JUST BEFORE INHALING I pressed the record button on my digital recorder, which I had placed beside me on the grass.  It would provide me with an audio record of details from the salvia dreamscape that might otherwise elude my recollection.  Of course, unlike my earlier session in the hammock, this would require me to talk throughout the experience.  Indeed, aside for a minute or so of silence, I spoke, or rather babbled, the entire time.  But unfortunately my words when replayed offered no insight: I had been reduced to an imbecilic state.  Aside from an initial statement of “Okay, I see things, I see lights, yellow ones, purp—” the rest of the recording consisted almost entirely, in varying combinations, of Whoahhh, Oh my god, Holy shit, Things are happening, Lots of things are happening, My legs are happening. 

As I had smoked slightly less this time, I thought I would have been able to remain alert enough to be able to coherently describe my experiences.  But, once again, only seconds after it began, and as soon as those yellow and purple lights started flashing across the back of my eyelids, I was gone.  At that point I plunged into the salvia dream-state, oblivious to anything else except that things—to use my nebulous salvian vocabulary—were happening. 

The most frustrating thing about trying to mentally reconstitute the experience is that, while I can recall my sense of awe and amazement at the fabulous shifting universe to which I had been admitted, I can’t remember the details.  It is as if the plant had erased part of my brain in contempt of my attempt, via an audio recorder, to arrogantly bring back to the world of ordinary consciousness something of salvia’s awful mysteries.

Not that it is all blank.  I remember a frightening yet thrilling sense that I was on a quest of some kind, perhaps a trial, which my friends were observing from a great distance.  I was alone in the endeavor, I was sure of that.  It was as if I were in a gladiator stadium, with my friends lending support from the stands.  That they were standing over me in a semi-circle surely contributed to this sensation of being a spectacle in an amphitheater.  Though they could not intervene, I knew they would cheer me on.  As for what or whom I was facing, as to why I was off on a quest, all that was beyond my grasp.  

Even though I was communicating at a pre-kindergarten level, the recording later proved illuminating, if only to demonstrate how salvia ruptures the connection between one’s sensations and behavior and how sounds from the outer world can impinge upon the inner experience.  For example, I had asked the others to occasionally speak to me to ensure I did not stop recounting my sensations.  Although I was aware that all of them were there, I felt the presence of S the strongest.  His voice pervaded my consciousness with a God-like presence as if he were speaking directly into my ear while simultaneously calling to me from far overhead.  Only when I listened to the recording did I realize that the omnipresence of S was simply because he was the only one querying me for the first few minutes.

The recording also explained why I had such a strong sense of being on a quest or voyage of some kind. At one point in the recording, after S asks me what I am feeling and seeing, he says in a slow, drawn out manner “Are you taking a journey? Are you on a journey…?”  Hearing these words in the recording triggered a memory of how that single word, ‘journey,’ when filtered through the kaleidoscope of my salvia consciousness, had imparted to my experience a dreamy, surreal Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere.  The sound of the word seemed to drag on and reverberate indefinitely—Joouurrnneey?—with the sound rising in pitch while leading to its question mark crescendo. 

In trying to emulate the sleep position I had lain on my back but that was short-lived.  After a few moments I had propped myself up into a slumped, semi-seated position.  But even that did not last long.  At one point, I was all of a sudden aware that I was on my knees and my cheek was pressed to the ground.  I was staring at an iridescent sea of grass.  My right arm extended before me as my palm brushed back and forth across this horizon of vermillion blades.  I was also half-howling, half-gasping “It’s the grass! It’s the grass!” while laughing so maniacally that I was barely able to get the words out. 

The curious thing is that at the same time that I was kneeling face-down in the grass in hysterics, I was also soberly observing my behavior from afar, as if I were standing alongside my friends, bemusedly watching this mad display.  I was perfectly aware that I was raving like a maniac, and yet I could not tear my head away from the grass.  My cheek was glued to the ground.  That, I later reflected, must be what it is like to be Darl at the end of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: lucid while frothing at the mouth.  It is the closest I have ever come to insanity.  Not to its anemic nephew, mental discomfort, which young men and women confuse with the real thing because it makes them feel special, but to uncontrollable, unhinged, bare-fanged madness.  One need only taste lunacy to shed oneself of delusions that there is anything romantic in it and to give one an appreciation for the comforting banality of sane everyday experience. 

The lunatic, Kant once said, is a wakeful dreamer.  Considering that salvia admits one into a waking dream state, it is no surprise that most of us had exhibited signs of mental illness that day: hysterical laughter, drooling, rocking of the body, blank stares, kicking of the legs, incoherent mumbling, oblivion to the outside world, cringing under demonic visions, exulting in beatific ones.  Just a few days ago, the group of us had been in suit and tie, clinking champagne glasses at a wedding amidst Bentleys and horse carriages and carpets of rose petals.  Now here we were in the California wilderness, a bunch of freaks twisting our minds up into Gordian knots.  Lost Coast indeed.

