With all the trip reports appearing about the use of salvia divinorum, I thought I would share my first experiences, from 2 years ago. I cherish them, for in an indirect way they are what led me to DMT, and to who I am today.
I hope you enjoy them! Here's the first:
THE SALVIA DIARIESThursday, may 22, 2008
First time. Trepidatious to say the least after some in-depth on-line research. No sitter: intending only a small, short trip. Procured some 20x from Psychonaut (no 15x left…) that I loaded into a colourless glass bong, no more than a very small pinch from the grambag, caution being the side to err on. One deep hit from the few leaves and a mild strangeness settled in : the music, Peter Gabriel’s Passion, throbbed with the room that shifted itself and elongated, the legs of chairs tendrils that swayed with the slowness of salvia (felt like it was familiar, but also unknown…).
The effects were nevertheless relatively mild and fast eroding so, after waiting 5 minutes, I loaded up another only slightly larger collection of leaves in the bowl, and hit it. Same strangeness, a little pushed : the wooden floor planks curled up toward the topline of my vision, attaining mid-route under the pressure of great concentration before retreating.
Visuals were strong, but, like psiloscibyn, worked from the visual material available – not to suggest this was like a mushroom trip ; this was a distortion of shape, whereas the mushrooms are all about texture and colour and depth. Objects in the room were stretched and horned, and swayed, not shimmered - for lack of better terms. A gap between two planks on the floor became a crevice, then a deepening hole and finally a veritable ravine before I shifted my attention away. The leaves of the hibiscus before me glowed and shone like plastic, their leaves pointy and serrated and exhibiting the horns that seemed to peak everything in the room – the chairs, radio antennae, the stone table across in the kitchen…
The glass vase on the table suddenly grew taller, but unlike other visual distortions from other substances, seemed real and otherwise unaffected. I stared at it for a while, but it responded in no way – it had grown twice as tall and showed no signs of wishing to shrink to its original dimensions. So I let it be. My head felt pressured from the sides, but not uncomfortably so. This was close to the level I thought I would allow myself to get to, but once here, I wanted more! I loaded a third bowl, in my estimation no larger than the second, and drank in the current of smoke which I trapped for upwards of thirty seconds before exhaling.
Now - words will have to do, but they are likely as insufficient as a toddler’s attempt at describing differential calculus, and I find them lacking the way a desert wants for water. I receded. The music pulsed my departure as the planks of pine that were my floor glowed orange and reached up, curling over me and hiding the room, the knots mouths that gaped and folded in on themselves, repeatedly. It was all 2 dimensional, Charles m. Shultz like cartoon cutouts, uniformly coloured and etched with thick black borders. The planks kept rising over me, like the conveyor belt described by others on salvia, until it started folding into itself, over and over again, but somehow retaining its size and dimension. I was aware of my legs on the couch. The moment I became aware of them they folded into themselves and disappeared and the couch which was not a couch folded over and over until it became the folding planks and my field of view was entirely occupied by this strange, recursive, cartoon-plank-orange and endless belt of both mechanical and organic origins that somehow at once opened as if pushing, and closed and dragged me into its geometric maw - and i disappeared.
I was not I. Nor anyone else. Words fail again, to an exponential degree. I was frightened, but not frightened – but to employ I, the first person, does a disservice, because there was no I. This must be the much documented ego-death and it was exhilarating, terrifying, elucidating and confounding all at once – and these words are shadows of greater shadows that lose themselves in darknesses too vast to be called shadows.
I had no recollection of having smoked salvia, of the room I was in, of the history I considered my own, or who the subject of OWN could possibly be. I felt that whatever I had known to this point (if I could possibly have recalled) was not only an illusion but a fleeting speck in a timeline that stretched in all directions without having a beginning a middle or an end or a centre. I wanted it to be over, but I hadn’t the foggiest what that would mean. To where would I go? It was shortlived (and somehow eternal !?… ?!?) but for those moments I had utterly ceased. Then the room slowly reassembled, the dark borders flowing back into the horns of chairs and edges of planks that lost their orange shultz-glow and took their place back on the floor with the liquid slowness and non-pulsing throb that is salvia.
What WAS that ? Or, WHERE ? Or - what was I? Or all of these folded into an unutterable question…
Hehehe. how long ago.....
JBArk
LINK TO PART 2JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.