The Trick
The Trick
by Nicole
I woke up one morning with nothing in particular to do, and more than a few hours to kill before a really short shift at work. While my boyfriend was at work that morning I hopped onto the internet, and lo and behold, found myself on BlueLight. I made rounds at the various forums, and stopped to read some trip reports. I found myself starting to wonder about salvia- more forcefully than usual, and decided that maybe it was time to actually see what's what. I had smoked it once before this: the smoking where you kind of feel it but aren't quite sure if anything is really happening. (All that had happened in that occasion was a weird feeling of morphing into the wall a few feet behind when I had tried to stand. Nothing very impressive). However, that first experience had been many years ago, and I had grown to conclude that I really didn't know a single thing about a full-on salvia experience. I was so right- more right than I could have ever realized at the time.
My boyfriend and I decided to smoke some on the lunch break between our shifts- we went back home, loaded about .2 mgs (what we assumed to be enough for two people) into the bong. He took the first hit- and I can say the only time I have ever seen him more overwhelmed was the time he received 50 mgs. of Demerol intravenously post-surgery while fully conscious. As for me… as I drew in the smoke I felt an odd perception change- it felt as if a very thin, faint, electric mauvey-pink screen had moved up from the floor to the ceiling and tinted everything very slightly- but still very noticeably. I felt a tightness in my head that seemed to draw to the back- almost in the same place that I first feel the tingles when I'm coming up on a roll (which I found very odd). But where all of that tightness was centered also felt as if it was weighing me down. I decided to give in, and since I really felt no perceptible changes other than that I tried to concentrate more on my mental state. I didn't seem to really feel anything different, however, no changes in thought pattern like I am used with the more traditional psychedelics.
After awhile I had a headache and decided that I really had not done it properly. I definitely felt in a different headspace, but it was nowhere near the mentally explosive experience I was expecting (or thinking I was expecting). Later than night we decided to give it another go- my boyfriend was just as dead set as my experiencing what he had as I was. We loaded up some more- less than last time as we had decided to do each bowl separately. I went first this time; I drew in a large hit and then focused as hard as I could on counting to 30 and trying not to cough. The latter urge was very pressing, however, and after about 12 seconds I found that trying to concentrate on both of those at once was very hard. I started coughing, lost track of my counting, started fighting to get it back, and then lost it.
As I struggled to keep track of numbers I felt as if consciousness- by which I mean reality- started shuttering together horizontally and vertically. Everything was 2D and hence not harmed by the folding action, but I was still 3D- and I felt as if literally pieces of reality itself were pressing down on me, folding in- and being 3D I would be harmed by it- I would be snapped into a bunch of pieces. I felt the presence of a man and woman in the room, and a female voice started telling me that I need to just lie down and relax, that something was coming and I should just go with it. I was still struggling to hold count- and indeed to hold in my breath, as I had not even reached 30 seconds yet- that I was getting very irritated at this woman trying to tell me what to do. Who the hell was she anyway, and what was she (and that guy) doing in my apartment. But was this my apartment? I suddenly came to the conclusion that this was a trick being played on me by the store that sold us the Salvia- but how was that possible? My boyfriend was sitting on the bed, watching me- I felt as if he was shuttering away with the collapsing reality like everything else, about to disappear when whatever it was came. A sudden, clear idea emerged in my head- "Has my entire life been a trick played on me?" I completely freaked out here.
It seems at this time that he had put his hand into the sack of marijuana and was attempting to load a bowl- I grabbed his hand in the sack and pulled it out- I was was very clearly panicking at this point.
From my perspective I remember seeing a horizontal bar of black and yellow blocks appearing on his hands and parts of this face and legs- the same bar that was popping up all over the room, folding things down wherever it touched- indeed the same bars that I felt were pressing in on my body, about to snap me into bits. I was thrown so completely out by the idea that he was a part of the disappearing reality that my panic started to grow.
I tried to lay down and close my eyes, but the chaos going on "in" the room was too frightening for me- I needed to be watching, I needed to see what was coming, I needed to fight it; it wasn't time yet, I wasn't done counting yet, damnit!