In the audio recording I kept claiming that I could see something ‘over there’ in the grassy area in front of me.  There are gaps in my memory but one thing I do remember, along with some spectacular shifting and pulsing of colors, is a snaking motion through the grass, as if a sidewinder were slithering away from me.  The earth under that curving path then suddenly dropped away, leaving a winding canyon in its place between two precipitous grassy ledges. These visual pyrotechnics went on for some time.  In retrospect they were like the fancy special effects of a Hollywood shoot ’em up that consists of plenty of action but little else.  

There was, however, a span of about a minute or so as the salvia began to wear off (this time, rather than abruptly ‘waking up’ I emerged slowly) that seemed to possess a transcendent beauty.  I was still face down in the grass, which was now aglow with the religious amber of the sun’s parting rays.  The mental inferno had been extinguished and a glowing sense of yogic peacefulness permeated me.  A gust blew and a crisp curled-up brown leaf suddenly landed on the grass directly in front of my eye, towering diagonally over my field of vision like some small-scale earthy fusion of La Sagrada Familia and the Tower of Pisa.  Pulsing with a supernatural significance, this delicate veined object surpassed in beauty any sculpture I had ever seen.  It rested serenely upon its emerald bed of grass, not a dead leaf, but a piece of manna tossed from heaven.  A few more leaves drifted gently to the earth, one even grazing my neck, or rather gracing my neck, before tumbling to its grassy repose.       

It is no surprise that psychedelic substances are primary objects of reverence in pagan religions—consider the Huichol Indian sacred rites of confession and purification in preparing for the peyote hunt—seeing that they bring on a sense of awe and exultation in the natural world.  In Christianity, however, the worship of nature is sacrilegious: the reverence is seen as misdirected towards the created rather than the creator.  This may partly explain why the ingestion of hallucinogens has been markedly absent from the rituals of Christianity, in which the emphasis is not upon the natural kingdom but upon the everlasting one, the one that, as we are told, is only accessible post-mortem.  Wine, with its warming but numbing effects, makes for more appropriate communion.  Having said that, the existence of early Christian mosaics depicting baskets of bright red Amanita Muscaria, or fly agaric mushrooms, have prompted claims from some heretical camps that the forbidden apple in the garden of Eden may well be the fly agaric, while the snake guarding the Tree of Knowledge is an imaginative representation of the root that mycorrhizally connects the mushroom to its host tree.  As for Adam being punished by a frowning overlord for partaking of a fruit that gives knowledge of good and evil, one can only say that things haven’t changed much since the dawn of human time.   

I was slow to emerge this time, perhaps because a compounding effect takes place when salvia is ingested multiple times in succession.  I remained there, lying on my back, for another ten minutes or so.  C too was lying on his back not far away, obviously also still feeling the effects.  I had hoped for some insight into the salvia experience, in particular in relation to the dream state, but in spite of all my efforts to record and understand the plant’s effects, I could say nothing definitive about it, or at least nothing any more definitive than I could say about dreams.  Aside for that brief transporting moment when the grass and leaves took on a supernatural light, I could not even say that it offered me a fresh gaze upon reality. All I could say is that salvia had shattered my everyday reality, or rather had snatched it away and replaced it with its own raging, ever-shifting, fiendish landscape.  I had read numerous accounts of how salvia brought on shamanistic journeying, recollections of past experiences, feelings of mystical union, etc.—and though I have a decent bullshit-detection mechanism hardwired into me—I still couldn’t believe that salvia offered nothing more than a brief mind-fuck.

Two days later we drove to the Corning ranch of M’s father, where we would spend the night before heading south towards San Francisco for our return flights.  After five days in the boonies we were ready for a night out at some of the bars in the nearby college town of Chico.  M, however, came down with a nasty stomach flu so we ended up staying in.  That was when the possibility of one last tussle with salvia grimly presented itself to me.  I had recollected more of my second salvia attempt than of my first one, so it did seem to logically follow that this third time I might recall even more, perhaps gain some fundamental understanding about this elusive plant.  It was not something I was eager to do, and it was far less appealing than a boozy night out in Chico, but I felt that if I passed on it, I might later regret the missed opportunity.

M’s father had offered us the cabin neighboring the house but as there wasn’t much space in there, I decided to pitch my tent on the lawn.  By the time I returned to the cabin, everyone was asleep.  I packed the final bowl of salvia and then guiltily roused S from his sleep, as he had offered to watch over me.  The two of us then went outside.

There was no wind.  I had not attached the rain tarp so that I would not feel constricted in the tent.  This time I asked S not to engage me in any way, just to watch over me silently.  I sat down, half inside the tent, with the pipe and butane lighter in my hand.  It was very dark. It would be a few hours still before the moon rose over the hills.  I took a deep breath to slow my quickening pulse.  My mouth was dry.

