Kaleida
Bluelight Crew
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This was my first experience with combining oral CBN with Salvia divinorum, and also of both in combination with high-THC cannabis. I am of the belief that oral CBN deserves its own trip report that I may get around to writing one day, but I'll have to give the abridged version of my feelings about it for now, because that's not why I'm writing this trip report specifically, but indulge me for a moment.
Ever since moving to a state where cannabis is legal a couple of years ago now, I have been eagerly albeit somewhat slowly experimenting with phytocannabinoids in a way that I was never able to before, starting with taking Δ9-THC orally in measured, increasing dosages. My plan was to get into the 100+ mg range and see how much I could get it to really turn into a quasi-psychedelic trip, spacing it out to be on weekends like a trip to get the most of it and such, but I turned out to not need either of those measures; it's pretty much guaranteed to be trippy for me at anything 30+ mg, and often feels a bit so at least at 20 mg or sometimes briefly even on 10 mg. I've realized in the time since then just how much people vary widely in their response to oral Δ9-THC, so I suppose I just lucked out in that regard. I think the highest I've gone so far is 50 mg, which I've only done a handful of times because it's so strong that I'm not sure taking more even feels worth it.
At 50 mg, oral Δ9-THC feels psychedelic to me in a way comparable to taking multiple hits of LSD or multiple grams of mushrooms, like exactly the same in certain ways, but also unignorably different in others, and that's somewhat true of the comparison between them at any level of effect for me. For example, the first time I took 50 mg after moving here I spent a period at the peak marveling at a very complex and 3D large, transparent, sort of neon geometric structure hovering over me that distinctly reminded me of once many years ago a time I took 5 blotters of LSD and saw something very similar, but this visual is the kind that simply hovered over my field of vision, whereas the kind that were present on LSD at the same time that involved things like patterns on textures in the environment and melting surfaces were completely absent on this dosage of Δ9-THC. Similarly, there was a euphoric high on the 50 mg Δ9-THC trip that went much beyond anything I ever experience from smoking cannabis and reminded me of serotonergic psychedelics, but simultaneously there were also typical cannabinoid body feelings both good and bad, including a head heaviness and nausea that I sometimes experience from high dosages of oral Δ9-THC in general that also goes beyond anything I ever get from smoking cannabis, and is unpleasant enough that it's part of the reason I don't want to keep pushing the Δ9-THC further now. I have found so far that 30 mg seems to be a nearly optimal dosage for me, practically guaranteeing relatively impressive quasi-psychedelic effects much beyond anything smoking cannabis has ever given me, while having little to no chance of feeling too physically heavy and unpleasant unlike what starts to become more common for me on 40+ mg.
All this being said, once I had my relationship with oral Δ9-THC pretty much nailed down, I decided to run another set of experiments attempting to do the exact same thing with oral CBN, and compare and contrast the two phytocannabinoids. While CBN is often said to be a very weak cannabinoid and scientific data seems to generally support this notion for CBN itself, I was inspired by a recent study paper that claimed that when CBN is taken orally, similar to the metabolism of Δ9-THC into the stronger 11-OH-Δ9-THC, it forms a metabolite called 11-OH-CBN that is a more potent and efficacious CB1 and CB2 receptor agonist than CBN itself, performing similarly to Δ9-THC at those sites, and being formed via metabolism such that a similar amount of 11-OH-CBN gets to the brain as CBN itself, meaning it very likely plays a major role in the effects of oral CBN. Additionally, after reading this I scoured the internet looking for any accounts of people having trippy experieces from taking oral CBN, and I did find a few including some mentioning things like strong visuals or mystical experiences, so I decided it seemed worth giving it a shot. There was nowhere I knew to buy CBN on its own in person - all the dispensaries around here carry those "sleepy gummies" that are always a 1:1:1 mix of Δ9-THC, CBN, and CBD, but in addition to wanting to take the CBN without the Δ9-THC mixed in, I also find that CBD drastically reduces the quasi-psychedelic component of oral Δ9-THC for me, so the three-way mix contains a double whammy for me - but I found a website willing to ship gummies containing only CBN isolate in them here, so I ordered some and eagerly awaited. When they arrived, I quickly started my experiments, which have been running for the last half a year or so, and I've now taken CBN up to 50 mg orally. These are my primary observations about oral CBN itself and in comparison to oral Δ9-THC for me so far:
1. The body high and sense of general euphoria are milder on CBN than on Δ9-THC at the same dosage, but other than that aspect, I think CBN kind of feels better overall. It definitely has the familiar feeling of being stoned and being more physically relaxed, but weaker. However, whereas Δ9-THC tends to make me want to curl up in bed and hold myself in the euphoria, CBN tends to give me a loose, jelly legs sort of feeling, while simultaneously making me want to pace around the house as much as possible, although part of it still feels a little heavy at the same time. I like the feelings of CBN a whole lot despite their subtlety, and I also like the lucidity that comes with those effects being lighter sometimes, even though other times I do wish it got me a little higher still. This is of course one of its main recognized characteristics, producing a much lighter intoxicating effect than Δ9-THC.