I tried to get up- having interacted with my boyfriend once at this point seemed to the throw the distortion of reality off kilter. I had made contact with something I knew to be true, that could interact back, and vague notions of movement started to form. I wanted to shake off this feeling, prove that I still had a body and it was still in one piece. But I was still far too confused to know what to do- this was immediately following my peak (I believe that a survivalist fight-or-flight response lead to my desire to get up and move so soon after, without any regard to destination or even how to move my body at all. I felt like a disoriented animal). My boyfriend took my hand and started instructing me to lie down, but I still felt as if I needed to work this feeling out of system. However, he was a far more concrete thing than anything else that had just happened, so I acquiesced.
As soon as I was fully able to solidify the idea that I was going to remain in one piece, I grabbed onto him and curled up in bed until most of the feeling had passed. I felt intensely light-headed once I was back to functioning- I had just received the biggest adrenaline rush I have ever experienced, and the endorphins pumping through my system made me smile and giggle like a lunatic. I had never felt so free to just be whatever. My body ached though- I felt sore in every muscle, very weak- I could still feel on my hands and feet where I had felt reality snapping down on me.
My boyfriend, once he was certain that I was ok, proceeded to smoke his bowl. I watched, completely fascinated, at how he seemed to navigate things happening just beyond the veil of vision. He did not seem to possess any of the terror that I had- in fact he appeared skeptical and questioning a couple of times, and then very thoroughly at peace. His eyes were open for a good portion of the time, and had I not have been sitting next to him I would have assumed that he was deep in conversation with someone sitting across from him. He took another hit, and settled in, seeming to be very serene.
Once we were both more or less back to a functionable level (him more so than me) we smoked some marijuana. I decided that I wanted to give it just one more go for the night- just a small amount. With this hit the most beautiful babble seemed to fill my head- I was caught on a wave of fluid language, a quiet, peaceful babble buffeting me in a stream. It seemed to take effort to pick out the right words from the stream; pieces of language that were identifiable words that could be formed into identifiable sentences that would happen by every so often. I felt incapable of speech unless I had been struck by a piece of language- I couldn't pick out the words that needed to be said on my own, because they were not coming from my own consciousness entirely. I still had to recognize them and form them on my own, give them meaning, but the pieces themselves were of the stream and only through laying in it could I receive them.
It wasn't just words, however. Sounds and feelings, things that exist as pure feeling, pure non-literate sensation, were creating this wonderful babble in my head; however it is also one of the reasons I felt so hard pressed to speak on my own. My head was too full to do anything on its own. The babble- which seemed to just barely reflect the tones of everyday "real" language, was very full of the intention of wonder. The words themselves felt familiar to me, but from some time long ago when I was a little girl. It was the language of the repressed memory. Pure dream-speak.
I never could have expected that this is what the effects would be like. I knew that I had reconciled the idea of how quickly it would hit with my experiences with other drugs, and I also felt that I had reconciled how intense it would be- but I had not figured out how to know what the feeling of both of those at the same time would be- or how total and complete the transformation from life to death could feel. I felt caught in a nightmare.
Despite how thoroughly terrifying this experience started out to be, it is without a doubt the most strongly impacting psychedelic experiences I have had to date. The utter and complete loss of who I was but the fact that I was able to experience it as it was happened- the literal feeling of losing one's sanity and grip on reality- is more than I could have ever expected to experience. I absolutely cannot wait to try this again at a breakthrough level. Some very stunning, very clear conclusions were drawn in regards to my personal life at the end of this experience. I know that my reaching out for my boyfriend as an anchor to reality, as a cure for the trip, can definitely be seen as a negative- as an unwillingness to go beyond and completely breakthrough. Yet given my inexperience with this drug and the pressing personal issues at heart, there could not have been a better conclusion at the time.
When I woke up the next morning the literal first thought on my mind was what had happened the night before. However, I also felt as if I had awakened from being drugged- my sleep that night had been one of the heaviest I had ever had (I used to be a notorious insomniac). During the entire day I was fairly subdued, thinking constantly of the experience, still trying to tease it out in my head, to remember it. I was filled with a deep sense of appreciation for everything that I could rely on to be solid and concrete. Physical fatigue was the most compelling factor in deciding not the experiment again so soon (for both of us). The experience is eagerly awaited, though.