-Here goes, I said.  See you in a little while.

Under the bright blue glare of the butane flame I saw that I had packed more salvia into the pipe than I needed.  I did not want to smoke any more than was necessary to break into the salvia dreamscape.  But in the agitation and nerves of the moment I got carried away, especially as I knew this would be my final effort, and so in a kind of last-hurrah I ended up inhaling the entire amount, perhaps the largest dose I’d taken yet.  I handed off the pipe and lighter, holding the smoke in my lungs. 

-I didn’t see you exhale anything, S later told me.  I think you just held it in until you basically passed out.   You went shaman-style. 

I paid for this act of unthinking bravado.  What followed ranks easily among the most terrifying experiences of my life, if not the most.  Not that it was the only so-called ‘bad trip’ I’ve ever had.  One of my most frightening encounters had taken place during the psilocybic excursion into the Chiapan jungle of Palenque mentioned earlier; at one point, while I was unwisely wandering barefoot off the main jungle path, a burning sensation on the tops of my feet brought it to my attention that I was standing upon a teeming nest of fire ants.  Swiping the ants off my inflamed feet, which were now covered in red bumps, I was overwhelmed by lurid visions of sweating feverishly in a hospital bed.  It ranked among the most memorable of my worst-of psychotropic experiences, but even that seemed mild in comparison to this final salvia dream. 

I remember very little from this third session in the tent, about as little as I remember from the hammock.  But though only the faintest intimation of the terror remains with me, I will never forget the realization that some powerful, conscious, willful and extremely-pissed-off entity was after me.

For the first time I felt that I had come up against a tangible spirit.  Not a benevolent spirit, not some interlaced-fingers-on-belly chuckling Buddha, but a cackling psychopath, a destroying angel.  I had felt malicious presences closing in on me when I was in the hammock: but this time there was only one presence and it was more than just hostile.  It was downright evil; it was, in fact, trying to kill me.

Once again, I had no idea what had happened to me.  All I knew was that this demon was coming at me from my left.  It was no run-of-the-mill demon; I had come face to face with my own private White Whale.  All of a sudden, I was awash with a horrific recognition of this fiend’s identity.  Not only did I know what it was but I knew that it knew that I knew.  The revelation, however, only lasted as long as the dreamscape, leaving me with the exasperating memory of having momentarily understood something of awesome and terrible significance only to then have had that awareness yanked away from me. 

All I now recall of this demon are circular saws, razors, teeth, blades—all of them spinning and whizzing with a geometric fury, nearing within millimeters of my body, threatening to slice me if I moved the slightest.  At the same time, a weight was crushing me down.  I could not budge.  Even if I could, these saws would grind me up into mincemeat.  A violent end awaited me if I even took a breath.  I did at one point sneak a gulp and I remember exulting in the fact that I had managed to trick this demon, to swallow without getting carved up.  I waited a few seconds and then I gulped once more.  Again, I celebrated inwardly. I did not, however, dare to take a breath.  That was risking too much.

I had again recorded the experience, even though this time I remained silent throughout its entirety.  Six minutes had passed from the moment I pressed the record button, which was shortly before inhaling the salvia, until the moment that I first said to S, “Oh my God, oh you’re back, I can breathe.”  S later told me that while I had been lying there, immobile, he could not see any outward signs of breathing.  He was just about to check up on me to make sure I was drawing air when I finally emerged from my salviamare and spoke to him.  I doubt it’s possible that I wasn’t breathing for the entirety of those four or five minutes that I was ‘under.’  But I am quire sure that for as long as those saws were whirling at me—perhaps two minutes—I did not take a breath. 

It is precisely this aspect of the experience that makes it so frightening in retrospect.  I’ve had to fend off psychopaths and mass murderers often enough in my dreams and can generally take it all in good stride.  While I may prefer sunnier dreams, especially lucid ones, I’ll take a nightmare any night over uneventful sleep.  But this inability to breathe was a frightening physiological infiltration of a dreamscape into my flesh-and-blood body.  While on a few occasions I may have tried my hand, or rather my head, at perception-threatening substances, I have left alone the life-threatening ones as I have a healthy instinct for self-preservation.  But the realization that I seemed to have stopped breathing for a period imparted a more sinister quality to the plant.  Having said that, I cannot prove that I wasn’t drawing small quantities of air.  And even if I had stopped breathing for a period, it seems certain that, salvia or no salvia, if the body needs oxygen badly enough, it will find a way to get it.   

