Hello Again,

Here come the reports. I have finnegaled some longer-term internet access by trading home-grown herb. Having a card for my arthritis is helpful on this front.

Readers may or may not want to check my first spice report for SWIM in the nursery and SWIM's 7 gram mushroom report in Other Entheogens for some background and context.

As part of a mid-life crisis that began around age 40 SWIM re-entered the psychedelic realm after a 20 year break. The 20 year break was occassioned by a traumatic ass-backwards ego-death experience on LSD which involved spending a number of horrific hours in what she calls The Realm of the Dead.

Before trying Salvia, SWIM made some lifestyle changes, read every book she could find (about 4 of them) on the topic, scoured Erowid, Lycaeum and Sagewisdom.org.


First Experience 10X:
It took SWIM 6 attempts to penetrate past Salvia levels one or two. The first time this happened she was lying down with her eyes closed. For the first time in her life she actually had a vision. A difficult to recall yet oddly coherant narrative.

After holding the smoke, setting the pipe down and starting a timer, SWIM lay down and closed her eyes. Amost immediately her vision was impacted by sheets of bright colors in blue, purple and green tones. Her body felt like it was falling at a sharp angle that she can only describe as 90 degrees from (consensual) reality. Not bad for not owning a linear accelerator. She heard voices.

Very rapidly the sheets of color coalesced into a green athletic field on a bright summer day. People SWIM knew but could not name were there. They observed, spoke and joked about many topics - mainly the kids on the field. But, there was an odd undertone - as if everyone kept expecting SWIM to get up and do something. She believes that in this vision she was lying on her back on the green field.

It feels insane to write this, but for SWIM it literally felt like months, i.e. the Summer passed. That odd feeling of expectation continued. SWIM remembers joking with one of the other women, making the punch line of some sort of play on words that caused everyone, including SWIM to laugh.

Very soon after she realized she was on her bed laughing. She had a residual buzz and minor visual "trails" for awhile longer but the main experience was over. Incredibly, her timer indicated 4 1/2 minutes.

SWIM had never experienced anything like this before and took some time off for comtemplation. She felt very good and positive for the next day or two.

Her feeling in hindsight is that this scene was lifted from her childhood somewhow. It was reminiscent of weekends when she played on a soccor team as a child. But, this time she was with the adults watching the kids. And yet something wasn't being done (by her), something was still being expected of her . . .


Second Experience 10x - saved by the cat:
About a week later SWIM decided to try again. She had had a couple of unsuccessful attempts so she made sure she was plenty buzzed on Cannabis. She then cleaned her water pipe and filled it with ice water. She loaded a small bed of Cannabis then laid a generous amount of Salvia on top.

Before proceeding in this description, SWIM must mention that her brother's black cat, Scorn, was spending the night with her. Scorn is a simple, loving cat, who is easily confused. The first few times Scorn had stayed over she had been confined to SWIM's bedroom. But, the past few overnight visits she had been allowed the run of SWIM's large, two-bedroom apartment.

SWIM's husband was separted from her by 80 miles due to employment realities. SWIM had heard and read accounts of somnambulistic behavior (sleep-walking) on Salvia and was worried about the stairs. She barricaded the hallway and locked herself in her bedroom, hoping this would stop any potential dangerous, walking-off situations. Ha!

Well, Scorn did not appreciate the closed/locked door. She thought the new order of things was that she got free run of the entire apartment. It took SWIM awhile to realize that she had caused Scorn stress by closing the door. By this time SWIM was fully in Salvia space!

She smoked the bowl of Cannabis/Salvia and held the smoke for 20-30 seconds, set the pipe down and started the timer. She immediately (and without any sort of memorable transition) was blasted into an extremely foreign world. She felt that she could communicate (almost telepathically?!?) with her brother who had recently exited her place. She felt that the walls and rooms were melting into each other. Complete and utter non-Euclidean geometry took over. She had her glasses off and for the first time ever had some trouble with double-vision. The weird geometry made everything seem connected, made large distances seem tiny. She had her eyes open and could "see" into all of the rooms of the apartment. She also thought she could "hear" her brother speaking (perhaps to his wife or children in their apartment downt he street).

The next thing SWIM knew she had rapidly jumped off the bed and was standing up. Scorn was at the locked door meowing and looking at SWIM. Scorn was perfectly clear. Scorn was not part of the weird, melding geometry where SWIM felt she could take a single step and be down the stairs and out on the street. Her vision was hitting her in layered, melting waves. She could feel an intense, eerie and extremely familiar sense of presences just beyond her sensory reach. It seemed if she could just "shift" a bit more that she would actually be able to see people standing around her. These people were clearly stationary and ephemeral.

