so... I tried salvia
Yup, I finally did it. I smoked something for the first time. After a lifetime of not being a smoker, I inhaled that shit. It wasn’t easy, I coughed, a lot. I still don’t like smoke. But what I do like is salvia. Damn. People aren’t fucking around when they say that salvia is strong... and weird as hell.
My first experience with salvia was actually chewing it, the taste sucked hardcore and I really didn’t find the effects to be strong enough (granted, I only used a small amount to test how my mind and body would react to the new substance), it went well enough but I wanted to move to the next level: smoking.
It was a few days to a week later that I was finally able to try smoking it, and I had to look up videos on how to even use a bong. I had this tiny cheap thing that I bought off of Amazon because I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for in a bong. I started by putting some plain leaf in the bowl and smoked it, it was truly awful from a physical perspective. Mentally, I definitely felt... different. I tried a few more bowls and closed my eyes and in my head I got some interesting faint 3D tunnels formed out of static. They were spinning. But I also got an image of some evil face grinning maniacally (tbh it looked kind of like the jerma sus meme but it wasn’t super funny because I’ve gotten an evil grinning figure before, off morning glory seeds)
I wanted to smoke more but there was another person in the house, she was going to leave for a few hours soon though so I waited until after she left to continue my experiment. I put on a long YouTube compilation of music from one of my favorite artists. I smoked a little bit more plain leaf but I quickly decided I wanted something more intense. I have a gram of both 10x and 20x, so I got the 10x out and put a pinch of it it into the bowl, lit it, and decided to put my mind into the hands of this new substance. I wasn’t expecting much... but then it hit me. Yeah, it hit me and I was pretty amazed by how quickly I went from mostly sober, to diving into deep hallucinogenic water. It was like DXM and nitrous all at the same time but way stronger than either one.
I kept pulling my hood over my eyes to block the light out, and I took my glasses off, which felt amazing and natural, like scratching an itch and that it was exactly what I needed to do at that moment. I pulled my hood over my entire face but I kept thinking I didn’t want to somehow make it hard to breathe. My entire vision morphed into this three-lobed formation of the little bit I could actually see, repeated on continuous lines in a clover shape. I felt a little overwhelmed, like I had done something that I wasn’t really supposed to do, since I told the other person I wouldn’t try 10x by myself. But at that point I could feel myself sink back, and I felt like I was on a boat in the ocean being rocked gently by waves. I moved my hands back and forth in front of me, mimicking the feeling.
At the end there were these faint 2D panels with these cartoon ape characters looking back at me, like I was supposed to follow them. It started to fade and I opened my eyes, sat up, and the first thing that came into my mind was some nonsense about “hairy gorilla soda bottles”. After it faded a bit more, I looked at the bong just thinking “holy shit!” I felt really good but it was way more than anything I’d experienced before that point. I knew immediately that I wanted to do more.
The second time around, when I started to enter I got a faint vision of a purple cartoon hippo looking over a book that was also a farm with a sunrise, I was a part of a class but I kept disturbing the class by moving around too much. The vision changed and became a lot more vivid, there were these purple and white teddy bears made of hollow rolling tubes, and I was one of the tubes. The tubes were rolling but also moving like on a conveyor belt or something. I was going to get pulled into the “inside” of the teddy bear and I was annoyed by this because I knew it was going to be too dark to see anything in there, and I wanted my “outside” time to be longer.
After I was sucked in there was this version of a house made of those rolling tubes, it was flat, and two of my family members were in front of it, they were also made of tubes and their arms, legs, and bodies were super thin and featureless, I don’t think they had distinct faces either, and they were both reaching into the middle of the front of the house with their “hands” touching. I just wanted to go inside the house. Then I was on this pinched oval type thing, I could see the whole thing and one part looked closer than the other, where there were repetitions of the room I was in, linked to this bicycle chain structure, with gaps between them, on a black background. This was all I could see, but I was also on/in it and it was my what I felt my face was. It kept looping over and over and there was this word/sound/concept that kept repeating and it was really frustrating for some reason because I had to keep repeating this loop. I felt stuck during this part and didn't know when it was gonna stop.