My eyes had obviously opened at one point because I remember looking at the side of the tent, watching the canvas flapping in towards me, as if someone outside was beating upon it.  S later told me that immediately after I had lain down, some strong gusts shook the tent.  It may have been bad timing, but I had no doubt that even in more tranquil settings, my experience would have been equally terrifying. As S put it, “it’s going to find a way to get you.”

It was such a relief to be conversing with S, to be out of that fiend’s clutches, to know that I had escaped intact from that infernal region.  I didn’t want any more of it.  In fact, I was looking forward to a night of placid, dream-free sleep.  S and I talked for fifteen minutes or so before he retired to the cabin.  One thought dominated all my others: Never, ever, ever return to that place again.  I had taken enough abuse from this plant.  Were salvia a god, it would be a wrathful one, demanding endless sacrifices and punishing those who enter its temple as skeptics not worshippers.  Salvia might remain a maddening mystery to me but I was done with it.

Salvia, however, was not done with me.  I began to hear sounds outside the tent, the scrabbling of raccoons, the scurrying of footsteps. The wind again intensified, bringing with it beach sounds of children’s laughter and breaking waves.  Creatures were crawling on me.  At one point I even returned to the cabin and, callously waking C in the process, I asked him to apply the searing head of an extinguished match to a mole on my upper back which in my paranoia I thought was a tic.  The moon had long ago risen over the hills and was harshly illuminating the clouds scuttling by below.  The tent made such a racket under those gusts that it was impossible to sleep.  But every time I intended to pack up and head to the cabin, the loud flapping would subside and I would remain; then, just as I was drifting off to sleep, the gusts would resume with a renewed violence.  It was about three am when I finally broke down my tent, cursing loudly, and headed in to the cabin for a place on the floor.  I had requested a dreamless night, but this was not what I had in mind.  

It has not been my intention here to either glorify salvia as a medium for visionary truth or to demonize it as the lethal threat to individual and society that some drug prohibitionists want it to be.  I am aware that, especially in this final encounter with the plant, my account seems to lean more towards the latter.  This surely was in great part because our experiences stemmed from a 10x concentrate.  Smoking or chewing the leaf in its natural non-extracted form, the way the Mazatecs ingest it, would I am sure have made a world—quite literally—of difference. 

In recent years, there has been a major push, especially in the United States, to criminalize salvia. Although salvia is best left to the shamans and veteran explorers of inner consciousness, I do not share these prohibitionist sentiments.  Leaving aside the lessons of Prohibition on the effectiveness of criminalization and leaving aside potential research and medical benefits, anyone who calls for a wholesale ban on the plant on the grounds that it is dangerous to self and society will have to explain, assuming it to be true, why they are not also calling for a wholesale ban on alcohol, which lies behind tens of thousands of cases of human road kill per year, untold acts of violence, and innumerable pools of vomit.  And if anything, an outright criminalization of salvia is unfair to those harmless explorers of consciousness sometimes referred to rather ludicrously as psychonauts, who want to occasionally voyage to the outer regions of their inner space in their own private quarters, unmolested by a hostile state.   

Nevertheless, I see no harm in emphasizing Salvia divinorum’s raging underbelly.  Its active ingredient is a naturally-occurring chemical portal into the dream world, one which as everyone knows is just as populated by ghosts and goblins as it is by nymphs and sprites.  One need not expect the worst, of course.  But though one hopes that, when summoned, the Sandman will waft in with his bag of glittering dream dust, one should also be prepared for the advent of his alter-ego, the Lord of Dreams, who always comes storming in on a galloping night mare.   

Constantine Markides

The Lost Coast Trail

AT HIGHER DOSES, the initial effect of smoked salvia upon the human psyche resembles that of general anaesthesia in that within seconds the subject ‘goes under’ despite resistive efforts to stay alert. With anaesthesia, however, one is ‘knocked out’ and remains more or less unconscious until revival; with salvia, one goes under not into insensate unconsciousness but into a kind of dreamscape, what some consider a spirit world.  It is essential to measure out precise quantities: too little salvia and you do not go under (or ‘break through’ as others refer to it); too much and you recall little or nothing.    

In retrospect, it was imprudent of us not to have had a method for accurately measuring out the salvia or even for just making a fair estimate.  As we were dealing with 10x fortified leaf (a concentrate ten times the strength of the natural form), the distinction between not enough and too much is slight. Our method—just pack a bowl’s worth—was crude to say the least.  Before smoking the salvia I do remember looking at the vial—which stated it contained leaf for ten doses—and noticing that it seemed more than one-tenth empty.  But I did not dwell on it.  After my initial uneventful experience in Gloucester, I didn’t want another salvia no-show. 

This time it proved to be more than enough, and I mean this not in its loose popular meaning of ‘an abundantly welcome amount’ but in its strictly literal sense of ‘more than required.’  Unfortunately I recollect very little from the experience. I am not even sure if my eyes were shut throughout it or not.  I do believe that my eyelids closed of their own accord several seconds after the birch trees started sidewinding on me simply because my external environment—the tree trunks, the foliage, the azure patchwork of sky—played no role in the little that I do remember.  In fact, the feeling was very much like sinking into a deep ultra-active dream.     
 
