I had my next salvia trips today. This time I smoked a half bowl of plain leaf twice about an hour apart from each other. It does seem to me like reverse tolerance exists from one trip to the next separated by a good amount of time, but notably this time I felt like the second trip was basically just like the first but a little weaker, although I was glad I extended the experience.
The first half bowl was very interesting. It takes me two modest hits to finish, which weren't very far apart. At first, nothing notable seemed to happen other than the weird release feeling I get right when it first kicks in, I feel a little sweaty and my perception is warping in that salvia way but not really in any concrete way yet, and it kind of feels like my body is spinning like a pinwheel and I have a feeling like I'm about to go over the highest peak of a roller coaster as my body feels like it spins upside down, and then once I get over that hump, I just start laughing. I sat there laughing, at first a little bit, then developing to a quite full belly laugh, going all the way to include a knee slap. I was sitting in the backyard of the rental house I'm at wondering if anyone else in any backyards around me could hear my laughing, not that it would matter since what I'm doing is legal. After letting the laughter pass, I got up and went back inside (it's pretty hot outside and I was only out there because we're not supposed to smoke in the rental house). I continued to have a few more short outbursts of laughter, and also started to feel some of the spinning of salvia kicking in in a way that made me feel slightly dizzy, but I just sat down knowing that I would adjust to it pretty quickly.
About eight minutes in I put on some music with a video that had both a female and a male singer standing next to each other at their microphones, and as I was watching them more hallucinations started to kick in, subtly but clearly. In some of my previous experiences since starting to use salvia again recently after so many years off, I had gotten the impression that salvia might trigger some of the same brain pathways in me that are involved in my lesbian sexual interests. My desire for other women is weak compared to my desire for men but they are feelings that I have explored before and when I first started comparing the seemingly opposite effects of oral cannabis and salvia for me, I thought that another mirrored thing about them seemed like it might be that oral cannabis stimulated the pathways involved in my sexual desire for men while salvia did the same but for women, but I took down those observation I posted because I had literally just had my first salvia trip in recent times at the time and didn't want to jump to conclusions. However, I have generally continued to feel in my recent experiences that there might be some accuracy to this observation, and this time it seemed more overt than usual even, although in a way that was almost psychedelically comical so I'm still trying to actually digest it.
I was watching the music video with the two singers, and I started to hear voices that at this level were clearly hallucinations and didn't completely sound external rather than internal, but I could feel that they were still attached to the singers at least as much as, like, telepathy or something, like I felt like they were communicating these things to me directly in some way. Specifically, I was looking at the woman who suddenly started to become surrounded with something like a radiant aura but more like it felt like that than actually looked like that, and my mind's eye started drawing up imagery from some of my old lesbian fantasies and applying it to her, and I can't actually remember what the voice I was hearing attached to her was saying although I think it was just her like tempting or trying to seduce me or something, while the voice that I was hearing attached to the man was trying to coerce me into taking a masculine sexual role with this woman where he was kind of posed specifically like he was being my friend and explicitly saying stuff like, "Be like one of the guys and have sex with her." It felt kind of ridiculous and the way they were standing next to each other along with the developing psychedelic state made me feel like I was actually seeing something like like a vision of two entities one male and one female standing next to each other at the gates / white light leading to the other side so to speak, but filtered through this music video and talking to me through the voices of these singers. However, I was starting to feel good and enjoying the sexy visions and was adjusting to the spinning sensations that often come with salvia for me, so I got up and started kind of pacing around and kind of dancing to the music as I got lost in the trip.
