General
Six Billion Reality Revolver
by Seb
Let me begin by saying that I am a 21 year old male living in Alberta, Canada. I consider myself to be an experienced user of psychedelic drugs, having taken mushrooms and LSD at least 50 times. I also use cannabis daily, and to be honest I find it funny that people have used salvia to try and replace their pot. That is kind of like replacing your cat with a porcupine. But I digress.
My bro Kyle and I were chillin at his pad when he happened to mention that he still had some of "that" salvia. He had bought this salvia at a headshop in LA, 100x where the highest legally available in Canada is 60x. I had tried loads of salvia but this was the only shit that had ever worked for me. Kyle busted out his torch (you need at least 220 degrees, another reason to have a sitter) and his water bong. I asked if he wanted to go first and he gave a definite affirmative. I lit the bowl for him and extinguished the torch, watching as he held the hit for about fifteen seconds. He was sitting in a short backed rocking chair, and I could see tension building up in his body. Slowly he straightened out until he was flat and rigid like a board. I asked if he could hear me and he didn't answer. After about a minute he looked disorientedly around the room, his eyes rested on me but he was looking through me. I asked if he would like to sit on the comfy leather couch, and he got up and moved very quickly. He asked me if he was alright, and I assured him that he was safe and in his own home. After about three minutes he was listening to the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. He sang some slightly changed lyrics to the song, looked at me in a startled and confused manner, then quickly slammed his computer shut. After about five minutes he was able to relate some of his experiences. From what I was able to gather, inside his trip we had been kids again, and we had been "caught and hung up by our backskins" by the river behind our middle school. McCartney had been singing his thoughts aloud as he thought them, hence the hasty shutdown of his Mac. He still looked disoriented and close to panic. After ten he was more or less himself again. He packed the bowl, lit the torch and looked at me expectantly. Not so subtle hint city.
Made a little apprehensive by this disquieting chain of events, I nonetheless picked up the bong and allowed him to light it, filling my lungs to capacity and holding it in. I don't remember setting down the bong or blowing out the hit, I just leaned back on that comfy couch and allowed my consciousness to seperate from my body. Before it had been a smooth pull and transition, this time it was like having your head stuck in a cannon. There was a physical sensation in my brain, it felt like a clap sounds. I know that doesn't make sense but it is the only way I can describe it. Very rapidly the room receeded until it was the size of a dime at arms length. Amazingly I could still see the detail of the room I had been in; my left arm, part of the couch, some speakers, small table, desk with computer. Even more amazingly I could see hundreds, thousands, an impossible amount of similar coin sized realities, each different from mine only in what it was experiencing. These "coins" were arranged in a vast and perfect concentric circle, only the extreme bottom corner of which I had glimpsed. The rest of the space was pure black, and it was filled with floating colors, reds and blues as thick and vibrant as children's pipe-cleaners arranged into complex goemetric patterns whose order barely escaped me. Time was non existent, I was there for the briefest second and the longest eternity. The giant wheel of realities began to rotate softly. I felt no emotion but my intellect was not impaired. I knew that I could "dive into" any of the realities that I saw but before I could choose one or decipher the patterns I began to hear faint muffled voices from the outside world. I knew that I was coming down, and I wanted to stay in that beautiful place of color and shape and reality forever. My reality coin detached and began to get bigger, the rest fading away abruptly along with the colors.
To this day I have no idea whether what I glimpsed was indeed some vision of the grand beyond or a severe hallucination. All I know is that it felt realer than my reality. I was back on the couch but not down yet, still tingly (that word is a gross understatement) and enjoying the body stone. I began to laugh. I could feel a red line dividing me vertically, trying to pull the back half of me back into the trip. I jumped up off the couch, prompting Kyle to ask me what I was doing. I replied that I was "getting away from it". He asked me what was wrong with me and I replied in annoyance "I'm high on salvia". He said sorry but I felt like a retard now and it was ruined. With an effort I pulled myself more firmly into reality and asked how long it had been. My cell phone clock told me that only 3 minutes had passed but the normal act of looking at it had pulled me completely out. In another five minutes I could speak normally and related my trip. It is interesting, but the normal psychedelic tenets of set and setting didn't seem to have much play here. Presumably, as Kyle had offered to smoke his salvia in his home his mindset had been quite good yet he had a "bad trip", while my witnessing said bad trip and being anxious while taking the hit had resulted in a "good trip" which bore all the hallmarks of psychedelic/mystical experience.
In conclusion I can only suggest that you respect the plant. Anything that can level an aging hippy who is used to taking 25 hits of acid a day is incredibly potent shit, and personally I find it to be the most intense of any drug I have done. Find your tolerance, have a sitter and for the love of god don't attempt to replace weed with this shit. You may hurt yourself.