste was wonderful and somehow seemed to spread across my skin as if my skin had taste buds all over it.

Within maybe 10 seconds of holding the smoke in I began to lose memory of what was happening and felt this gravity tugging me backwards towards the ground, my whole body got cold like it was being dipped in menthol or something. So next thing I know, I’m blank, no anything, no observer or memory of what was going on and then a voice shakes me out of it. "Did you see that bird?' My brother’s voice reminds me that I’m a person and I see. I SEE, oh yeah! I’m sitting in the yard and remember I had hit that pipe with the salvia in it. At the same moment I see a blue jay fly right over top of us and the tracer is so long it is almost like a 50 foot long bird just stretched out over top of us. Everything is extremely sharp and vivid and I still feel the gravity pulling me toward the ground. I remember what I was there to do after a brief complete blackout and I motion for J to hand me the pipe. I say "I hear there’s a thin line between feeling the gravity and going beyond the threshold, we'll see." I then torch the rest of the bowl, attempting to smoke the entire rest of it which was maybe 3/4 of it.

This is the point in which my life was to drastically change forever, and had I known beforehand what was to come, even given my immense curiosity I’m not so sure I would’ve went through with it. What follows is my attempt to put an extremely illogical and ineffable series of unlikely events into some sort of coherent order. As I said before, it took me a long time to remember these pieces and put them into a narrative like this. It is a crude attempt to explain something which unfortunately cannot really be understood from the outside. Okay, so I torch the bowl, hold it in and hand the bong to J.

I feel the gravity become way more intense and I start hearing my heartbeat, at about every heartbeat I hear a voice coming from some distant valley, louder, louder, LOUDER, and reality begins to fold. This was not like a visual hallucination or a metaphor, reality literally folded, behind me there was utter abyss. All of reality seemed to leech into a 2 dimensional frame of what I could see with nothing behind or around it. My spine had become the middle of space/time and was rapidly closing in toward the middle of my vision, and at the same time it was unfolding from the middle of my chest outward like pages of a book. Each frame was made up of the last image I saw, the side of the barn, the trees and snow in the yard and the hill in front of me. Each time a page folded from the middle it the voice got louder. It was as if someone was whispering VERY loudly "HE SEE'S IT, HE SEE'S IT!!" and this sound shattered reality into a million frames.

There was no longer an “I” to speak of so I use this description loosely, there was no yard, no brother, no salvia, no earth, everything was completely replaced by this new and frightening reality of this "book" which seemed to be imbedded in some gargantuan feminine presence. As the pages grew from the middle the trees in the image grew upward and everything took on a crazy weird pallet of browns, greens, reds and oranges. As if the hill had become some sort of metallic clay that was growing upward at each frame/chant. It is also important to clarify that this wasn’t simply visual, I felt that I had BECOME this unfathomable thing. My physical reality was reoriented from that of a human body to an ever-growing geometric entity made of pages of all reality which was born and died over and over from the spine of the book which was literally my own spine. In between the pages of the unfolding fractal book I could glimpse what seemed to be portals into other places, and as the pages grew larger and larger they seemed to swallow all of the cosmos and incorporate all physical/mental/spiritual/mathematical reality into their/my frames.

Between the massive pages of this book, out sprang some sort of devious jesters, these dark and malicious unexpected entities that felt as if they had been waiting my whole life to play this ultimate fucked up prank on me. The prank was that I had thought whatever had existed before was real and ultimately it was all a big joke, and this was what was behind the curtain of the stage of reality. This is not the type of psychedelic experience where you can reflect, there is no YOU to speak of other than EVERYTHING and EVERYONE which have somehow been rolled up into an amalgam of experience unfolding with all of you as the epicenter of some cosmic apocalypse. So as these pages of Barn/trees/snow/HE SEE'S IT! Mantra/all conscious/all geometry unfold I am still peeking between the pages to see these portals into other worlds and then BAM!! I’m right back to sitting in the snow with the pipe in my hand and for a brief moment almost remember that I was a human being smoking a powerful psychedelic. This is what I might consider the second chapter, wow what a funny metaphor to use in describing an experience which I reference to as being book like.

