This is an excerpt from
an Amanita muscaria trip report on Erowid.
I don’t become conscious again for a while. D tells me later that during this time I was asleep, I started choking and he had to make me stop. He also tells me that I started screaming as loud as I could and he couldn’t soothe me. He says at one point he put a pillow over my face to muffle it, and I didn’t even notice. I went right on screaming.
When I become conscious again he’s sitting on top of me. I try to sit up but he grabs my arms and pushes me right back down. He tells me to close my eyes and go to sleep. Flicker. I sit up again. I have to get out of here. He pushes me back down. Tells me to close my eyes and go to sleep. Flicker. I sit back up. He pushes me back down. Says the same thing. Flicker. I don’t know how many times this happens before it dawns on me that I’m dead. I must have died somehow. Did I take too many? The wrong kind? Did I just jump out of a window in my delirium? But I’m dead now. Flicker. I sit up. He pushes me down. Tells me to close my eyes. Is this Hell? Were all the Christians right all along? Am I in Hell now and this is my world?* Flicker. I sit up, he pushes me down, tells me to close my eyes. I start babbling about forgiveness. Flicker. I sit up, he pushes me down, tells me to close my eyes. I realize that this is Hell, and for the rest of eternity I’m going to relive the last ten seconds over and over and over again forever, and I’m tortured by the idea. All I want is to get out. This is a realization that I forget every time I sit up, right up until he tells me to close my eyes, and then I realize it again, and remember I’ve realized it a thousand times before. I can’t resist what he tells me to do, and every time he tells me to, I close my eyes again. Flicker. Up, down, close your eyes, I realize again. “This is going to go on forever…” He laughs. This only tells me I’ve figured it out.
I’m going to sit up panicking, and realize again and again and again forever that this is going to go on and on. I’ll realize a million times that this is going to keep going, and a million times more. It’ll never end. Flicker. Again and again and again. Every time it’s worse. His voice echoes. Have you ever put two mirrors facing each other and looked into the infinite reflections they produce? Once after another after another after another. That’s how I felt. That’s how he sounded. That’s what he looked like as my eyes closed again and I fell back against my pillow. Reverberating and happening again. Flicker. Again. I hear an ambulance outside. I see the lights. “Is there an ambulance out there? Is it for me? I want to look!” I try to get up, he pushes me back down. “You can’t go! You’re going to jump off the balcony!” Immediately I wonder: is that how I have to end this? Am I supposed to kill myself? Will that get me out of this infinite torture? But I’m already dead! So what would it matter? Flicker.
I don’t want to jump off the balcony, I just want to do something, ANYTHING that’s different from what’s been happening and happening and happening. “Please let me up!” I have to escape from this! “Close your eyes.” Flicker. I bolt up. He’s not on top of me anymore. He’s across the room. I jump up and try to run before it’s too late, but he’s too fast for me and even though I’m halfway through the door to the living room he’s grabbed leg and waist. I’ve gotten so far! I have to break out of this. I beg him to please let me up, please let me get out of here. I promise I won’t go anywhere. Reluctantly, he lets go and watches me. I run to the bathroom. I’m so happy I didn’t close my eyes again. I’m so happy. I make the mistake of going back into the room and lying back down, and when I wake back up, I’ve forgotten that I ever left the room. It’s all happening again. I feel my phone ringing and I take it out. D runs over to me and takes it away before I can answer it. But I’m so close, so close to making something different happen, to breaking out of the infinite mirror of events, I beg him to just let me see the phone, let me talk to whoever it is so they can get me out of it. Something dawns on me. “What time is it!?” “Will that make you feel better?” “Please let me see!” If there is time, I can’t be dead. This can’t be Hell. The same moment cannot happen forever.