2. The quasi-psychedelic effects seem to be of about similar strength on both CBN and Δ9-THC for me, producing a similar level of trip at the same dosages as one another, albeit of very different character. I did seem to luck out here as well, as I'm able to trip very easily off of oral CBN much as I am with oral Δ9-THC. The aforementioned differences between Δ9-THC and serotonergic psychedelics also apply to CBN compared to the latter for me: some of the types of visuals like especially the more visionary and "on top of what you see" visuals are present, while others such as patterns and distortions in the environment mostly aren't, and it does feel like being on a serotonergic psychedelic in some more abstract and recreational ways too, but simultaneously has unignorable cannabinoid-typical aspects. The latter includes the uncomfortable body high and nausea that start to develop at higher dosages; similarly to Δ9-THC, so far my sweet-spot dosage of CBN seems to be 30 mg, just enough for a good trip and not enough for a bad body high, which not only sucks but seems to kind of detract from the trip as well. Set and setting are very important for me with getting the most psychedelically out of these phytocannabinoids, so being physically comfortable goes a long way with them.
3. The psychedelic effects of oral Δ9-THC tend to remind me most strongly of things like psilocin, DMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, and nutmeg essential oil, whereas the psychedelic effects of oral CBN tend to remind me most strongly of things like LSD, MPT, 4-HO-MiPT, and TMA-2. I could go really in-depth into my comparisons here and in giving theories about how and why I think this is all the case, but I'll spare you that within this particular report. This factors a huge amount into how I desire to use these phytocannabinoids though now that I've gotten to know both of them better, much as it does with how I use those serotonergic psychedelics. While this may just be a coincidence with the drugs I happen to have tried so far, CBN also has reminded me of non-serotonergic psychedelic hallucinogens more frequently than Δ9-THC has so far too; it tends to remind me a lot of arylcyclohexylamines like 2'-Oxo-PCE, methoxetamine, and ketamine, and also of Salvia divinorum (which is part of why I wanted to try mixing them at some point too). Notably, both CBN and Δ9-THC also produce a small number of hallucinations that remind me of diphenhydramine which are different from almost all other hallucinogens I've taken, although salvia sometimes does similar things too (another reason I thought they might make a good combo here).
4. CBN seems to have a good antidepressant effect for me, making me feel generally happier in the days after the trip and also notice more details in nature, like paying closer attention to the details in leaves on trees as I walk by. I like this effect a lot, and it's not something I remember ever getting from Δ9-THC. However, CBN doesn't really seem to work as an "all day, every day" kind of high the way Δ9-THC does for me (oral too although admittedly much more so when smoked instead), quickly making me feel disoriented and like I'd rather save my CBN experiences for when I really have time to focus on them. For this reason I've gotten to a point where I generally only consume cannabis via smoking high-THC flower on my busy days and then alternate between using oral Δ9-THC or oral CBN on my days off. I have not tried taking both phytocannabinoids orally at the same time yet, although I have interest in it.
5. CBN and Δ9-THC orally both seem to follow a similar time course of effects for me: I notice the psychedelic effects within roughly the first twenty minutes, they peak after around an hour, the recreational buzz though is still more slowly coming in at that point, and then the psychedelic effects start fading quickly and are mostly gone by around two hours after dosing, but the recreational buzz actually starts peaking at around that time, and then the next few hours I feel stoned with a minor trippiness still lingering from earlier, and I'll feel both kind of effects at least very vaguely after that for pretty much the rest of the day.
