Death, soda machines, and an eternity
October 28, 2015The first time I ever used salvia was with an old friend. We were at his father’s house (his father has several horses and a large arena, we were there to help get some work done), and we were done working for the day, and decided to go smoke a few bowls of weed. My friend suggested that we try this other stuff that he got from the guy who normally supplied his weed. We knew nothing of it at all, only that it would get you high. We both assumed it would be something akin to pot.
We left the house and crossed a nearby road, and entered a wooded area. We packed a bowl and had two big hits each. We decided to head back to the house and have something to eat, not really feeling anything from the salvia yet. We were maybe 30-40 feet into the woods, and by the time we reached the road, both of our universes had taken a rather interesting turn. Reality didn’t have any drastic changes for me–the road was still a road, trees were still trees, etc. Yet, I did “feel” different, but I don’t think I can precisely explain how. I guess I could say that I felt very calm, yet I was giggling like crazy. For some reason, we began to walk in a direction that was going away from his father’s house, and I don’t think either of us noticed it at the time. I suddenly became aware that my friend was gone, and that I was alone on this very, very remote road. This caused me to feel somewhat disturbed, but I was still “calm.” Then a logging truck drive by (and they would break the speed limit on this road, as the police all but ignored this place, unless called–it was way out in the boonies), and I became a little concerned that I might stumble into the road and get hit by one, should I fall at just the wrong moment. By this time, you see, my balance had begun to be a little less steady, though nothing severe.
I continued walking in the direction we’d started out on, and my thoughts about my own possible demise were interrupted by my friend’s voice loudly yelling somewhere in the woods to my left (both sides of the road were surrounded by forest), and I quickly looked in that direction. I wasn’t alarmed or curious at all about what I saw–and I’m convinced that what my eyes were seeing was accurate, even to this day. My friend was running around in some brush, yelling at the top of his lungs, all the while bludgeoning what I believed to be the ground with a log that he’d found somewhere. His dog, Patches, was running around in close proximity, barking furiously.
Oddly, I lost all interest in what my friend was doing, and somehow became aware, as if the knowledge was simply infused into my mind, that I was going to see “something” very interesting very shortly. I should also mention that not only did I lose interest in my friend, I lost knowledge of him. The fact that he was pounding around in the woods a few yards away from me didn’t matter. I didn’t see or hear him, and his very existence seemed to have been wiped from my mind. I resumed my walk to wherever I thought I was going, when suddenly it happened–that interesting thing I knew was coming. A woman materialized roughly twenty feet or so in front of me, and she was jogging in my direction. For some reason she was also pushing some sort of stroller with a baby in it, but the stroller looked like a bassinet, rather than a stroller. The odd thing about this is that A.) she materialized from nothing, and B.) she and her baby, and bassinet/stroller were cartoons.
The cartoon woman and babe jogged by, she smiling at me as if there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the fact that she was a cartoon, and I simply lost interest with her as she passed me. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. At this point I suddenly remembered my friend, and was about to yell into the woods that I’d just seen a cartoon when a massive gush of wind hit me, and I realized that I was stand right in the middle of this little backwoods road, and that I had just been missed by one of those logging trucks by a hair.
By this time my “high” was coming down, and I quickly made my way back to the shoulder, and determined it was time to find my friend and get home before something terrible happened. He emerged from a patch of thicket near the woods, as if he’d been struck with the same idea of coming to me and heading home. The log was gone, dog following behind, and in his hand he held a dead possum. He held it up triumphantly, and said that his dog had killed it, and that Patches was a brave hunter. He was obviously still higher than I was, but was coherent enough to understand the danger when I explained that I’d almost been killed by a truck, and that we needed to go to his dad’s house and lock ourselves into the room his dad kept for him until we were totally sober again. He later explained that he had no idea that he’d been beating a stick on the ground (I think he was actually killing the animal), and remembered nothing about running around and yelling. He only remembered watching his dog hunt and kill the animal, while he watched and cheered. I’m absolutely convinced that my friend was the one who killed the possum. By the time we reached his father’s house, we seemed to be totally back to normal.
Second time:
The second time I used salvia was with a different friend quite a long time later. I didn’t have any profound experience this time around, either. The only thing out of the ordinary I noticed was that the sidewalk we were sitting on felt kind of sponge-like, and that the walls of the plaza buildings seemed to be bulging in and out, as if breathing. This friend, however, had a rather interesting experience. I remember clearly seeing him, he was sitting on the sidwalk, back against wall, laughing his head off. Talking to him was pointless, as he didn’t respond. He would stop laughing periodically and make a “psshhhh” sound with his mouth, then continue laughing hysterically. All this lasted ten minutes at most. When he returned to normal, he told me that he was a soda machine, and that he was spitting cans of juice at passersby. There were very many people, he said, and he was just shooting them like crazy with these cans of juice. The thing is, we were alone. It was late at night, and all the stores were closed, save a nearby movie theater. There were no other people at all.