This was familiar, she quickly came to realize because she had been here before! Holy shit!

Over 20 years ago she had had a bad LSD trip, that among other things, sent her to what she can only describe as "The Realm of the Dead." During this scary experience (actually terrifying and harrowing but that is another story . . .)she saw many "people" who were not really present in consensual reality. They were dressed from different eras. They all had bleached, bluish faces. She could not (and did not want to) communicate with them. They seemed strangely and completely disconnected, neither benevolent nor directly threatening, yet inherently terrifying.

That was 20 years ago and this was now. As SWIM stood up and rapidly opened the locked door (That didn't work too well.) Scorn exited SWIM's bedroom and SWIM followed Scorn. Scorn led SWIM on a silly and merry chase through two different rooms, meowing anxiously all the way. As SWIM followed, she kept saying "Scorn!" SWIM feels that was the only English word that she possessed at that moment. When she tried to explain this to her brother he asked if she couldn't speak English what could she speak? Her answer was something bizarre like, "pre-verbal space."

It was very odd. SWIM realized that she was back in the Realm of the Dead (at least on the left hand side of her vision) but could not see the "spirits," although she knew they were there. There was absolutely no fear or terror this time. More a sense of wonder and amazement. A realization that she had been here before and a strong sense of inquiry into why she was here again and what it might mean? SWIM felt that she had not completely penetrated to this other realm, as had happened previously, but that she was incredibly close. If she could just step a tiny distance more into that "other" parallel universe, she would be able to see the presences.

On the right hand side of SWIM's vision, something strange was happening. The entire view had broken up into rectangles that were the height of the room. Shimmering 3-D, smoke-colored rectangles with black borders. It was obvious that each of these rectangles was a door! A door into another dimension. SWIM was just about to pick one and step on through (or at least stick her head through), but she was concerned about Scorn's anxiety. She knew Scorn didn't want to be locked into a single room anymore. Reality had completely dissolved into a science fiction fantasy but everything and every thought about Scorn came through clearly. Just when SWIM thought she was going to see those who inhabit the Realm of the Dead and/or peek through a door into another Universe, Scorn came through alive and well. SWIM is grateful for this because she knows if she had tried to step through that interdimensional door that she whould have smashed into a wall and probably broken a tooth! Reality gets in the way of the most interesting, fun and intriguing fantasies at times . . .

As SWIM walked Scorn back to the bedroom the effects began to rapidly subside, though SWIM still had those "tripping hard" feelings and perceptual distortions, but she could see the room(s) re-coalescing nicely around her. SWIM kept saying "Scorn," while petting the cat and laughing. Scorn was so incredibly soft and very appreciative of the attention (and the now open bedroom door). SWIM stopped her timer and saw that just under seven minutes had elapsed this time. Perhaps she was beginning the process of "getting to know the plant." She hoped so, because the failed attempts were weird and frustrating and these were the kind of experiences that she came away from feeling intrigued, fascinated and excited by.



Transition
There were a couple more trips, whose content was either unnotable or too personal. One in particular allowed SWIM to make a breakthrough in an supervisorial/employee relationship that she was involved in at the time. During this time, among other effects, SWIM experienced reverse tolerance. That is, where it used to take multiple tokes off of 10x, she could now have a full-blown vision experience with a single toke of 5x. Also, she had quit timing her sessions.


5th Salvia Trip: Journey into a Matrix-Like Parallel Universe, 5x standardized
Again, SWIM was descending into a feeling of familiarity. SWIM was with other presences who had expectations of her. Something needed to be done. She was alone in her bedroom but felt that others (other SWIM's) were also lying down . She quickly came to realize that she was not in her bedroom at all but floating in grey space while lying in a body-shaped capsule which looked like the bottom half of a sarcophogus. In fact she was floating among a group of bodies positioned in these sarcophogae. These bodies were arrayed out in truly huge hand formation.

SWIM rapidly came back to her bedroom and enjoyed a very pleasant, colorful psychedelic drift.

This "other dimension" seemed somehow calmer, more at peace. The usual sense of tension/something needed to be done, though there was yet lacking a certain previous intensity. It felt more comfortably familiar.

Looking back on this vision, all of those SWIM's laid out in a hand formation was very comforting on an extremely simple and genetic level.

SWIM could see how a religious person might interpret this whole thing as perhaps signfying the hand of a higher power. But for SWIM it was like a subconscious message that everything was literally in hand! Seeing that all the other SWIM's in all the other nearby parallel universes were doing the EXACT same thing that SWIM was doing was very reassuring and assuaging of recent feelings of lonliness.

SWIM has come to learn that her subconscious lives in her childhood neighborhood and realm and is very young and simplistic in its messages. It is also apparently somewhat religious. This is endlessly fascinating to SWIM . . .

