My Salvia Experience

Yesterday, the wife and I were feeling a little adventurous. We had seen that salvia video on YouTube where the guy pretty much laughs for 10 minutes straight. So, ready for a new experience, we went down to the local smoke shop and picked up some salvia. We were not sure which one to get initially. The prices range from $20 to $60 depending on the potency you want to experience. We went with the middle grade stuff, and paid $40 bucks for 1 gram.

We get it home, and my wife decides to go first. We pack a bowl into our little bubbler piece, and she gets going. From what we'd read at the time, you're supposed to hold it in as long as possible. About 20 - 30 seconds. She did this, but did not initially feel anything. So, she took another hit. This time, right after she handed me the pipe, she started laughing. She kept saying how great it was. Then, she rolled off the bed and laid flat on the ground. She was having a conversation with something (later on I found out she was talking to Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit) that kept making her try to go under the bed. I managed to get her back on the bed, and after a couple of minutes of laughing, she came off her salvia trip and told me all about it.

It was now my turn to try this out. I took a big hit off a newly packed bowl. I exhaled after holding it in for the full 30 seconds. I didn't feel anything at first either. I asked my wife to pass me the pipe again, and she just shook her head. That's when it hit me.

Now, this is a little hard to explain. I could definitely feel it pulling at my arm. I started laughing hysterically, and then things got weird. It's like life as I knew it started to melt away, and my body became part of this universe that had always been laying dormant underneath. My body was now part of the architecture of this strange world. But this world was not like the one we live in. It was more like a storybook, and the middle of my body was the spine of the book. From time to time I would see flashes of my wife materialize in front of me as she tried to ground me in reality, but she would be like a statue with flowers come to life.

Mind you, I was laughing throughout the entire episode. It was a little on the perturbing side, but still interesting. I guess the best way to describe the world that I was in would be to compare it to the dream world in the movie "The Cell". I know, a Jennifer Lopez movie? But it was trippy like that. As I was coming off the trip, flashes of reality started to interconnect with this alternate universe/reality that salvia had plunged me into, and after a couple of minutes, I was done.

Salvia trips last maybe 10 minutes tops. It feels like an eternity when you're right in the middle of it, and then when you come off of it, you're left with a "What the fuck just happened?" feeling.

My wife decided to take a 2nd trip after I had sobered up. The 2nd trip came over her rather slowly, but what I saw was her propped up on the bed, her head laying on her own shoulder, and she kept saying "no no no". When she came off of it, she told me that her trip was more introspective rather than fantasy like her first trip. But it also scared her a little, because during her hallucination, she saw her life as a tiny pin-prick sized picture that was part of a tapestry of other lives on the wall of an all knowing being. She said she heard me saying "just relax and let it take you" but she equated that to succumbing to this giant wall of pictures and she tried fighting it. This ended after a couple of minutes and then she sobered up again.

It was my turn for my second trip. Again, just one hit off the little bubbler piece sent me on a hallucination-filled trip. This time, I felt it in waves, starting from my feet all the way to my head. As I lay on the bed, I could feel my body transforming into an infinite amount of random objects. I felt my self turning into cruise ship after cruise ship, room after room, street after street. Again, reality melted away into this alternate universe. Whenever I opened my mouth I felt like I was opening up into an ocean (I later learned I was drooling, which might have helped with the wetness sensation I was feeling). From time to time, my wife would ask me how I felt. She told me I kept saying "everything". She asked me what about everything. I told her that I loved everything. This time though, there were voices in my head. These voices kept telling me to ignore her. She didn't know what was real. She had no idea about this world that I was being transformed into. That scared me a little.

Coming off the trip is a trip all of in itself. Reality once again started to flash every other second. Eventually, I no longer felt like I was being turned into a part of something I was not.

Salvia is pretty potent stuff. I don't recommend doing it all alone. Even though both my trips were fairly similar, and I was indeed laughing through both of them, they had an underlying fear factor. I guess it's fear of the unknown. I don't regret doing it at all though. This shit is mind-expanding. Until now, I had gone through my 29 years of life on this planet without a single sensory hallucination. Now that I have experienced it, I feel like my life is a little richer. It's not something that I want to do every day. Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to trip off of salvia every damn day of my life. But every so often, I'm going to visit alternate realities for a couple of minutes at a time.