While walking around, I had some notably psychedelic-like visionary effects of a kind that I had gotten the first time I smoked salvia in my recent trips too, but hadn't noticed quite as much with later doses, and I'm wondering if it's in part because they're context dependent, like I think getting lost in the music here might have really helped, but I'll have to explore that more with future experiences to say with confidence. In general, they remind me a lot of higher dosages of LSD as well as things like mushrooms and DMT in their visionary style, except that they're mostly lacking the geometries of serotonergic psychedelics and are just all the human imagery I get intermixed with that geometry on serotonergic psychedelics except on its own, still arranged in more shifting, mandala-like organizations and making poses and gestures and stuff exactly like what I expect from serotonergic psychedelics, and their textures and outfits are also more realistic and less cartoony than what I expect from serotonergic psychedelics. I would compare this point in some ways to peaking on a psychedelic amphetamine, particularly TMA-2 which specifically came to mind at the time, because it did have these visionary effects reminiscent of powerful indole psychedelics, but I was pretty clearheaded and more so just sexually stimulated in a very confident way, more like what I associated with psychedelic phenethylamine derivatives. The psychedelic visions I was getting were all of the woman singer from the music video, and she was moving in all the teasing and tempting ways I would generally expect of a woman I see on a psychedelic, repeated in multiple places throughout my vision simultaneously in a trippy orchestration, although when I see these kinds of visions on something like LSD it's usually just some unidentifiable cartoon woman in shiny latex or something, not a specific person like this wearing the exact outfit from the video.
The sexual visions continued, not getting too crazy, although at one point I felt like I suddenly spun around a wheel a bit like I was getting over another hump of peak activity, and suddenly I was seeing visions of the man from the video, and it kind of looked and felt like he was like celebrating getting me to be like one of the guys or something, he stuck his tongue out in excitement and I did the same thing. My imagination started producing visions of psychedelic fashion like it often does when I'm walking around listening to music on serotonergic psychedelics, and the fashion still felt very connected to my lesbian feelings being expressed and was what I would describe as like very masculine psychedelic female fashion and started covering my body in my mind's eye. By the time the song ended I felt very good, the music felt enhanced from normal and I had a very compelling body buzz and a general good mood and was ready to listen to more music. Of course, since this is salvia, the peak ended quickly and I think it was pretty much by the end of that first song that most of the truly notable stuff was over, but I kept enjoying myself listening to music for a good while, getting little bouts similar to things from beyond here and there. I had another big burst of laughter at some point at the same time as the singer of a funny song I was listening to which caused the spinning wheel visuals to pick up significantly as if I spun around the wheel several times all at once with that laughter. I continued getting psychedelic-like visions of the singers of other songs, but they weren't as opaque, as lively, or as interesting as from the first song, and then continued to wane in intensity from the first song, as did the body high and music enhancement.
Around just less than an hour after the first half bowl, I smoked the second half bowl, and as I said it was similar to the first half bowl but less intense. The same kind of trippiness from the first time around continued, still weaker and less interesting than with the first song I listened to, but I got to keep enjoying it all for around another hour before it started waning in the same way again. Around an hour and a half after the second half bowl, I decided that I felt that it was about over, stopped taking notes, and went to eat some lunch and watch TV.
Something I've been wondering since the first salvia experience I had in recent times when I first noticed this sexual distinction between it and my oral cannabis experiences is if these drugs were very specifically stimulating a part of my brain associated with the specific gender of people I was hallucinating on them - that is to say, if salvia was stimulating a part of my brain involved in interacting with women and oral cannabis was stimulating a part of my brain involved in interacting with men, and that this could conceivably be the same as what it does in other people if they manage to get this certain type of effect out of them - or if these perceptions are more flexible to something else these drugs are doing more primarily, like potentially stimulating the brain pathways that scientists tend to call "reward" and "aversion" specifically. I introduce the concept in this way because, personally, I get why "reward" and "aversion" seem to be accurate a lot of the time especially like in tests they do on lab rats and stuff, but I've done enough drugs and known enough people who've done enough drugs to know that "reward" and "aversion" are not really truly accurate labels, because people can like and want to repeat use of a drug that is "aversive" just as much as they can do so for a drug that is "rewarding" and they can dislike and not want to repeat use of a drug that is "rewarding" just as much as they can do so for a drug that is "aversive" if we stick to those specific scientific study terms and what the studies say about each drug, so obviously human reasoning and motivation at they very least must get more complicated than what these specific terms would imply. Not to get too into my own beliefs about sexuality, but I've wondered before, for instance, if people who are bisexual may (at least sometimes, maybe there are multiple explanations) be people who don't really follow the scientific terminology of "reward" and "aversion" and are just kind of down for anything at any time potentially, and maybe their brain looks like it's being "rewarded" with one kind of sexual partner and "averse" to another based on those scientific observations but they're perfectly fine with both types of neural stimulation and like both of them, so behaviorally they go both ways and couldn't care less what gender of partner they have.
