Salvia Journal

Trip #2 -- Membranes

2011-04-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

One of the most commonly cited themes in salvia trips is the sensation or perception of "membranes," or surfaces.

With the same setup as in my first trip (in fact, my first and second trips were a mere half an hour apart) , here was my experience with salvia membranes:

As you can tell from the video, the usual physical symptoms kicked in fairly quickly: laughter, light head, disorientation. Then my surroundings morphed and appeared to glisten and tighten around me. The room I was in started to look like the inside of a leather or latex tent, with the walls stretched taut over the frame.

At one point in the video you can hear me saying "what's going on over there? [idiotic laughter]" as I point to something off screen. What I'm pointing at is an old laptop battery, that to me seemed to have sprouted four black arching rubbery legs and a tail. The texture of the limbs was identical to that of the walls and ceiling, a kind of smooth featureless latex.

As I laid down, the perception of membranes or weird surfaces became even more pronounced. The walls and the ceiling appeared to be made out of the same texture I saw before -- a tight stretched latex -- that was stitched together at the edges where these surfaces intersected. I had a distinct sensation that the "weight" of the world outside was pressing down on the exterior of the house, and causing things to concave in on me. The best image I could find on the internet that best illustrates what I saw was this:

But, imagine everything being skin tight, and glistening.

Eventually I had the distinct perception of sliding in between two such surfaces, as if they had been lubricated with water (think sliding your hand across a wet swimming pool tube). On the other side, I felt enclosed, and almost trapped, as if inside a pocket made from this type of material. It's hard to say exactly what I saw, but the entire time I had the image of being inside a woman's purse, looking up at the ceiling of a grocery store, or some convenience store.

At this point, things began to dissolve fairly quickly and before long I became more and more aware of my real surroundings and the trip was over. The room returned to normal, the dead battery lay lifeless where I had left it, and the walls and ceiling were no longer ready to burst inward on me. One surprising thing about this trip for me was how much more potent it was than my first, even though I took nearly exactly the same amount of salvia.

All in all, it was a great trip, exactly what I hoped for from salvia: complete disassociation from reality, and the perception of the ineffably weird.

Trip #1

2011-03-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

The first night I got my hands on salvia I was extremely anxious. I couldn't wait to see what all the hype was about. Here's a video of me tripping on salvia my very first time, I apologize in advance for my incoherence, I'm usually not so inarticulate in person.

In case it wasn't clear from the video, the setting was my living room, on my leather beanbag chair covered with a plush green blanket (important later), and with no music or sound in the background, with the lights on.

I took two tokes from the pipe, skeptical that I would feel anything after only one. It only took seconds before I started to lose my grip on reality. My body began to tingle, my vision changed, things seemed to stretch away, and seemed further then they actually were. Then I blanked out, and reality dissolved to nothing, and instantly after I was in a different world, with no recollection or knowledge of the real one.

I was sinking through moist grass, and it felt like I was falling through a dense liquid. Now I say liquid because my body felt wet all over, especially my head. Then it seemed like I was rolling around on wet grass, or trapped between two mounds of vibrant green grass. Now this makes sense if you look closely at the blanket that I was laying on.

Next, I was a child lost on a school trip, and I was laying on the ground by the school bus, trapped in a ditch. My girlfriend who was videotaping me, was my teacher, looking for me. I was confused, thinking I had hit my head or had hurt myself in someway. I can't emphasize the confusion that had overcome me, as I was certain I had suffered some sort of concussion.

Meanwhile--in reality--I keep asking my girlfriend if I, or someone else is hurt. Interestingly, I was also worried that I had somehow hurt someone else (which made no sense, as there were only two of us in the room). Then as quickly as reality had dissolved away, it came trickling back, and I slowly started to remember that I was tripping on a drug.

Something that is a recurring theme in all my trips thus far is the sensation of wetness, especially on my face, as evident by my repetitive face-touching.

The sensations that stick out most from this trip are the vivid images of grass, and the genuine feeling of sinking.