So I’m sitting there looking at my legs outstretched with my blue coveralls and boots in the snow. A spiral begins to appear on the ground like a drain plug has been removed and my legs begin to melt and swirl into this hole, I can FEEL my body stretching and melting into this abyss as if I am made of stretchy putty. It literally feels like there is NOTHING on the other side of this hole. The world was again a 2 dimensional plane which ended with the ground and underneath was nothing. It was pulling me into this nothing and the only feeling I had was OH SHIT, I’m going to disappear! All the while I feel like my spine has been attached to some sort of cables which I later discovered were the “chakra” points, something which I had never heard of. These cables stretch off into the sky, where there is ALSO a hole into nothing though the cables are being controlled by some force within this abyss. I am being pulled upwards into the sky and I can SEE the ground moving away fast and the blue sky and clouds disappearing underneath me.

Somehow I had been sucked into a drain and also pulled into the sky at the same time, and then there is NOTHING. This is the part of the experience which I struggle to explain and come to terms with. It was literally the void, an abyss, there in not even the color black, no memory, no identity, only a FEELING. It is a feeling of being made of pure lead, only heaviness and pure emotion. There is this enormous feeling of indescribable fear, pure terror and loneliness. I knew that I had existed somehow, somewhere before in a place where I wasn’t so scared and lonely. Keep in mind that this "I" is very vague, there’s no me as in human, only the faint memory that there had been a something before this nothing.

I hear my mother’s voice calling to me from behind, somewhere off in another universe where there is something she yells for me, calling my name over and over. Later I would remember the feeling of wondering what this was calling me because I couldn’t remember my mother. I thought I had died and had a brief instant of memory of being a person, a person who liked to experiment with strong psychoactive drugs, and I had fucked up not only my brain but washed away all of the cosmos in the act. That little sliver of memory in this utter nothingness made me so lonely it’s almost too much to remember. At the same time I hear another voice telling me to BREATHE, “you gotta BREATHE man!!”, it echoes like YOUyouyouyou gottatatata breathehehehe and I FEEL, I feel myself squeezing someone, I feel breath going into my lungs, but the very idea of feeling is completely foreign in this abyss where there is no I, no they, so the feeling of sensations scares the shit out of me. It’s as if my very lungs are a separate entity from this void which suddenly appeared. But somehow it gives me hope.

Then I return for a moment, I feel like I am crying, I am so desperate to return from this abyss, I know there was a me and I want that me back. My eyes are open, I am being embraced by my brother, he is maybe a foot taller than me so I am looking up at his face, he is hugging me, I had been squeezing him hard and was afraid I would hurt him, who or whatever he was, but I was afraid to let go. Still to this day I will never forget how he was there holding me in the most intensely horrifying and lonely moment of my life. I had experienced fear as a soldier during mortar/rocket attacks and a few crazy experiences on patrol, nothing brutal like some folks in war experience, but this fear was of a fundamentally different order. It was fear of nonexistence. A fear of having initiated, through immature decisions the death of all familiarity. But I returned from that abyss, it felt like a billion years in that place.

So just as suddenly as chapter 2 had begun it had ended and so I move on to chapter 3. Suddenly I’m back again, I have a body and I am on earth though I am more of an observer than aware of what is happening. Though now I am in the same place, the holler with the cabin, but it’s different. There is no barn and the houses are in different places, there is no snow, just green grass, it is spring! It seems that I am in the past a hundred years or so, literally seeing this spot in another timeline. Then everything turns red like on Total Recall. Suddenly this small Kentucky holler looks as if it’s in a sand storm, everything turns different shades of red/orange and up in the sky, in the right hand corner of my vision, there is another black hole in the sky. Surrounding the black hole in the shape of a whirlpool is the entire spectrum of colors radiating from deep purple closest to the hole out to the red which is the sky and everything else. I hear this noise like the THX logo, like wurhhhhhHHHH as everything begins to grown upward towards the sky and the black hole.

The trees are stretched upwards infinitely thin that they look like hair going into the wormhole. Every single blade of grass, every rock and tree, every cloud is growing upward into this vortex but I was simply an observer without awareness of my body so there was no fear attached to this part, I just felt like that was the world. Another flash and I’m seeing snow again, I am looking downward completely unaware of all of the craziness that just transpired. I'm looking at gray icy footprints in the snow and the scent of nag-champa radiates through all of my senses. A piece of my old human mind begins to reform, I am overjoyed thinking that it’s over, the BAM, I am in another blackout, them BAM there I am again pacing around staring at the snow, I look up and see some strange creature covered in ice, froze solid, it was my brother, who was NOT froze solid. I didn’t know who or what he was but I knew that this object knew something about who I was or what I was. BAM! I am in a tunnel shooting upwards at the speed of light, this tunnel of light and images had little doors leading to other realities, in them I could see glimpses of ancient civilizations, alien civilizations, dinosaurs, and things way too weird to understand.

