Here's a trip report of a my salvia divinorum trip I had last year.
(If you don't know what salvia is, I highly suggest you give this
link a click. I'll try to communicate the gravity of what this substance can do, but if I fail, this should do it and give some useful background for how something like this could possibly exist too.)
Dose
About 3 deep puffs of 60x extract, held in for about five-ten seconds.
Context
My two roommates and I had ordered some salvia off the internet (it's not a controlled substance at the federal level and it was legal in my state as well). We experimented with it here and there, but it produces such a strange and traumatic trip that we went long stretches of time without touching it before we gave it a try again.
On this particular night, one of my roommates was gone, so my other roommate and I decided to try hitting some salvia again. (We'll call him Max).
I have a california king sized bed that takes up the majority of my room and I had these blue string lights wrapped around the walls. There was a red lava lamp on a metal wire nightstand too. That was the setting for this trip. The lights were off, the blue string lights were on, and the lava lamp was on, so there was this real ambient kind of lighting in the room. We grabbed the salvia and the pipe and I sat on my bed while Max sat on the floor.
Keep in mind, again, we both had experience with this powerhouse of a drug. They call this the most powerful psychoactive substance on earth for a reason. But our memories of what exactly this drug did was distant. We did it, we got freaked out, but we couldn't remember exactly
what about the experience freaked us out or
why it scared us.
This time, though, I took enough out of the experience, and I remembered enough, to know why. And I'll never forget.
So with all that said here's what happened.
The Trip Begins
Max hits his hits off the pipe and I see the look on his face. We're both a little jittery going into this because we know that whatever is going to happen, it's going to be ridiculous. So I was watching the look on his face real closely to see how we handled it.
After he did his hits, he had this look of panic and he was looking down at the pipe. He had this pissed off smirk like he remembered the punchline to some cruel joke that he was the target of. After about two seconds of that, he looked up and his face melted into this worried/sad expression when he saw me. He later would tell me that he was trying to communicate "Don't hit this pipe. It's worse than we thought," with that look.
Then the salvia took him and he slumped back into the wall. He grunted a little and closed his eyes.
I brought the pipe to my lips and took the first puff. With salvia even the smoke tastes weird. Best way I could describe it is "mildly spicy rubber sage." The taste made me remember a little more about how this felt and how I was about to feel and a little more of the panic set in.
I willed myself into doing the second hit because Max was already gone and I didn't want to pussy out now after he did it. I took the second hit and my body started to buzz. I started to feel like my consciousness was a physical thing I was seeing the world through, and that box was slowly getting lifted up and there was this adhesive that kept me grounded in the real world and that adhesive was being pulled right the fuck apart. At this point I knew I had already bought that ticket into the salvia-verse and I couldn't turn back now. There were only precious seconds before I lost all control of my body and mind and would slump over into a different world. My entire body went cold from pure, primal fear. I took the third hit because by now I was remembering enough of what I was in for that I figured I would be rewarded by bravery. I figured that maybe I had such terrible times on account of being half in/half out of the experience. Maybe if I got so loaded that I couldn't even register my emotions, I would either be incapable of fear or unconscious.
Neither of those things would happen.
After the third hit, I put the pipe on the floor and tried to get comfortable on my bed. I felt it taking me and the feeling was so god damn strong that I felt like my soul was being hurt.
The Pull
That initial feeling of being taken by salvia (let's call it "the pull") is something out of a sci-fi movie. It is entirely unlike any other drug experience (except for maybe the blast-off from DMT).
The first thing I felt was the disorientation. My sense of direction was shot, but I mean,
extremely shot. You know that feeling when you need to find north but you don't have a compass, the sun is directly over you, and you don't recognize any landmarks? Well it was like that feeling, except instead of not knowing where north is, I didn't know where "left" was. Or "down."