Although the details elude me, I do remember that something vividly terrible was happening to me, that malicious creatures had surrounded me and were closing in.  This was not merely a feeling.  They were tangibly there in the form of—if I am not mistaken—shifting, venomously colorful geometric shapes, like a gang of Lego monsters.  These evil presences (or was it one evil presence with multiple minion Hydra heads?) were enclosing me on my left and right, looming over me.  I recall them cackling hysterically at me, although I think I was hearing in color and patterns rather than sound, as if my senses had jumbled and merged.  I was desperate to escape but felt trapped.  It was a textbook nightmare. 

Salvia experiences are often directionally-specific: it was happening ‘over there,’ the person later reports, or it was coming from ‘up there.’  On examination these directions often correlate to some sensory event in the external environment—the birdcall of a red-winged blackbird perched overhead, the westerly blaze of the setting sun, the pressure of a chair’s frame against one’s upper back.  I suspect that my feeling of being hemmed in from the left and right stems resulted because I was hanging in a hammock, with my body hugged by netting on both sides. 

I do recall being vaguely aware that I was in a hammock and that I had better jump out of it to save my life.  I also had the vague feeling—unpleasant as it is to admit this—that these evil creatures were in some way connected to my friends and that they had all turned against me.  In short, the entire universe had turned malevolent.  But though everything was screaming ‘jump, JUMP!’ (in retrospect I’m amazed I did not leap out of the hammock) there was a voice from somewhere deep inside me telling me, Don’t jump, stay put, just wait it out.  

Part of the reason the salvia experience can be so horrible (although this seems to be exclusive to higher doses) is that when you are under its thrall, you have no awareness that you’ve ingested anything.  It is much the same as with dreams: one does not question a dream’s reality, nor is one conscious of dreaming, except when in that rare and wonderful state known as lucid dreaming.  It was not until a few minutes had passed—and I can only refer to this time span because that’s how long my friends say I was lying there, silent and immobile aside from occasional twitching—that I realized with relief that I had taken salvia. 

-Oh, I took salvia, I see now… I suddenly declared.  And with those words I lifted my head up and looked around.  I was still feeling the salvia—the effects would perceptibly linger for another twenty minutes or so—but I had emerged from the nightmare. 

All too aware of how close I had come to throwing myself out of the hammock, the first thing I did—and I wasted no time in doing so—was climb out. I was briefly disoriented, and almost fell back into the hammock upon standing up, but my sense of balance was soon restored.  I was at a loss of words.  I mumbled something about how salvia should never be taken while in a hammock.  Though it may sound like the sort of cliché phrase you see in promotional blurbs for horror flicks, the fact was that this salvia experience had been as bad as my worst nightmares. 

What made it so infernal was the feeling of helplessness before the presence of a malicious force.  It is one thing to contend with dramatic hallucinations, another to be overcome by a nightmare sense of futility and vulnerability (i.e. consider the classic dream scenario of being stuck in quicksand, unable to move, never mind run away, in the face of an approaching killer).  There are a great many myths surrounding psychoactive substances, especially mushrooms and LSD, one being that they transform the universe into either a distorted, leering House of Mirrors or into the sort of tie-dyed Grateful Dead landscape that so much third-rate ‘acid art’ purports to depict with its predictable array of multi-rayed suns and multi-armed Shivas.  All this is a grotesque exaggeration of what is essentially the same world experienced in a heightened state of sensory and perceptual awareness. 

The only encounter I have had in which I found myself in a kind of anything-goes carnival universe was in my first year as an undergraduate at Columbia.  Along with M and S, I had taken a few drags off a joint which, unbeknownst to the three of us, had been laced with some hallucinogenic substance.  M later described how at one point the walls were covered with hundreds of eyes, blinking and staring at him. S, meanwhile, discovered in the shower that his extended left arm, which he was scrubbing with soap, was several miles long.  As for me, I was, among other things, having peanut butter complications.  I had dipped my forefinger into a jar, but just as I brought my finger towards my mouth, the clump of peanut butter had transformed into a giant Dumbo-like elephant with flapping wings, then into a roaring tiger, and finally into a python with a swinging head and flickering tongue.  I don’t know how long I sat there, ogling at these fabulous creatures on my fingertip, but finally I closed my eyes, overcome by the munchies, and devoured the reptile.

Although the world I had unexpectedly found myself in that night was certainly bizarre and unpredictable, with more than its share of mental hobgoblins, it did not seem malevolent.  While my outer world had perceptibly changed, I had still retained my sense of self.  I was aware that a substance had induced these hallucinations and therefore was able to respond to them or ‘defend myself’ by keeping a relatively cool head.