6. Finally, a strange but important note: something I have discovered is that when I take oral CBN and then smoke high-THC cannabis flower during the experience, the resulting effect is distinctly different from either experience alone and actually extremely similar to the way my manic episodes work (my natural, not drug-induced ones, which happen around the beginning of the year usually). It's by far the most similar experience I've induced with drugs to my manic episodes since I first started experiencing full-blown mania and psychosis. It's not 100% the same, but feels like it's probably at least about 90-95% there, just based on my handful of experiments with it so far; it's enough that it keeps making me recognize something very familiar from my episodes, but then go, "Oh wow, it's not usually like that!" Luckily, the combination seems more grounded and calm than my actual episodes, which has given me interest in using them as a way to briefly dip my toes back in the manic waters every now and then and try to gain perspective on things I would normally have a harder time gaining perspective on without them, but I am exploring it cautiously too and would definitely recommend the same to anyone else who may find this combination to produce similar effects. These cannabinoids together are shockingly episode-like for me, to the point of having produced experiences like the kind of thought broadcasting and telepathy that people experience during psychosis, for instance, which neither alone has ever done for me.
Before the experience that this trip report is about, my most recent attempt at using oral CBN was also the first time I tried smoking high-THC cannabis flower exactly an hour after dosing, trying to stack it with the CBN peak rather than waiting until at least two or three hours after dosing trying to stave off the manic episode-like reaction. What I discovered when doing this is that when allowing the peak effects to stack, it may increase the risk of mania-like response, but also causes a synergy between the more diphenhydramine-like hallucinations that are mostly unique to these drugs compared to other psychedelic substances for me. Something that stood out as really fun to me about this combination is that I could actually see transparent but 3D-looking and -feeling fish swimming around my apartment, just a couple here and there, but leaving long lighter blue neon streaks behind them as they swam through the air, and definitely feeling more like full-blown hallucinations than anything I had ever gotten from just cannabinoids before. There was some other ocean-themed imagery that occurred during this experience as well, like actually getting panoramic visions of the ocean with the sun shining down on it at the center like the white light at the end of the tunnel, and seeing and feeling a mermaid tail on myself. This experience got me very excited about the idea of mixing oral CBN with other substances as well, especially salvia since I both already thought CBN and salvia had some similarities and also thought salvia seemed like one of the few other hallucinogens that could also produce some diphenhydramine-like hallucinations for me. That experience was just about exactly a month ago as I type this, with the experience this report is about having been four days ago. I waited until I felt I was really ready to smoke salvia again, which it had been about a year or so since I had done previously, but which I had been feeling the itch to do again lately anyway, waited for the perfect day for me to do nothing but trip and enjoy it, and finally took the plunge.
T+0:00 - I ingested 40 mg of CBN orally in the morning not long after waking up. Frankly, I don't know why I decided to go with 40 mg instead of my typical sweet-spot 30 mg dosage, and I will just say now, I did end up regretting it throughout the experience. I feel like I mostly gave into the urge because I wanted to try to maximize the trippy synergy, but I ended up getting that slight heaviness that dosing too high on oral phytocannabinoids can give me, and the CBN alone actually ended up feeling underwhelming during the coming up phase compared to most of my experiences with it, so I think that whole "sweet-spot" deduction was probably very right after all. Next time I try this combo I'll go with 30 mg for sure.
I took a shower and didn't take any notes about what was going on with the CBN as it was coming up alone over the first hour. I think this is mostly because it didn't hit very hard and not much interesting was going on, but I definitely could feel the familiar effects kicking in and all that.
