First time quid method

October 28, 2015

Here is a brief background first, I’m a 61 year old professional artist and photographer. I’m not an old Hippie still living in the past, but I was a real Hippie in my late teens and early twenties, I smoked pot, hash, and whatever else was available starting in the late 60’s all the way into the 80’s. I stopped doing any mind altering drugs in the mid 80’s just to see if I could. Maybe because I’m an artist or because I’ve always been naturally high on life anyway, I just didn’t see a need to escape reality anymore. It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve done anything.

I read about Salvia a few years ago, and was more interested in the dream state and visions it said you might see than just getting high, so I bought a living plant on ebay. For two years it never really grew taller than 18″ and never had more than about 10 leaves. I did everything to get some leaves but nothing ever worked, then all of a sudden this summer it started growing and by New Years it had two stalks almost 4 feet high with lots of big green leaves.

Well, last night I cut the plant back and replanted the cutting into 8 small plants, and with some of the leaves that came off I decided to try the traditional quid method of chewing the fresh leaves to go into a trance or dream state. I had tried it last year with just two leaves and nothing happened, so I was not really expecting much.

I was following the instructions I had read on how to do it by mouth , and started by making two piles with 8 leaves in each stack in my bathroom. I rolled up the first stack of leaves and grabbed a bowl to spit in, because when chewing it’s hard to keep from spitting (your mouth fills up with lots of green juice from the leaves) it’s bitter and hard not to want to spit it out. To take my mind off the taste and kill time (it should be chewed for 15 minutes) I brought the bowl and a paper towel into my home office, sat down in front of my computer and started watching a recording of NOVA about ice and the quest to reach absolute zero. The clock on my computer said 12:45 AM at 12:56 AM 11 minutes into the show they were showing close up views of ice crystals and I started feeling like I was getting sucked into the ice on the screen. Something was starting to happen and I was not sure how to react, so I got up and walked back to the bathroom and spit the salvia out in the toilet. Then I realized all the time I was doing this I was explaining everything I was doing like why I use the toilet instead of the sink to spit, and what I was going to do next, like now I’m going to walk back to my computer, but then I realized I was talking to someone that was not there. I have a friend in California that I called because I wanted to explain what was happening to me, but he didn’t answer. Now I was really feeling it, because when I reached for the phone it looked like it was 6 feet away when it was only about arms length, but my arm stretched to the phone like a long telescope.

I wanted to get to my bed to lie down before things got out of control, and as soon as I hit the bed in my dark bedroom with my eyes open, all I could see was the time in big red numbers on my wall, it was 1:00 AM (the red time on the wall was not part of the trip I have a clock that projects the time on the wall or ceiling so it’s easy to see at night) At 1:00 about five minutes into this I was feeling strange but nothing I hadn’t felt before. Then I closed my eyes! Once I closed my eyes I saw colors at first, but then it went black and I noticed my breathing, it started to feel like the blackness had a weight to it, and it was pushing down on my chest making it hard to breathe, and I began to get nervous, and claustrophobic. I could still control my actions so I said to myself it’s only a dream open your eyes, and I saw the time on the wall and was back to reality in my room. Then as soon as I closed my eyes again the blackness and feeling of weight on me came back, but I thought to my self calm down and just go with the flow, don’t fight what’s happening, think happy thoughts, as soon as I did that I found myself sitting on the back of a butterfly and could feel every beat of it’s wings as we rose into the air. It’s colors were amazingly bright, but everything around me was still black (like deep space) I think that’s what made the colors look so bright, like neon lights in the night sky. I opened my eyes again and now wanted to call someone to tell them what I was seeing, but it was 1:30 in the morning by now, and I didn’t want to wake any of my local friends, so I call my friend out in Cali again, because in his time zone it’s only 11:30. Again no answer, so I closed my eyes and was now riding on the back of a bright red/orange horse, again glowing colors and in black space. He didn’t have wings but we still were flying or maybe just galloping weightless in space. I found that I could open my eyes and look at the time on the wall to end one vision, and then close them to come back to another vision, the next vision I remember was a cheetah or jaguar running very fast, but it was purple and glowing again like a neon sign, and this time I was the cat not just riding on it, like the butterfly and horse, I (as the cat) was running in space or flying against a black background. All the time I was seeing these totally real visions, I was saying to myself remember this part.

The final vision I remembered took place in an apartment I lived in 20 years ago, and has now been bulldozed to make way for new construction of some kind. Everything I saw in the apartment was absolutely real to me, and just as it was 20 years ago, down to the last detail. The strange thing about this was I had two friends there with me and I was trying to talk to them about what was happening on this trip, and all they wanted to do was invite me to a wedding, and before I could point out my salvia plant to them they ran out the door.
After they left I spotted my salvia plant cuttings on top of my TV an as soon as I saw the cuttings I began to float out of the apartment, and up into the air. That’s when I noticed the huge apartment (that covered over a city block when I lived there) was all gone except my second story apartment and the one below it. As I was floating up into the sky I could see construction workers dismantling it from all sides including pulling off the roof.

The last thing I remember seeing was the time on the wall at 2:05, and I think I fell asleep sometime shortly after that, but when I woke up the next morning I remembered everything I told myself to remember so I started calling friends to tell the story before I lost it.

I have to say this was way more amazing as far as what I saw than I expected, and I’ve seen and done a lot of amazing things in my life, but in my opinion this stuff is not something to play around with or to do just for fun. As I said at the start I was interested in seeing things I hadn’t seen (dream worlds), not getting high just for the sake of getting high. It’s also not something I would do during the day or in public.

I think doing it late at night like I did when it’s dark and peaceful, and knowing how to control my response to stress is what helped me not panic, and helped me see such nice visions, or maybe it’s because I’ve always been a happy person, and love everything about life already. I may be wrong about this, but I think if you are not a happy person and you have a lot of negativity, you could have some really bad visions, and believe me my beautiful ones were so real and intense that I would not want to go through a hyper realistic nightmare that you can’t get out of for what might seem like forever. Another thing I would do differently from this first time is have someone there I trusted to make sure I was OK, and maybe record what I was seeing, because I’m sure I forgot many of the things I saw.

by Charles