My vision was also starting to slip out of the room I was in to this other place (I'll to that in a minute). I knew I didn't want to go, I didn't want to trip anymore, and whatever it was that made me take this shit--bravery, looking cool in front of my friends, the need to "see the other side"--NONE of it was worth it. So I started to try to stay in the world and not trip. I tried to fight the pull. Like the sensation of fighting a yawn crossed with the feeling of grabbing onto the armrest during a flight with very heavy turbulence. That made the pull stronger. The color scheme in the room started to change, like my eyes were cycling through Instagram filters, each with different R/Y/B proportions and color schemes. The sharpness of the picture of the room blurred with each cycling.
The worst and strongest part of the pull is the actual, physical sensation of being pulled. A literal sense of moving at an accelerating totally overtook me. It always felt like I was being pulled somewhere back and to the left.
That classic salvia feeling of existential dread was building in me too as the pull got stronger. It was a flood of emotions that I had never felt before in my life. Something like dread, despair, depression, panic, wanting to plead for my life, wanting to see an escape, regret. All these things in their most pure form. And then there were the thoughts that I
knew, that I absolutely
knew. I couldn't tell you how I knew it. But I knew I knew it more than I had ever known anything in my entire life. I knew that this thing that was happening to me, this process, was real. It was not fake. It was not just some drug. I knew that this was reality. You know how when you're in a dream, a little piece of you knows it's a dream? Then you wake up and you just know that you woke up into the real world because that piece is gone? As the salvia took me, I felt that piece of me go away. I knew I was being taken out of the dream. I knew this just like I know I'm typing on a computer right now. I knew that like I know my name is Tex.
With that came the next realization typical of smoking salvia--the realization that
you are going to a completely different dimension and you smoked too much and you went too deep and you ARE NEVER EVER GOING BACK TO YOUR OLD LIFE AND YOU WILL NEVER BE A HUMAN BEING AGAIN.
The final wave of realizations came as the pull started to completely take me. Maybe it's the most disturbing part of salvia. It's the realization that this place wasn't new to me. It was
familiar. And I don't mean familiar in the sense of "I just smoked salvia X months ago." I mean familiar as in "I remember this place from memories I had from before I was born" familiar. Familiar like the place reminded me of truths I had once known, ideas I once had, places I had once been, and I forgot them, but as I was forgetting them the first time, I thought, "Man, I need to remember these things forever." Then I forgot them, and now that I was re-remembering them, I was thinking, "My God, how could I have ever forgotten
this?"
The pull had finished its job. The mattress opened and swallowed me. I watched the fitted sheet stretch under my weight and suck my body into an ocean of fabric. I looked up and saw the corners of the room where the ceiling and walls meet split open. White/purple/neon lights broke through from behind wall and the picture of the room looked two-dimensional. Everything looked like it was being torn apart. My body felt like it
was the sheets and blankets under me. I looked back at my body and only saw fitted sheet, but I knew these sheets were my body. Then there was this buzzing sound that got louder and louder and I closed my eyes. That was when I was there.
The Salvia Space
Instantly my entire being felt like it was literally shooting through something as if I was blasted across a billion light years in a split second. It sucked ass. Then I saw this world of abstract shapes with this bizarre cartoonish color scheme. My friend once described it as the aesthetic that you see on an old animal crackers box. It was a lot like that. I felt dead because that's the only thing that made any real sense. How else could I be seeing all of this?
Then I met this entity that told me something to the effect of "Now you understand why." I was embarrassed because I didn't understand what that meant but it was made to seem like I was expected to. I felt naked in front of this thing. The shapes dancing around us were impossible to describe. They were solid but would disappear and reappear when passing front of each other based on some pre-determined hierarchy of what shapes were "dominant." One kind of shape would turn translucent in front of another kind. But that other kind would be "dominant" in relation to another kind of shape. And there was also a lot of grass. If I had to guess, I'd say we were on a hill. Then I was in this different part of the space where these mandala-like shapes in different sizes, that each had smaller mandala-shapes perfectly reflecting the larger ones they were inside, were vibrating and melting into each other. I knew I would be here
forever.