T+1:00 - Sitting in bed with the lights on, dried off after my shower with my clothes on but legs under my bed sheets, back against the panel against the wall, I loaded and smoked a single bowl of plain leaf salvia in a new bong I bought recently. The bong was specifically purchased to be a salvia bong for me, although I hadn't used it yet; based on my experiences using it with cannabis so far, it hits very hard, but the bowl is also pretty shallow. I loaded enough plain leaf into the bowl to get three modest-sized hits off of it before it was cashed. Many years ago, when I first had access to salvia, this definitely would not have done anything more to me than making me feel a little weird and sweaty, but I also lost access to salvia years ago when the country was freaking out about it, and only recently was able to return to it upon moving to my new state since it's still legal here, and was thus able to start experimenting with it again similarly to how I can finally use all of these oral phytocannabinoids as well. I smoked a lot of salvia soon after moving here in the same time period I was first experimenting with oral Δ9-THC, and immediately found that these days, plain leaf can actually get me pretty far; I did buy some 10X extract which I intend to move up to eventually, but I haven't even touched it yet in the couple years of being here now. I wasn't totally sure that this bong and its bowl were necessarily going to afford me enough salvinorin A to really get that far in the first bowl alone, but I was very quickly and happily proven wrong when I started rapidly feeling the familiar salvia state kicking in after taking only the first of the three hits (I took short pauses between them to gauge my state, but still smoked the whole bowl pretty quickly overall, probably within around a minute or so).
While the beginning of the trip is just a little bit hazy in my memory now, I do clearly recall that the first visual I saw was by far the most similar thing I've seen to salvia art (thinking of Salvia Droid in particular) on an actual salvia trip. First, there were just some geometric visual effects kicking in which I noticed off to the top-left part of my field of vision, although they felt like they were coming from within rather than distorting the environment. They were the extremely familiar type of geometry you'll probably know if you've smoked salvia before, which I always feel possessed to describe in bizarre terms. (The one that just immediately came to mind was "It sort of has the vibe and texture of a well-made pamphlet about seeing exhibits at the zoo." For some reason salvia frequently sends me to the zoo.) For me they tend to have darker, bolder colors (even the whites somehow feel like they fit that description) and seem angular, and also like I'm seeing them at weird angles on top of that. However, as these geometric effects began, I immediately noticed a style mixed in with them that was very unfamiliar to past salvia experiences of mind, but seemed very similar to CBN visuals I've gotten in the recent past, despite the CBN itself not having been very visual on its own yet prior to me smoking the salvia, which made me happy. Although, that being said, I felt the visual styles actually sort of clashed; something about the textures and tones was off, like the CBN visuals looked like softly colored construction paper mixed in with the deep, high resolution but cartoony renderings of the salvia. The oral phytocannabinoids often make me see nature as my primary circular geometries like in the forms of flowers or lily pads, for example, and these mostly salvia-fueled geometries definitely looked more flowery than normal particularly around the parts that also seemed like they had a lot of CBN influence, and I did think it was really cool the way they were mixing despite some visual clashing, and I thought it seemed like a good sign of things to come.
I don't remember when exactly this started now, but at some point between the first and the third hit, this vaguely flower-like abstract geometry transitioned into the thing that makes me compare the visual to Salvia Droid art: suddenly, there was what I perceived to be a jester entity, and would in retrospect describe as also maybe sort of elf-like, positioned in the middle of the flowery shape, and as the geometry was turning to the left, it felt like the jester entity was attempting to pull me up and into the visuals, carrying me away into some fantasy land. And indeed, that is what happened. After taking the third hit and seeing that the bowl was clearly done, I put down the bong and relaxed into the trip, and immediately something more powerful started.
This next part of the trip I understood as it was happening in two completely different ways simultaneously. One of these ways I actually visually saw as a hallucinogenic effect, while the other I simply felt as an inarguable metaphor for what was happening, or sort of like an ink blot or blueprint that the hallucinogenic experience was layered over, causing them to both follow the same sort of abstract themes throughout, despite their concrete content being very different.
First, I'll explain the abstract part of it. This entire short experience I'm about to describe, which lasted around seven or eight minutes and was the peak of the smoked salvia effect, appeared to follow this very distinct structure: it was as if I was hallucinating having sex, and I experienced a full rotation of my focus and sense of self into my male partner's body, then into his genitals, then out of his genitals and into my own, then back into my own body, completing the loop, at which point the dissociation ended and I returned to myself. Of note, I never actually dissociated from my environment during this, but my sense of self did dissociate from my body; I was still fully aware of what my body was doing in bed and able to make choices about it I think to at least some extent, but the visions I was clearly seeing erupting out of my mind's eye were immersive to the point that I couldn't not experience them as if they were happening to me, although again, they had nothing to do with what I just described. I just knew, and felt, as I was experiencing them, that they were exactly mirroring this sexual experience that I just described. It seemed undeniably clear to me that that's what the peak essentially was, but then transformed into something also much stranger than that.