Third time:
My third experience with salvia will probably be my last. This one was with a cousin, and a very, very long time had gone by since my last experience. I’d never had a ‘bad” experience. I thought the stuff was mostly harmless, and, as I mentioned, really knew nothing about it. I’d never bothered looking it up on the internet until tonight, and that’s how I now found myself writing these memories into an E-mail to share with you guys. It was my cousin’s first time using it, and I’d mentioned that I’d had it twice before. I explained my experiences, and what my two friends had experienced. He thought it sounded very interesting, and couldn’t wait to try it out.
My cousin is a long time pot smoker, and the very concept of a small bowl doesn’t exist to him, neither does one bowl, for that matter. He packed a very large bowl, I took three hits and he smoked the rest (maybe 5 hits). A couple of minutes went by, and he said the stuff was crap, and that he probably needed more. He packed another bowl, took another deep hit, and I took a regular size hit. Before I finished inhaling my hit, my cousin was well into a trip (though I didn’t know it at the time–he later told me that he remembered giving me the bong, watching me press it to my mouth, and then he “slid through”–which I’ll explain in a minute). I’d entered mine seconds later, I’d say, though the initial stages of my trip weren’t as sudden and obvious as my cousin’s.
I placed the bong on the table in the middle of the living room, and laid back on the couch. I was feeling very, very relaxed and wanted to contemplate life in general. I then went on to thinking about the possibility of alien life on other planets, and the universe itself. At this point, I began to trip–really trip. It’s the only “trip” I’ve ever had in my life that I truly believe is a trip. I would’ve called the cartoon lady a trip prior to that, but seeing a cartoon pales in comparison. I can explain this with words, but I can’t explain it in fullness. I can’t possibly explain how very real the experience was, nor can I explain how very, very, very real the whole experience really seemed. To quickly get to the point: I became the universe. Not just the place in which all things exist–I was all of it. I was space; I was all of the stars in that space; I was all of the planets around those stars; I was the galaxies and solar systems in which those stars and planets reside; I was the completed version of time; I was you, me, my cousin, the cells that make us, the dust in our hair. I was all of it. I was all things. I didn’t, but I knew I had the option to “move” into any of these parts of existence (like a fish moving through water) and experience my being that thing on a more personal level. I could have moved into my cousin and experienced existence as him alone–or as the couch we sat on. I could focus my being into a mote of dust, a beam of light, or a dog, cat–anything. A random rock in space, if I so pleased. And I wish that I had done one of those. Instead, my attention was drawn to something I mentioned above–which may have caught your attention. Time–I was completed time. By that, I mean I was all of it. At first, I was aware of the fact that I was time, much like I was aware that I was all things. But for some reason the aspect of myself that was time caught my attention, and as if on its own, my focus went there. I say completed version of time, because I understood myself to be the very beginning of time iteslf, and the end of time itself. I wasn’t just the universe at one given moment–I was literally all of it: past, present, and future. I understood that time wasn’t a concept: it is real, and that time in this universe began with this universe, and will continue as long as our universe continues. Therefore, I was the beginning, and the end into infinity. To a mind that is working logically, this cannot possibly be conceptualized. We can’t have an accurate concept of infinity, just as we cannot conceptualize “nothingness” or the “lack of existence.” But I did, on that horrible night. I experienced the infinite. I was the infinite, and I experienced it. I experienced forever and ever. I can’t explain it in any way that will make sense, and I can’t possibly explain it in any way that will convey how true all this was, as it happened. I wasn’t experiencing a flow of time into the future; I was experiencing the completed journey of time from its start, to it’s very depth into forever. Literally. And it was horrible. That’s all I can say about it, really. It sounds very simple, maybe interesting when I type it here. My cousin thought it sounded cool, and said he’d like to have the same experience. It only proves to me that he didn’t understand what I was saying to him. Would you wish to experience ten years locked in a prison? One year? A million years? Infinity? I literally experienced infinity–it really DID last forever. I came down from my trip and returned to normal, but I was in that trip for an eternity, and I mean that in every literal way possible. I don’t care that it only lasted 20-30 minutes, if even that long. It was the full expression and experience of eternity. The ONLY good thing about that trip is that I completely lost all fear of my own death, and the very idea of living forever as a spiritual version of myself is something I absolutely would refuse to have, if given the choice. I expect to blink out of existence when I die, and that’s the exact way I want it to be. Infinity is not a great experience. I’ve “lived forever” once, and I do not want to do it again, under any circumstance.
My cousin’s trip was very different than mine–and much more pleasant. As I was preparing to take my final hit from the bong, he slipped through some sort of membrane that separates normal existence from some other existence. Whatever this other place is, he slipped through the unseen barrier that keeps our reality separated from that other one. He found himself in a room much like the one we were really in, but he understood it to be a different place. He was himself, but a different version of himself. The way he explained it is that, he was the version of himself he could’ve been if something had been different–any given thing, like waking up earlier than he did, or later–skipping the act of brushing his teeth, or ate breakfast instead of skipping breakfast. Basically, he was an alternate version of himself in an alternate version of our universe. The interesting thing is that he KNEW he was in another version of himself, rather than thinking he was that version. He felt like he was basically possessing someone, and that particular someone happened to be himself. He felt good and enjoyed the trip, finished the whole thing off by having sex with the armrest on the couch.
by S.