It’s 7:22. Now it’s 7:23. “I’m just….I’m just….just…just tripping…..I’m just tripping! I’m just tripping!” Time is moving. It’s been three hours since the start of my trip. I’m not dead. I’m not in hell. I’m in my room. D is there helping me. I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude that I start to laugh and sob at once. I forced my way out of hell, I found my way out, I’m alive and I’m so grateful. Time is moving again. I have free will again. Oh god. It feels so good. I’m hugging D as hard as I can, I’m so happy this is over. The feeling is still there, the glitches in my brain, but I’m back in my own head and I can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. The next three hours fly by, and I’m feeling much better. I just want to talk. I just want to relax. I don’t even want to do that again.
D tells me that he only pushed me back down onto the bed a few times. 4 or 5. The tiny number feels so impossible, and I’m not sure I can ever believe it.. I’m told that in all my flailing, I kicked A in the face. I have some nice scratches/bruises on my arm, and a big purple bruise on my right thigh. My wrists ache, and my hip hurts. I find other little bruises on accident when I touch them, but they’re not the kind you can see through your skin. I’m embarrassed more than anything, and I’m not very happy overall after this. I’ve never been so terrified in all my life, never felt worse than I did. I never wanted to understand the concept of infinity, but I do now.
I don’t think I’ll ever trip on anything with those people again, because how they handled it only sent me further into delirium. You can’t choke someone and threaten them while they’re having a bad trip, sorry. I’ve never had a bad trip before this, so it was really…..I didn’t know how to handle it. Shit, I didn’t even think I was alive and tripping anymore.
(*I’m agnostic, but I firmly believe that the Christians have got it all wrong, and they use their religion as a tool for money and power, disgusting. So my thinking that I’ve died and gone to Christian hell pretty much means that I have lost my mind.)
I've often wondered if the kinds of experiences sometimes reported from salvia being discussed here could basically just be like being in this type of loop combined with the extreme dissociation and delirium that the drug can also sometimes cause, all just happening to come together every so often (and probably particularly with higher dosages) to make an unusually powerfully consciousness-altering experience. Amanita muscaria is not always like this either, but it certainly seems it can be.
There is another comedian named Steve Cantwell who was somewhat recently in the news again for discussing a salvia trip he claims to have had like this where he definitively states that he spends an entire vividly experienced eight years in something like forty-five seconds in real time, although I think he was probably just guessing on the actual time duration, it's salvia trip length obviously. I listened to a podcast or something where he actually described his story, and I did find it compelling even if, obviously, hard to swallow. I do think it's the most vividly-described and thus supposedly also lived experience of its sort I ever personally heard, although I did think there were also some extenuating circumstances in his story. It's been a while but I do believe he noted that at the time he used the salvia, he had never touched another drug in his life, I'm fairly certain he said even including caffeine although I'd have to check again, and he had made it all the way into his 40s(?) I believe while doing so, and the reason was because he was a Mormon preacher (I saw a Reddit thread where someone criticized the idea of a "Mormon preacher" but then another commenter pointed to some other more believable Mormon credentials he gave on another website and suggested me may have just said "preacher" for the interview, make of that what you will) and so basically he had made an attempt to stay totally sober his whole life, and I can't remember if he gave a reason why he finally decided to take the plunge anymore, but basically he framed it around his army buddy coming home and wanting to get high with him on something that his friend could use without failing a drug test afterward, so he went to the head shop to get something. He wanted to get a synthetic cannabinoid blend and mistakenly assumed that that's what the person in front of him was buying when they bought salvia, so he asked for the same. So, basically, he was a fully grown adult who had supposedly never ingested another drug in his life and didn't even know that he was using salvia or any hallucinogenic drug at all when he used the salvia, which I think is... at least maybe a fair reason for someone to have a particularly powerful trip. He also I believe claimed to take a huge rip off the bong trying to impress his friend or something like that.
