This trip was a while ago, but I've never posted it anywhere. First experience with Salvia divinorum, low dose, twice with an intervening hour.
I diluted the "emerald elixir," a murky green tincture, and held it under my tongue (not drooling = no small feat when the effects hit). I took it blindfolded and lying in bed, with the covers on. My cat hopped in with me, trampling me gently.
There was something important I had to do, but first I had to get up. Something preventing me. Blackness framed my vision outside of two intersecting circles like the old MasterCharge logo. A wooden house nearby, children playing. A farm. I explained to the farmers, whose ground I could not get up from, that the fractal patterns dripping off their roof were really pretty cliché for a hallucination. Dogs were trampling me, the rhythm of their trampling metric and repetitive as dub.
Insight returned: I became aware that this was not reality. Reality was outside the blindfold. Heard myself laughing because I hadn't noticed a shift in reality. Everything in Salvia World was rhythmic and repetitive except for spoken words.
What was happening in the world outside? I lifted the blindfold, expecting some queasy drugged-out world roiling with motion and colour. Absolutely nothing. A temporary suspension of the dream. I put the blindfold back. The dream resumed.
Explaining to the farmers, aloud, in a British accent -- I could hear myself in the waking world too: "Got to get these dogs off me." The children lined up. Without malice, they pressed me into the ground with extra wooden walls from the house. I decided to go even deeper. Found myself looking far far up, as if I were in a deep square hole. Though it was gravelike, I wasn't afraid. The farmers and their children kept pressing the walls against the earth. I asked the farmers if this was anything like the trip the characters in my novel have on a new psychedelic, and they scoffed. "You can't get an experience like that." This salvia trip seemed to consist of geometric patterns and spotty continuity in consciousness: serious limitations. Nothing would change. Couldn't get up anyway. It all felt like a threshold I couldn't cross -- as if I were stuck in the Waiting Room of the Gods.
Thus, when the rhythms slowed to a lull and the dream trailed off, I took a second hit to see about my unfinished business.
This time I found myself in a black space roughly like the inside of a rodent's mouth. No teeth, though. I put out my hand to stretch the walls of the space, knowing I was moving in the outside world as well. The lucidity was greater in this dream, so unlike the first hit, I knew I was dreaming, but this didn't make the dream any less real. I know I kept my hand up for a while. I couldn't stretch out the space any more than the length of my arm, but suddenly found myself in an amusement park.
Yuppie fathers were putting their children in a ferris wheel that rolled slowly towards me. I tried to dodge, but it crushed me into the earth. Nothing hurt, but it was disappointing not being able to get out of the way of walls and wheels. Again the feeling of only having gotten to the threshold of some other world, not beyond it. This dream seemed shorter.
Came down, got up, mellow, limbs heavy, a bit dizzy, pleasant swirl. Every dimension in my apartment seemed momentous, important, a warning almost. Was not tired. Not sure how much actual sleep figured in the salvia dreams.
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I did salvia before any other psychedelic. Quite a different trip. I've never lost insight on mushrooms or acid. On Salvia I definitely did -- I "went somewhere else" and wasn't aware I had made the jump until sometime after the peak. However, I could never get off the ground, and the worlds I visited seemed oddly mundane.
An intense trip, good thing I started it lying down. Even on a low dose, I was pretty gone, though only for about 15-30 minutes.
-------------------- Monday Night Weirdness! Episode 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." - William Blake, Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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