--G

Trip #3

2011-03-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

I'd like my first article to be about my third and latest trip. I'm starting with the third because it was by far the most striking of the three, and I would like to get it out in writing while it's still relatively fresh in my memory.

The setup used for this trip is the same as the one I described in my introduction (x20 extract). The setting was my living room, in the dark, no music. I own a soft black leather beanbag chair that I place in the middle of the room that I like to lay back on while I trip, I find this to be comfortable and safe as it sort of keeps you from being too mobile.

I filled the bowl to the rim with the salvia leaves, brought the flame to the bowl and inhaled one big toke. I held my breath for a good 20-30 seconds, exhaled, and cleared the bowl, holding my breath for another 20-30 seconds. At this point I could already feel the onset of the drug, and before completely losing my mind, I lit the bowl one more time and took another big puff.

Suddenly everything sort of "melted" away. All sense of reality was gone, and I was no longer aware of where I was, what I was doing, or even who or what I was. The world I perceived--in a very literal sense--to me felt to be reality, and not an alternate one. I had no concept of "the real world."

To curb any confusion, from here on I'll refer to "real reality"--the world we actually live in--as reality, and the universe in my trip as the alternate reality (or alt).

In the alternate reality everything consisted of only two colors: black and yellow, and every "object" perceived in the alt was a swirl of the two colors. Very much like a black and yellow candy cane.

In the alt I was laying on a conveyer belt or a water slide with the color scheme mentioned above, atop a hill that extended out to infinity and I was looking upward at a yellow sky. While on the slide I was simultaneously moving horizontally along the slide and "falling" vertically through the slide to another slide directly below it, like a cascading waterfall. Though once on the lower slide I couldn't see the one above it, as if it was never there to begin with. The feeling of motion along both axes was extremely vivid, and quite distressing.

Not only was the sensation of motion vivid, but so was the sensation of wetness. I felt like my whole body was being splashed with water, especially my face (hence the imagery of waterfalls, and water slides).

It's difficult to recall the events in a linear order, but more or less the following happened: At one point the sensation of falling ceased, and I only felt the horizontal motion, and at that point I started sliding through what I can only describe as rubber swinging doors hanging from somewhere. Try to imagine this:

only smaller (enough to fit a grown man head first), on a conveyer belt/water slide, and striped black and yellow. Every time the flap would pass over my face I would be overcome with the feeling of wetness.

In the meanwhile, I would experience a sequence of images unrelated to what I was directly perceiving in the alt. Similar to how dreams are constructed, I wasn't directly witnessing any of the following, but I "knew" they were "happening": I saw various grade school objects such as traditional yellow pencils and classrooms. I also saw my dad and my girlfriend in silhouette, and it seemed that they were ominously subjecting me to whatever I was experiencing. Seeing the two figures of my dad and my girlfriend some times happened more or less in the periphery of my "vision" and could have been said to have been observed directly.

Through out the whole trip I had strong taste and smell of the salvia itself, and it was very prominent and incorporated ubiquitously through out the trip. Even now, whenever I smell the salvia leaves (or even tea), I see a clear image of yellow/black swirl, and recall the sensation of falling through the slide.

The overall prominent emotions through out the entire ordeal were distress, panic, and confusion, but at the same time tiny amounts of excitement and curiosity. Remember that through out the entire trip, the world I was perceiving was all that I knew that existed, I remembered nothing of reality, and at no point was I thinking "when will this end? When can I go back to reality?" Since to me, there was no "back" to go to, and the alt was all that I knew that existed--almost as if my whole life had been in this bizarre state. Trying to make sense out of the random and irrational inspired confusion, and the thought that this experience would go on forever evoked panic and distress.

Slowly, the alt began to dissolve and I was soon caught in a strange in-between phase where the alt and reality were superimposed. In this phase I regained awareness of the physical room I was in, and I slowly began to remember that I was on a drug trip.

It's important to note that the perception of time is very strange while tripping. While in the trip, time seems to be dragging, but as soon as awareness of reality seeps back in, the trip seemed to have been shorter than it actually was. In reality, the trip lasted no longer than five minutes.

--G