I didn't know that I was a human being that had hopes or wishes or thoughts. Or a name. Or lived in the physical world. Or what it meant for there to be a physical world. Every thought was pumped out of me and all I had here were emotions with meaning. The meaning of what I was seeing was obvious but I can't exactly remember what it was now. There was definitely the most somber sense of nostalgia. Then something from within the mandalas said something to me but I can't remember exactly what it said. The vibes from this mandala entity were pretty negative. It was as if the thing was hiding within the mandalas because it knew that hiding from me would be most disorienting thing it could do to me.
Then the thing touched me from behind the mandalas somehow and I felt a shock run up my being. Then another rush of getting flung across the galaxy. Then the mandalas changed their color scheme, and as I would look around the mandalas would give off this shuttering effect.
The space of the mandalas started to go more and more distant and what I had left around me was a void. Eventually the void grew and grew until it was all that was around me. This process took about ten to twenty thousand years. A lot happened during this time but I can't remember it. I do remember that every now and then these bolt of electricity would fly in and out of the blackness of the growing void and the bolts would sometimes dance around me and swirl. The bolts weren't exactly visible, but I could sense them some other way. It was almost like I was hearing them, because I could see them even if I wasn't looking in their direction.
If I had written this report right after I had this trip I might have been able to describe more of this part, but I won't ever be doing salvia again, so I guess this is a lesson for the next person.
The Comedown
As the void gathered until it was all I could see, I could hear these distant, echoing, reverb sounds. They were very loud and distorted. Then I opened my eyes and saw the room. The room was vibrating, but I could see Max and I remembered I was a human being with thoughts and feelings and a life plan and a job and that Max was also a human being. I was washed with relief.
Then I tried to keep all the meanings and experiences I had gained in the space with me. I tried so hard, like trying to keep the memories of a dream. This time I was able to keep actual memories of experiences with some entities and the general feel of salvia with me out of that. But the core lessons of that place, the memories it made me remember, just melted away like grains of sand slipping between my fingers.
The Take Away
The biggest thing I take away from my salvia experience(s) is that magnitude of what these things can do. Most people (probably even you) have this idea of what drugs can possibly do, or what tripping can possibly do. And sure there's a little bit of this recognition that you can lose control. But few people understand how completely and how violently you can lose control.
You can not only be made to forget who you are, but you can be made to forget that you
are in the first place. You can be sent to a place where life itself if torture and pain and you can come out of that and swear up and down that you were in that place for thousands of years. Even though just seven minutes passed (I think my actual experience here was about six-nine minutes long).
Whether or not you actually went to some different dimension and saw different beings,
you (yes, YOU) can be made to 100% believe that you did and that you did. You can transport yourself to a reality where the impossible is not only possible but is so violently possible that it unfolds right in front of you and forces you to see things you couldn't possibly believe in because you couldn't possibly have the language to describe it.
I can't stress enough how this exact experience can happen to you with full intensity. For context, I'm a guy who can drink a very large amount and be relatively fine. I have a correspondingly very high tolerance for crazy shit on psychedelics. I have handled pretty intense experiences at doses that have caused people to call 911 out of sheer panic. And salvia is too intense for me.
I won't give a full spiritual analysis of what I thought about this experience right now but I can just say that there is real spiritual significance to this kind of experience. There is a reason shamans would chew salvia leaves for spiritual purposes. There is also a reason shamans would absolutely refuse to smoke 60x extract of salvia. This is very powerful and obviously it's not a party drug. It's not even a drug. It's a spiritual blowtorch that, in the wrong hands or in the wrong head, will burn every piece of you down. It can even give you
PTSD.
Be advised, if you decide to try salvia, that this trip report is very typical. There are more positive experiences and I have had one on salvia, but most of the time, it's just so intense or so outright bad that it scars people and might even dissuade them from using psychedelic drugs ever again.
My final takeaway from this experience is that salvia is not a feeling-enhancer, or a hallucination producer, or whatever. Salvia is a place. It is not about you, or your thoughts, or your fantasies. It's about
it. It's about the place
it takes you. That space, most of all, is not empty. It is occupied by entities and these entities do not look kindly on us for the most part. They will even coax you into going deeper with this promise that you will learn some great truth, but you get there and it's more existential torture.