After the experiences I've had now on salvia and cannabis, I'm definitely suspicious that logic similar to this that I've just proposed could be at work here too. As I said, I mostly seem interested in men, and when I trip on oral cannabis at dosages that seem to be in the realm of producing what science would refer to as a "rewarding" effect, the experience is sexual and orgasmic for me in a way that I specifically relate to my sexual desires for men, and I find the trip desirable and worth repeating. However, salvia and other kappa-opioid receptor agonists have clearly been classified as "aversive" drugs by science including in studies specifically administering salvinorin A to lab animals, but when I smoke salvia, it does in some clear ways that I've detailed here before seem opposite to my oral cannabis trips which seems logical with the concept of "reward" and "aversion" being conceptual opposites to one another, but still, as with oral cannabis, I find the trip often sexual and desirable and worth repeating, and it's just that it happens to trigger feelings seemingly related to my sexual desire for women instead. In line with my above thoughts, I would propose that this perhaps relates to the idea that because I feel "mostly" attracted to men, maybe that's what would look like "reward" in my brain while my attraction to women would look like "aversion" instead, and most straight or gay people seem to specifically act this way, like one type of partner is rewarding while the other is aversive, but since I couldn't care less and will happily and repeatedly explore either the so-called "rewarding" or "aversive" pathways in my brain, I'm ultimately still bisexual, and also, I ultimately love so-called "aversive" drugs like salvia just as much as so-called "rewarding" drugs like oral cannabis.
On the other hand, maybe one or both of these drugs does work by stimulating the parts of the brain involved in interacting with specifically men or women regardless of who takes them. I don't get to compare to other hallucinogenic oral cannabis reports very much, but it's obviously well-recognized, at least enough to become a stereotype whether it's true or not, that salvia often specifically comes with interactions with a seemingly consistently present female entity, "Lady Sally" and all that. In my first salvia trip in recent times, the initial peak was over in a flash like it was this latest time, but for a while after the peak I continued to get visions that seemed to detail things that had happened within my salvia trip, which seemed like it contained an infinite amount of information contained within that instantaneous flash and which afterward was being pulled out of my head slowly after having initially been downloaded like downloading a new skill in The Matrix or something. The visions I was getting at the time specifically seemed to detail the logic of how the salvia land actually works - how people become objects, who becomes what kind of object, whether the object is more like a tool or more like furniture, whether the trip is euphoric or dysphoric depending on exactly what happened, and so on - and this logic seemed to be applied specifically to both males and females as the trippers with the entity on the other end always being female. However, was that because that's how salvia actually does work for everyone, or just because I specifically see a female entity on the other side, regardless of if I try to understand the trip from my own perspective or from someone else's? That I cannot say with confidence. What I can say is that even at the time, there were a lot of lesbian themes for me personally.... I had visions about becoming a tube of lipstick being used by another woman and the lipstick coming out of the tube felt like a metaphor for male sexual ejaculation on to the woman's face, while feeling like the object specifically that I became being lipstick reflected the fact that I still felt female at the time when releasing those masculine sexual instincts for another woman, and other things quite a lot like that.
I think that's about all I've got to say about it for now. Looking forward to more experiences down the line as always. I actually really love salvia, it's fascinating and one of my favorite drugs for sure.
...every vape has been money wasted?
