This is Ari Shaffir's actual salvia trip report, which
he posted on Reddit after having the experience filmed live.
This is all on film on a Naughty Show podcast from the old Deathsquad studio at Redban's apartment. It's on Deathsquad.tv.
What happened was, I took a hit of salvia but I didn't quite take a big enough hit or I didn't hold it long enough. So it took me right to the edge of disappearing into my mind, but didn't quite get me through the barrier. So I took another hit. This time, the hit was as big as I could physically muster. It was massive. And I held it for a really long time. That hit alone would have been enough to make me obliterate my consciousness. But that hit, coupled with the one from before that got me ALMOST there put me in another place.
I was in a lake in the backyard of my childhood home. But I wasn't me swimming there. I was a new being, who lived under the water. It took me a little bit of time to learn how to breath water but then I learned. And I was there for a while. I mean, like, months. At least. I estimate I was there anywhere from 4 months to 2 years. I made friends. I had a life. All underwater.
At some point in my new life, I saw Sam Tripoli at the shore of the lake so I swam up to him to investigate (he was just sitting in the chair across from me in reality). That's when they started pulling me back into this existence. But what they didn't know was that I couldn't breath air any more. I had forgotten how after breathing underwater for so long.
I had to relearn the experience of breathing.
Man, that was a good trip. It looked hellish if you watch the video but what's important to understand is that the hellish part was me not wanting to leave my friends, family and life in the lake. It was just adjusting back to this reality that hurt. But the months or years I was living there were some of the most beautiful and peaceful of my life.
It's kind of like that Star Trek movie where Kirk is still alive and he had been in some dimension where all your dreams come true for all moments of every day and you live outside time. And then Picard came and got him out of there and he couldn't stand to live in the world for a while. But it wasn't that bad for me.
It sounds like a believable salvia trip to me. I've certainly read crazier ones, and the expected elements are there. A return to childhood, complete immersion in the other reality, a rug pull as reality starts setting back in. It's all pretty consistent with things I've come to expect out of salvia, not every trip, but commonly appearing in trips.
Notice the complete lack of clarity on the actual amount of time experienced in the trip. "I estimate I was there anywhere from 4 months to 2 years." is what he said.
I've taken a lot of different hallucinogenic drugs. Psychedelics, dissociatives, deliriants, amanitas, gaboxadol, synthetic cannabinoid overdoses, stimulant overdoses, zolpidem, gabapentin, DiPT.... Salvia is easily the craziest of all of them. If there's a drug that can fuck you up this much, I think salvia could be that drug. It's a bonkers drug with bonkers effects. That's just how it goes in my experience with it (and with observing others using it or administering it to them myself) so far.
I finally got to use salvia again at long last, nine years after my last experience when it had just become illegal in the place I used to live. Just about a week and a half ago I smoked a big bowl of plain leaf out of a nice new bong that I bought and got way further with it than than amount or strength would have ever gotten me before, obviously I've come along way with my reverse tolerance in those nine years. As I watched reality transform in the way it usually does, I was approaching a peak point where I felt a distinct fear that as I reached that peak, I would be plunged into an experience that would last for an infinite amount of time. However, when I actually let go into the idea of experiencing it, it was over in an instant, and I popped out on the other side in absolute bliss. From that moment I was coming down for maybe an hour, hour and a half with nothing but pure positivity, an amazing body high, and lingering smooth, brightly colored, opaque geometric visuals occasionally flitting by in my mind's eye. In the week and a half since then, despite the peak passing instantaneously, I've gotten occasional streams of visions that are highly crisp, directed, and feel as though they are behaving sort of like flashbacks or maybe more like callbacks to the infinite amount of time that I spent riding around the wheel of eternity in the instant that had passed at the peak of that salvia trip, sort of like even though I didn't actually get to live any of it, an infinite amount of salvia experience had been downloaded into my brain like the way they learn new skills without having to actually do anything in The Matrix. These flashes of vision have contained apparent lessons on the nature of my mind and the interaction it has with salvinorin A, and what that might mean for my consciousness and consciousness in general, although I think they may be starting to lessen in intensity now? Or maybe I've just seen all that they have to show me so far.
Salvia can do wonky things with the perception of time, and this experience I had just from smoking the plain leaf. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it further again now that I actually have the capacity to again finally at long last, so I'll be sure to report back if I have anything wild to say about my future experiences with respect to any of these crazy time-warping shenanigans. It has been an interest of mine for quite a long time as well, although I try to go into every experience without expectations.
I’ve heard or read on Erowid of someone taking way too much moxie experiencing like 1000 lifetimes this is news to me about salvia however
That's a great trip report. 5-methoxytryptamines are wonderful substances for exploring the mind too.