Hello Pandora,

Another well written story. I imagine that you, chasing the cat while calling "Scorn" all the time, must have been a silly situation. I also understand now what you meant by safed by the cat in your mushroom experience thread.

I was wondering though, now that you went back to parts of your "traumatic ass-backwards ego-death experience on LSD" do you feel you have the cuarage to explore deeper the next time you enter that "Realm of the Dead"?


Kind regards,

The Traveler

yes, nice write up!..really nice to see others appreciating salvia divinorum..and I think that most here that are aquainted with her can relate to some of you're experiences..she really is one of the strangest and most amazing of the lot..far out.

Traveler,

Oh My Gold-Building!!! It happened last night at midnight. Unmistakeable and still astonishing - my first breakthrough. Will be posting on this asap. Was going to post the LSD story today but that's tabelled . . .

In hindsight, chasing Scorn around while saying her name and having her meow back anxiously was hilarious and SWIM still laughs when she thinks about it. At the time, it seemed like serious business. She had three choices in front of her and she chose Scorn . . .That cat had obviously penetrated DEEPLY into her subconscious!

Wow, great question. Thanks - I love to be pushed and challenged. I can honestly say that when SWIM inevitably does return to The Realm of the Dead (one way or another) and she does feel this inevitability, she will want to actively explore and perhaps even attempt to directly interact with the spirits. SWIM regrets not making that clear in her report. The terror is gone. A tremendous sense of curiosity and desire to literally move forward remains.

What happened? A tremendous amount of personal work that took me through places truly hellish. I wound up at the end of this work with a deep and profound acceptance. Acceptance of the deaths that had plagued me in my youth (Here we go again with TMI . . .) such as the fact that at age 18 my mother, maternal grandmother and personally bonded cat all burned to death in a horrible vehicular accident. They died travelling to a favorite camping location. We used to camp together, the three of us (Don't remember if Chestnut the cat came along.) and we would sit around the fire after a day of fishing, hiking, adventures and wonderful food and call ourselves, 'The three generation trio!" It was very, very hard to continue to attempt meaningful life knowing that their last thoughts were screams of agony and to know that I would have to live the rest of my life being the only surviving member of The Three Generation Trio. Also, throw in a little survivor's guilt just to make it interesting. I was supposed to BE on that camping trip. I blew it off for selfish reasons.

I have the police report and know EXACTLY what went down. It took 10 years after the event to nerve myself up to procure the report. Learning EXACTLY what happened caused this acceptance to begin the descend and the real work to begin. My mother made a split-second decision that doomed them all. It was her fault but it was a mistake that anyone could make, especially in a moment of adrenaline-soaked panic. There were witnesses. At the end of my work I had completely forgiven my mother and myself. I had come to the point where I was ready to be happier and try to live my life with my head out of the yawning grave. After all if there was any shred of a remnant of my mother's and grandmother's souls (for lack of a better term) watching over all of this they would be APPALLED to find I was wasting my life grieving for them! I felt no need to attempt to contact witnesses who I knew would not remember anything more salient or detailed than the content of the report I possessed.

Check this out - I had to get the report from my mother's sister. When I asked my alcoholic father he looked me in the eye and said, "Pandora, I don't have it." What did he mean?!? I pushed. "I never saw it." I pushed again. He sighed, "When the investigating officer contacted me to indicate that their investigation was complete, he offered me a copy of the report. I told him I didn't want it. I didn't save his contact information." (Pink Floyd lyric, "I had another drink . . . drink-a-drink-a-drink-a-drink-a-drink." I still have some work that remains incompleted with my father, in case it is not apparent from the tone and content of this paragraph. Frankly, he is a simplistic, alcoholic, brain-addled, coward. Sigh.

I have truly come to the place where I do accept the early deaths and my how my mother's split-second decision doomed them to death. I accept that my husband will probably die 20 years before me as I am almost 20 years younger than him. I have come to accept the death of myself. I do not fear it, yet I do not seek it. I have moved from "Tired of living but afraid of dying" to "hungry for life but ready for death."

I try to be as humble as is possible with a bloated ego. I try to live each day as if it is my last. Yet, I try to keep my human relations smooth and do not burn bridges. This seems to be paying off for me (not in a financial way, obviously). Every day is a challenge. Every day has temptations to escape that I know are unhealthy and wrong for me. Every day is a beautiful wonder.

It is hard to explain. It took a long time to happen, but it is a good place to be compared to the past . . .

Peace,
Pandora

wow, thanks for sharing.

That's quite an experience, and an incredibly tragic story. I second that thanks for sharing. Be strong, and power on.