His actual supposed trip involved him just switching over to a different life as a different human being where he spent eight years being relentlessly pushed by the world and people around him into believing that this new life really was his original life all along, and that the life he thought he knew before was the one that was just a trip. He said he would be living his regular life, and people would come up to him in the grocery store and say things like "I was your teacher in second grade, remember?" They all (supposedly) believed that he had suffered brain damage from a traumatic experience of almost drowning while falling off of a boat or something like that, and that's actually where his trip began, with him suddenly being sucked into another world where his friends on the boat were saving him from drowning. Despite living a supposedly normal and full life, the things he describes are simple and highly repetitive, involving working the same dead-end job with mundane activities (I forget what exactly now but pretty sure it was mundane) for I believe the entire eight years, and hanging out with those same friends from the beginning the entire time, doing things like forming a band with them by the end of it. He also describes some more complex events in the trip, like trying to find his old home in the new world he found himself in and failing, but ultimately everything brought him back to the loop of his simple, fundamentally unchanging life. However, there was a single important story arc that he described as occurring throughout the experience: he claimed that over the course of the trip, while living a life where he was no longer a Mormon, he became distanced from the ideas of the Mormon church for the first time ever, even researching things on the internet about Mormonism in the other world to double-check his knowledge (something I have to say also weirdly reminds me of deliriants, which make me see computer, TV, and cellphone screens a lot), and about halfway through the trip, four years or so into his supposed experienced time span, he decided that he really didn't want to be a Mormon anymore in any life, after which he started to lighten up more about his circumstances and slowly began giving into the trip more. Eight years in, when he describes going to meet his friends at a picnic and feeling as though he had actually achieved some peace in his new life, he suddenly fell through the ground and found himself returning to this life moments later than he left it at the end of his salvia trip.
To me, this sounds a lot like the "Hell" of the Amanita muscaria trip, which itself reminds me of Salvia divinorum experiences I've personally had, and it's just, like I suggested, instead of being experienced in a mentally detached but physically present way still in the same real world environment you were tripping in, it's happening in an out-of-body experience that is dissociative enough to actually be completely taken into an "alternate reality" sort of experience and simultaneously enough like a deliriant to be totally mundane in style but still trippy in the way it plays out and with possible apparent superficial similarities to actual deliriants, all of which does remind me of my own experiences with salvia even though they've all been much less intense than the trip described here, because I do in fact find it to have a blend of properties of psychedelics, dissociatives, deliriants, and more, that can significantly vary from one trip to another as well. I wonder, when the brain is doing all of these kinds of things at once at or near maximum potential, how much content can it generate in how little of a time? Perhaps these are the experiences that give us windows into what pushing those limits may actually achieve. That's one way I like to theoretically frame it in my mind, anyway.
I think his trip sounds relatable to Ari Shaffir's trip too, in ways I find believable. I think it's notable that they both describe feeling peace at the moment that they were yanked back into reality and out of their trippy alternate realities. I've often wondered if this kind of trip style on salvia may reflect it stimulating the aversive pathways in the brain in a way that causes dissociation similar to an out-of-body experience caused by a natural highly stressful event, potentially leading to a complex internal mental event where the anxieties that are currently at the forefront of the mind are systematically eliminated and replaced with a peaceful alternate plane and state of existence, which then collapses with a feeling of a loss of that peace upon a return to reality. Another thing I've seen people describe in these sorts of supposed experiences are having families in their alternate lives which they fear losing upon return, which I think may be considered similar to Ari Shaffir's trip as well. With respect to Steve Cantwell's experience, I wonder if perhaps the main stresses on his mind were particularly related to his Mormonism, and perhaps (not to get too into the guy's business, but it seems like the obvious suggestion) if that also related to why he decided to try drugs for the first time ever, and subsequently, at least theoretically, he then had a drug trip that specifically got him to decide to leave the Mormon church, which he did say he stuck to once he returned to this reality only minutes or perhaps seconds after he left. He claims to have started a whole new life where he left the church, tried a bunch of drugs, divorced his wife, and so on... and I guess maybe became a comedian? I don't know when that started. He said the trip was like ten years ago from the time of the interview I believe, although again I'd need to listen again to be sure....
Anyway, what is "Hell" if not what is described in these experiences? A repetitive torture in a seemingly infinite reality that only ends at the moment you finally decide that you would be accepting of it. It sounds to me exactly like the trip I just had on my plain leaf experience too where I felt I was reaching infinity but then gave in and it just ended.
Just some more thoughts.