The salvia, however, had brought on the nightmare feeling that something hostile was consciously out to get me.  With salvia, the outer world is not merely changed but rather obliterated and reconstituted into something entirely alien—and sometimes entirely wicked—while one’s inner poise and self-control is yanked away, leaving one as vulnerable and confused as a washed-up jellyfish.       

My friends could see I was not exactly gung-ho about my salvia encounter.  The frightfulness of being hemmed in was still lingering and I felt I needed to walk.  Even the foliage of the birch trees seemed constricting; I wanted an open sky overhead and the expanse of an ocean before me.  I set off but returned two minutes later.  I knew someone else was going to try the salvia and I wanted to be there for that.      

Z decided to go next.  He sat in a foldable chair that M had brought.  S and I promptly positioned ourselves on stumps between him and the campfire.  Nearby was another stump with an axe lodged into it, which I moved a distance away.  M then prepared the pipe for Z as he had done for me.

Z’s response took us all by surprise.  Rarely is Z fazed by uncomfortable situations, the kind that for others would be unbearable.  He has suffered from flesh-eating worms in the Bolivian jungle, motorcycled cross country without sleeping in a bed for weeks at a time, shat bloody pieces of his innards in India, spent the night alone and miles from anyone in the Mexican desert while under peyote, etc.  Although he never deliberately seeks out discomfort, as with any serious traveler, plenty of it comes with the territory.    

This time Z was definitely fazed.  Within thirty seconds or so his eyes widened in an expression of anxiety that would remain until he had emerged from salvia’s clutches.  At one point he leaned forward and reached his arms out, as if he wanted to escape the chair.  S and I supported him as he stood up since his sense of balance had been severely handicapped.  He curled down briefly on the ground, resting his head upon a heap of twigs, but no sooner had he lain down that he struggled to his feet again. 

Though his eyes remained wide open the whole time, he did not seem to be seeing, at least not the world that was shared by the rest of us.  In fact, with his arms extended before him, his hands tentatively groping at the air, and his lost expression, Z looked like a man who had just been struck blind.  He was, however, able to respond positively when S asked him if he wanted to sit back in the chair. 

Recalling my own confusion and consternation, I tried to remind him that he had merely taken salvia to reassure him that he was fine.  I thought that would help settle him into the salvia experience free of the all-consuming distraction of anxiety.  One could, of course, argue with a trial-by-fire logic that how you handle the anxiety is the experience.  Regardless, my words seemed to have no consequence.  It was about as effective as telling someone who is tossing under a nightmare not to worry since it’s all just a dream. 

Upon emerging from his salviamare, Z was surprised to hear that he had left the chair and sprawled upon the forest floor.  What he did remember is encountering a void of sensory deprivation and fighting to emerge from it, to return to the world he knew, the world of his senses.

-It gave me an awareness, Z later told me, that reality is like a canvas and you can tear the canvas and look behind it.  The canvas is your personality and consciousness and you can fall away from that and there’s blackness behind, non-sensory perception.  The plant taught me that our consciousness is fragile and that there is a blackness out there.  I didn’t want to be in it because it was an absence; I wanted to be with you guys, in a place with sounds and colors. It wasn’t pleasant, you don’t enjoy yourself, but it was an alternative look on reality so I’m glad I did it. I don’t really think I need that look again. 

Z had also described how this salvia-induced canvas-like world was at one point displayed in folds, as if superimposed upon a handheld fan.  A few hours later he saw on the ground near the campfire a cheap colorful fan that had apparently been left discarded by previous campers.  Although he could not recall having seen the fan, it was obvious that he had unconsciously made note of it earlier in the day.  Out of this mere passing glance, the fan had come to occupy an essential architectural role in constructing his salvia reality. 

S went next.  The first time he had tried salvia, excluding the failed Gloucester attempt, had been several weeks earlier.  He had had what he described as an out-of-body experience, although instead of the conventional (conventional as far as ‘OBEs’ go) sense of floating directly up and out of the body, he instead got pulled out of himself to the left, perhaps because his head had been leaning leftward at the time.  When his friend had asked him how he was feeling, he merely pointed to his right, saying “He’s over there.” His sense of leaving his body had been primarily aural rather than visual: it had not been so much that he could see himself to his right, but rather that he could hear himself over there giggling. 

While all this had left him with a recognition that the plant had to be approached with respect, as he put it, the positive nature of the experience had left him interested and curious to try it again.  What he did not anticipate was that at higher doses the plant could show a more sinister face.    

