I tried Salvia for the first (and second) time earlier this month. I can see why people don’t like it, but the trips are just so strange and interesting that I still want to do it.
The first time was pretty damn cool. The Salvia seemed to be speaking to me by improvising this unstoppable rap about “Salvia blotter” in my head, which is really weird because I never listen to rap and because I smoked the Salvia, I didn’t take it through a blotter. Also, everything in my room looked kind of cold, dark, and square, which someone made me think that I was back in 2003. Pretty cool how Salvia seems to make your brain travel to a different time and/or place.
The second time was a lot more intense and scary. It seems like I immediately blacked out after exhaling the smoke, but I guess I moved around at the same time because after the trip was over, I noticed that the bong was in a safe place on the floor even though I didn’t recall ever putting it down. But anyhow, during this Salvia trip I became part of a child’s plastic toy which kept rotating vertically. I was pretty much trapped in the surface of this toy, which seemed to be red when I was at the bottom of the rotation and green at the top. I kept trying to get to the top so I could escape from the toy, which I did after 6 minutes or so. I remember that I had to sit up (which was pretty difficult) and move my desk lamp a little bit to assert my dominance over the toy. A very odd situation to say the least. This time, it felt like I was back in the late 90s.
From my experience, Salvia doesn’t do much in terms of visual hallucinations. The first time, these designs on my pillow looked 3D and the reflection of 3 hats in my window looked like 3 faces. The second time, I saw this red, rounded rectangular Teletubby face to my right. There’s a little bit of sound distortion too. When I’m tripping on Salvia it sounds like there is a fan somewhere that keeps speeding up and slowing down every couple seconds. And I got that prickly/warm/sweaty sensation in my body both times. Finally, after the trip is over I always get really paranoid.
There was also this feeling of familiarity each time I smoked Salvia, like I had done it a long time ago and just forgotten about it. If I could sum up Salvia divinorum in one sentence, I would say this: It’s like you become a child who is thrown into a strange and sometimes bad dream, and you have to follow all these rules that you don’t know about while the world plays a cruel joke on you. This is how Salvia is different from other psychedelics. It makes the world seem very fake and ordered.