The final scene was this neighborhood of cartoony 2D houses made of thick, round, rubber looking tubes. They were soft and squishy looking. There were families in the houses and grey metal doors underneath each one. I called this place Book Land because it reminded me of a children's book, where everything is gentle and pure and bright. I talked to the dad of the first house and he told his wife about how I wasn’t able to get through because I had to pee too much, but my door was open a little bit. I asked him if he could see me and he said no, he had never seen me even though he knew about me before because the door is open sometimes. There was a close-up of a cartoon purple kid, who looked like from a child’s drawing, but made of the round tubes. She was smiling and looked happy. I was able to open the door enough to get my hand through, it was all purple and blobby and made of tubes like everything else. It stretched across all the houses and I felt like I was doing some kind of educational lesson about sharing “my kind” with the people of this world.
After I came out of it I had to piss really, really bad, so I rushed to the bathroom as quickly as I could, I’m not sure if I just drank too much water while trying to smoke or what, but it was way more intense than usual for me. In the bathroom I was still pretty in it because I kept thinking about Book Land like it was a real place, and I wasn’t sure if me using the bathroom was real or just a particularly normal/realistic part of the trip.
I went back to my smoking spot to go in one last time. I knew I was reaching my limit, though, so I didn’t want to go overboard. Very shortly after smoking it, I got up to pee, I don’t even think I had to at this point, I think I was just unconsciously repeating something I’d done several times before. I kept thinking about Book Land and I also felt like I was in a weird cycle and that everyday life was just a weird cycle and getting up to pee was a part of it. I could see repeating rainbow fractals on the carpet as I walked to the bathroom and I was super happy about it and thought it was totally normal. I remember when I was in the bathroom I kept trying to talk to myself, but it was pretty much only mumbling and partial words that came out.
When I was done I sat down but got up again right after to look at the carpet, because I could see this 3D simple three-lobed snowflake like pattern repeated on the carpet wherever I looked. I kept moving around to see it at different angles and it looked totally, convincingly 3D no matter where I looked. I loved this to no end and just kept looking at the patterns for several minutes. I thought that I should put my glasses on to see the fractals better, but when I did they simply disappeared. At one point an advertisement came on since the video with the music I was listening to had ended, and I became really angry and paused it, saying “NO!” really loudly. I thought to myself that “the children in Book Land cannot be exposed to corporate propaganda like advertisements. The children in Book Land can only be exposed to pure information.”
After that, I admired the carpet patterns a bit more, then I wanted to go outside. As I went to go outside, I kept looking at the floor the whole time, searching for more patterns, and when the flooring switched from carpet to a flat, wood patterned floor the fractals disappeared. So I was a little annoyed at this and continued making my way outside. I saw one of the cats and thought she was cute, but she didn’t have any fractals on her so I wasn’t super interested in that moment. Then I saw a clover leaf and said “Yes!! There it is!! That’s it right there!!” and sat down on the step to admire this leaf, which really did resemble the three-lobed vision from the start of my adventure, and it looked like the patterns I saw on the carpet as well. I sat there looking at the leaf and looking around, thinking to myself as the salvia wore off more and more.
Over the next couple hours I sat down, thinking about my trip and how intense everything was. I felt really good and at that point I knew exactly why people said that salvia was weird as hell. I kept thinking about the visuals, the feelings, and about Book Land. I hastily wrote some notes down on my computer, which I referred to when writing this, as despite the typos and weird wording, it had the most raw translation of my experience that I could get. In all honesty, I felt pretty accomplished for trying something new and not shrimping out over smoking for the first time, or shying away from how daunting salvia can seem. I knew what I was getting into before I started and I wasn’t taken by surprise at any point.
I know I’m going to try it again at some point, but I’m definitely not going to rush my way into it and push myself too far too fast. I have a huge amount of respect for this drug and the last thing I want to do is screw myself over by getting cocky.