Within thirty seconds of exhaling the smoke, S was speaking in tongues.  He was grunting and yowling in his own private language that seemed perfectly comprehensible to him but that was gibberish to us.  His eyes, more glazed than shining, were sometimes open, sometimes closed, but he had a possessed look unlike any I’d ever seen on him, as if he’d been transformed into a different being.  At first I thought S was just acting and having fun with us, but then I realized it was no make-believe.  He soon began pawing at the air.  Occasionally his peculiar howl-speech would be interrupted by a bout of laughter.

It was impossible for us to keep straight faces.  Our suppressed chortling soon escalated into full-fledged laughter.  I think we all wanted to stop guffawing but we couldn’t help ourselves.  It was all so goddam crazy.  If his salvia experience was anything like mine had been, then our laughter—assuming it was even penetrating his consciousness—would take on malicious overtones.  But we soon quieted down, because it was clear by S’s occasional troubled looks that something was also profoundly disturbing him.  At one point he crawled out of his chair to the ground, rolled onto his back and began kicking his legs in the air.  This inverted waggling of the legs, the inability to communicate, the reaching forth of his arms… it all pointed to one likely scenario
: S was undergoing an infantile regression. 

After about five minutes had passed—and I can’t remember if S was still on the ground or back in the chair—he suddenly ‘returned,’ albeit still dazed and under salvia’s sway:

-Oh, what did I do? Did I smoke…? Oh, there you are….  Okay… Oh, sorry about that… Oh God I don’t want anymore of that! Aarrghh… No, okay, I’m all right. I’m okay… Oh God, you don’t want to do that. I just couldn’t even keep up with you guys.  It felt like everybody’s head was just stuck through a… Oh my goodness.  I was trying to talk to you guys…

Initially S seemed slightly embarrassed, in much the same way that a volunteer of a showman hypnotist might feel upon awakening from a spell of hypnosis only to discover himself in some compromising position in front of a laughing auditorium.  K later told us that he had found S’s behavior so disquieting that he started praying for the return of his friend.  It seemed, K said, as if some other presence, some alien thing, had displaced and briefly taken over S’s mind.  Not long after that, K left the campfire to walk off the afternoon’s troubling sights.

The first part of the experience that S remembered was being on his back and seeing people around him, although ‘people’ isn’t exactly the right word:

-They looked like human shapes, S later said, but they were all glowing, like lights, with astral bodies and mushroom-shaped heads.  I suppose it was all of you but I thought it was my family.  These are the first things I remember. Those people were soothing, but at the same time they were putting me down like a child, like I wasn’t allowed to join them.  I felt infantile, like a four-year-old.  There was a horizontal layer of energy, a blanket of light. I was trying to rise above that surface to where those people were but I couldn’t burst through it. Even if I pushed through, it fell around me like a film, like a surface.  I remember thinking, am I going to drown? But I could breathe so I wasn’t going to drown. It wasn’t a smooth blanket. It fell down on me in chunks, like keys on a keyboard. Eventually I was able to climb through it more… There was a lot of sound to it. The visual images are mostly mental ones.  I think you’re more connected to the salvia world through sound… I think you have to do it with an experienced person, someone who knows what they’re doing, and build up to it.  I bet you could utilize that drug for inner visions if you did it the right way, but I don’t know how to do it.  I don’t know if I want to try.

Despite the succession of increasingly unsettling salvia sessions, M decided to go next. He opted to move away from the enclosed fire circle and smoke the salvia while sitting cross-legged in a sunny patch of grass in a nearby clearing.  He also asked us to keep any interactions with him to a minimum.  He felt that, even though one is disconnected from the outside world when under salvia, there still exists a thread of connection that can dramatically alter the nature of the experience (his previous encounter with salvia bore this out: some Navajo drumming chants had been playing softly on the stereo at the time and had, as he described, cut him in two; each split, arrayed in color and fabric, separated to reveal a Navajo man emerging behind his ‘split self’). 

It was not long after he had exhaled the salvia that his upper body slumped forward and he began to slightly rock to and fro, smiling.  Soon he was laughing uncontrollably, while mumbling something that sounded like ‘Shit’s about to change.’  This effort kept escalating until his whole body was convulsing with the laughter, drool hanging and spittle flying from his lips as he yelled, “Fish is about to change!  Fish is about to change!”    

M later described that he had felt himself pulled out of his own body until he was seeing himself through a second pair of eyes, then a third, then fourth, and so on.

-I could actually physically see the phrase Something important in your life is about to change, M recounted.  But then the salvia started chipping away at the phrase and the fonts started pulling out.  I was trying to say the phrase but my speech was crippled and so the words kept changing.  It changed to Something’s about to change then to Shit’s about to change and then to Fish is about to change.  And it was so absurd I started laughing.   

It’s possible that the change of environment—the sunny clearing as opposed to the foliage-enclosed tree grove—played some role in taking off some of that menacing edge that had so battered S, Z and I.  By this point, K, J and C were left to try—or not try—the salvia.  After witnessing the reactions of Z and then S, K had made it clear that he was not touching the stuff.  Also, he was also still off on a walk.  After his own episode, Z had advised J against trying salvia, but J finally decided he would.  