I am moving at light speed and it feels like I am in a tornado, I try to grasp at these doors just to stop at any reality, afraid at this velocity I will never stop. All the while these shadowy wispy beings are taunting me with the idea that I’ll never return to normal and I am to blame for this craziness. They are scaring me again, they are malevolent even, taunting me, and it is haunting to remember. The presence of these different entities was perhaps the most startling thing about this experience because not only did I not expect it, but it was so real. This is where I suppose the peak happens. As I am flying upward in this tunnel of realities being harassed by shadow beings there is a moment. All time and movement freeze and something reaches through the edges of the tunnel, something made of light, more powerful than the seemingly evil creatures trapping me with fear and doubt. Time stops, the vortex stops, the shadow people freeze and shatter like a million pieces of fragile glass and I even hear the tinkling sound.

I felt that someone was here to help me, these beings which for lack of a better description felt like HUMAN spirits took me away from the terror. They brought me out of the vortexes, the books, the wormholes, the abyss, the saved me. They took me to a place akin to a twilight zone, the barrier between the human world and Salvia universe. I have a vague recollection of a horizontal plane made of different gray colors. There they reminded me that I have always been there with them, we were family. They told me not to be afraid anymore and ignore the desperate emotions that had entrapped me. They told me that we will always be together, they loved me, and everything is okay. It was a feeling of pure love and comfort, as if these beings had waited millennia for me to remember them and I finally have. In this human world I have a very loving family and these beings reminded me of them, perhaps from several lifetimes or generations, or perhaps just human beings in general.

The last thing they said which I heard as a voice was "Don't forget, don't forget." This echoed further and further away and I seemed to fall gently back into my body. This time I opened my eyes and saw my hands, I wasn’t sure what the hell they were but I knew I was coming back from somewhere to this world. The trees looked menacing like tentacles on an alien world, for this moment, I felt that I was being reborn on an alien planet. Then I started to rapidly remember who I was, and recognized my brother. He was pacing back and forth looking at me with a worried expression and saying something like "We can never do this again man." I couldn’t even remember what had happened. He walked up the steps to the cabin and I followed, on each frozen step I saw what looked to be entire cities in miniature. Like New York City with skyscrapers and cars, taxis, all of that. I felt bad for stepping on them on my way up the steps. It was this thought that reminded me that it’s not normal for entire cities to be on steps. It was simply little ice spikes and snow, and I started to remember more and more where and who I was.

I was still feeling pretty heavy and strange and lay down on the mattress to try and get my bearings. I suddenly remembered the immense terror I had felt at some point prior and it dawned on me like a cosmic bitch slap that I had just survived something utterly daunting. I could not remember exactly what it was but I knew I was SO GLAD to be back in the 3d reality with my body, my ego, my brother, the snow and trees. My brother had the unfortunate duty of watching me go completely mentally void, slobbering, wandering around like I had lost all sense of reality and self, which I had. During this he had thrown the little bottle of Salvia flakes off in the snow somewhere determined that I never touch it again. I made up my mind right then and there that I would never do it again! But I did, many times and so did he.

Future stories for future trip reports. I just knew it wasn’t something to play around with. On the walk back to the house I couldn’t help but touch things, caress the plants and trees, feel my hand move across surfaces. Just thankful to be in a body, to have an identity, to be separate from the rest of the universe even if it was an illusion of separation. It made me more thankful that I had ever been just to be in what we consider a humdrum reality. When I got home I immediately went to sleep, took a few hour nap and woke up to a text that my brother needed a ride home from a party up the road. I didn’t feel like doing anything but I remembered that he had been there for me, and I should be there for him. On the drive up the road that night I randomly turned on the Art Bell radio show and wouldn’t ya know it, it was about psychedelic plants! I went back and found the salvia the next day and sat it on my altar. I thanked the spirit of the plant for putting me through whatever it had. I couldn’t even remember what had happened, it wasn’t until a few sub-threshold experiences that I could piece together what happened the first time. It has taken me a long time to piece together this story to the best of my abilities. This concludes my first trip report, Salvia Divinorum. The keeper of the book of eternity.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 116090
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 27
Published: Jul 23, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), HPPD / Lasting Visuals (40), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), General (1)