First Bad Salvia Trip

[zera]

A few days ago swim smoked some salvia on the tail end of an acid trip (3 hits of blotter and a sugar cube that was supposed to contain the equivalent of another 2 hits). Here's how it went:

Swim was very skeptical that he would even breakthrough because he and his friend weren't using a torch lighter and this is the only time he's broken through before. He did use a bong though (with some hash sprinkled on top) and lit it as close to the base of the flame as he could. While hitting it he had the overwhelming urge to cough (he inhaled a lot).

Ahh the sickly sweet taste of salvia, bringing up memories of twisted lands in other dimensions. He cleared the bong and held his hit with military precision. Then the confusion started spreading over him "Who I am?" "How do I fit into this world?" "What is my name?" "What are these things I'm seeing?" For Swim the the salvia experience is defined primarily by losing the sense of layers that define the world.

That is to say in our sober experience we identify different objects as having different classifications, that is a person, that is a peice of furniture, that is a television, etc. For swim this distinction is almost always broke with salvia, he becomes unable to distinguish objects from people and starts seeing the furniture and the objects around the room as a sentient entity. This particular experience had this characteristic even more, swim lost all sense of a traditional "people world," was not even able to remember the difference between people and furniture.

This confused him immensely, when he began to start feeling himself sink into the couch. Then his friend, who was also partaking, started staring at him and this is when all cognitive hell broke loose. Swim had the sense that they were two people in a great unbroken chain of people (remember every single thing in his field of vision has interpreted to be a person, doors, walls, chairs). He had the sense that some sort of verbal chain letter was being communicated to him by his adjacent friend (when he was trying to talk to him), and he felt compelled to pass this on to the people next to him.

Then it came back at him from the other direction and he had to pass it on to his friend. Eventually so many of these "verbal chain letters" were being passed along that he had no control over himself, or even if he did everyone around him was so caught up in it that he was compelled to. Eventually this verbal chain letter became somehow physical involving all these people to move in certain directions up or down like waves. At this time the acid was making all the imagined people seem very very vivid, they all wore synchronized colors, and the whole scene reminded swim of Sesame Street.

Eventually swim realized that all these "verbal/physical chain letters" were being controlled by some marketing executive who was doing nothing but getting the throngs of people to spell out messages. Swim was part of the letter O and his friend was part of the letter N and the physical chain letter caused us to become seperated.

At that point swim had the most terrifying and lonely feeling of his life. He couldn't remember who he was or his family and friends, but he still had the sense that he had lost any individual identity and everyone he loved. He was stuck in an isolated existent as nothing more than a serf to an asshole marketing executive. What pissed him off and caused him to despair even more was that he wasn't even directly enslaved, just manipulated beyond any individual freedom or dignity. He wasn't even being used for any purpose but just to make an advertisment designed to manipulate others.

Anyway at that point he was freaking out his friend, who got his "sober" girlfriend and somewhat talked him down. Swim regained some bit of sanity and started seeing the world such that it wasn't "out-of-phase," recognized people as the proper "layer" of things to interact with. Laying down or standing up didn't even help because he was still lacking any sense of orientation or "up" and "down." He had to get out of the room he smoked in, because it was reminding him of his terrible experience, and he still had the feeling of reality breaking down and the couch swallowing him. He sat in the bathroom in the dark for a few minutes before coming down.

For the next hour though he still had the sense that at any moments the layers of the world were going to break down again. He had the sense that he truly understood schizophrenia, and feared that perhaps he had broken his sanity for a couple of hours. This time he had taken a lot more back from salvia space than in his previous trips.

So why did Swim have such a bad trip and what can swiy do to avoid one:
-Be very careful about mixing salvia with psychedelics, swim feels like the large amount of acid he ate caused the trip to be a lot more vivid than normal. It also seemed to cause him to take a lot more back from the salvia trip than normal, which may have been the cause of his fear that he broke his sanity. On the S-A-L-V-I-A scale he most defintely was into I - Immaterial, and was acting like people in the A - Ammnesia range, except he remembered it. The LSD may have blocked the ammnesiatic effects and caused him to remember something truly terrifying.
-This was the first time swim smoked salvia with someone else and had both people break through. The vibrations between swim and his friend were probably responsible for the whole tangent of "verbal chain letter" thoughts.
-Swim wasn't mentally prepared for this, he didn't expect to break through, and unlike other times only had to take one hit, so he broke through quicker. He definitely wasn't mentally fortified.
-Adding THC to the mix was probably a bad idea as well.


The one thing that I think is funny is that swim has yet to meet or talk to the salvia goddess. He does have authority figures in some of his trips, but his previous one it was demonic, definitely male figure, and in this trip it was this asshole marketing executive (once again definitely male), who wasn't even talking to swim, but merely controlling his and the tons of people around him's actions indirectly.