His experience was markedly milder.  He smiled and started chuckling to himself, but the salvia never overwhelmed him—he never broke through. Ironically enough, J, who had been the most hesitant about the potency of the substance, ended up being the most disappointed that the experience had not been strong enough. 

Daniel Siebert, whose substantial explorations, research and writings on salvia has made him one of the plant’s top authorities, writes in his online guide that it is important to hold the smoke deeply in the lungs for twenty to thirty seconds to ensure that the salvinorin A is absorbed from the smoke.  If one exhales too quickly, the psychoactive agent will only be partially absorbed.  Even though J did not end up smoking the entire bowl’s worth, the reason the salvia didn’t overcome him is probably merely because he did not hold the smoke in his lungs for long enough.     

M decided on impulse to smoke the remainder of the salvia in the bowl when J handed it back to him.  Shortly after smoking it he walked about thirty feet away and stood under a small grove of trees.  It was close enough so that the rest of us could keep an eye on him while also watching over J.  Although M seemed to be fairly composed for the first few minutes, he at one point leaned his elbow upon a tree trunk and began laughing into the crook of his arm.

-I could feel it coming on, M later told me.  But it was J’s trip and I didn’t want to interfere with it so I went over by those trees.  I could feel that it was trying to overwhelm me but it couldn’t, it was jammed, like a cog.  I eventually fell into it again, but I’m interested in that I was able to postpone it.

C went next.  His experience outwardly resembled J’s as he did not react in any way aside from some smiling and laughing.  But unlike J, who described only a sense of lightheadedness and a wave of mellowness, C saw a pulsing object and sensed being on the verge of breaking through.

-It was a deep-seated body feeling, C described.  I had a deeper sense of color, and my surroundings were more solid.  I lost track of all of you being there.  Out of the left corner of my head I could feel a steady knocking and could also feel it in my body.  I could also see something, an outward arc on my left that was moving to the right along the ground to a pulsing sound, which may have been my heartbeat.  The arc was made up of small three-dimensional blocks.  I want to say it was yellow.  I was a bit scared because I didn’t know what it was.  This reverberating arc swung around and lined up in front of me.  I thought it was going to hit me. I wasn’t sure what would happen.  But when it landed there it stopped pulsing and I knew at
that point that it wasn’t going to go anywhere else.  I had no idea I was laughing.

C had been sitting very upright, maintaining a straight back throughout the salvia episode.

-I think posture makes a big difference, C added. I didn’t feel like I needed to go anywhere.  It was coming to me. Also, I believe from my yoga studies and meditation that sitting like this is important to basic sanity.  It’s a grounded natural position to be in.   

It had first been while S was on his back, bicycling his legs in the air, that I first began considering the salvia experience in terms of dream states.  Aside from S’s seeming regression to an infantile state, a few other details suggested the relation: for example, that Z’s experience was fundamentally colored by a seemingly insignificant fan he had observed earlier; that S’s speech was incomprehensible even though he seemed to respond to our questions; that S, Z, and I felt a tremendous anxiety that was only exaggerated since we did not know what or why these things were happening to us; that the three of us felt a definitive moment in which we had returned to our ‘right mind’ despite lingering salvia effects; that Z had no memory of leaving the chair, falling to the ground, and returning to the chair; and finally, that we could only remember small aspects of our salvia experience, although whatever we did remember we are not bound to forget anytime soon. 

Consider the above in light of how dreams often resurrect memories and early impressions of childhood that were imagined forgotten; how our dreams incorporate unremarkable elements of the day’s experiences; how while dreaming we often mumble in garbled speech that is incomprehensible to those awake even if we respond to their questions; how our anxiety-dreams are especially terrifying because we are not aware that we are dreaming; how there is a definite moment when we recognize we have emerged from a dream even though some time must pass before we fully waken; how we are later surprised to hear of our acts of somnambulism or other movements during sleep; and how we recollect only portions of our dreams, although we may remember some details vividly for years, even decades.  When one considers all of this—and there is plenty more—then it seems that the salvia experience and the dream state bear much more than a merely superficial resemblance, although what that may be is for the oneirologists to say. 

C had recommended the upright seated posture, but my increasing sense that salvia serves as a kind of dream dust bearing Sandman made me wonder whether perhaps the plant was best explored not seated but prostrate.  I was fairly certain that I was not again to dabble with salvia after this trip so it seemed that if I wanted any more firsthand experience, it was, to use the hackneyed language of inspiration, now or never.
 
-I’m going to give it one more go, I suddenly said.  I’m going to do it right here, lying on my back with my eyes shut, as if I were sleeping.  

The final part of this essay is the August 4 posting