For that concrete part of it that I was actually seeing, what happened was that as I got pulled up by the jester entity and into the swirling visuals, the visions increasingly solidified until they became a field of grass and I think flowers much like I often get from the phytocannabinoids, and my attention seemed to be specifically focused on a rose. I feel like I actually saw the field sort of emerge into existence and the rose shoot up out of the ground, but it's very hard to remember this transition phase now.... I remember having what seemed like sort of a close-up bird's-eye view of the rose, with I think like either a solid blue or orange wall of color in the background and for some reason it's hard to remember which (and just now I had the sudden urge to type "both"), spinning around it in such a way that it felt like spinning all the way around was connected to an intrinsic part of the dissociative experience, like that was a climactic point in the narrative of the experience playing out. As that spin completed, suddenly I felt that I personally became the pollen in the rose, and started seeing the vision from that "first-person" perspective.
To compare to the abstract part, what I interpreted this as so far is that my male lover from the hallucinated sex was the field of grass and maybe other flowers, and my focus shifting to him at the beginning of the cycle was reflected in my attention being pulled up with the spinning visuals by the jester entity to the field, and then the rose (which again I feel like I remember actually seeing emerge from the field, but it's hard to remember clearly now) was his penis, and since him ejaculating was the exact midpoint of the cycle that shifts focus from his genitals to mine and then back up to the rest of my body, in the dissociative equivalent of the experience that moment perfectly correlated with completely loss of my sense of self and substitution into that which was the equivalent of the ejaculate in the dissociative vision, which was the pollen in the rose. This also seemed and seems to make sense to me with what happened next, as the dissociative analogue of that ejaculate being released into my vagina, shifting the focus back to myself.
Suddenly, again as the perspective of the pollen in the rose, I saw the nose of someone coming to smell the rose, and felt the pull of the sucking as I was being drawn up into their nostril. I remember distinctly thinking that it seemed bizarre that I could feel that this was the equivalent of me being ejaculated, but whereas that would have been a release out, this dissociative parallel of the experience instead involved me moving in the same direction but instead by being sucked in to where I'm going, like the force of movement itself was directly opposite despite the trajectory being the same, which reminded me of moments I've had during psychotic episodes where it felt like time was moving forward and backward at the same time; salvia has before seemed to produce some similar phenomena to bizarre subjective experiences I've had during episodes in the past, including the apparently circular focus-shifting nature of this entire experience, so it seems worth mentioning. At this point, perhaps in tandem with this climactic point being reached although I'm only thinking about that now in retrospect, the experience shifted from exciting to scary, in a way not out of line with what I would expect from salvia.
To put it simply, I didn't want to be sucked into the nostril. I knew what goes on in those places, somehow, even as rose pollen. I had visions of the grossness and wanted to resist it. I internally screamed and struggled, but nothing I did made any meaningful impact, and it seemed futile; there was no resisting the pull of the nostril. However, I couldn't manage to actually give into it just yet.... I went all the way up until the nostril like going toward the light at the end of the tunnel, but I didn't let go, and suddenly, I was back in the rose... but the sequence began again, and I was being sucked up into the nostril once again. I knew what this was the moment it started: a death loop. I struggled a bit longer not wanting to have to give into the grossness of the nose, going through a handful more loops, but I knew that it was going to take me accepting the inevitable to get through this, so before long I gave in. I thought to myself a silly thought that seemed much more profound at the time: "This is the life of a pollen." And with that, I released myself into the fate of the nostril, being absorbed into the possibly gross void as I went in.
In the real world, the whole time this was going on, I was sitting in bed laughing my ass off at the absurdity of what I was experiencing. That's pretty common when salvia first starts kicking in for me, and I remember wondering if my neighbors were going to hear it, as I often worry after the fact about the goofiness and loudness of it. I don't actually remember what was happening at the point that I accepted getting inhaled into the nostril. But, after doing so, I suddenly found myself completely back in my body, with that simulation ending and me returning to my normal sense of self, again, seemingly in accordance with the sexual metaphor of my focus returning back to the rest of my body as well. All but the subtle, lingering part of the salvia experience was now clearly over, and I was thinking about the things I perceived when I experienced what I perceived to be my death as the pollen. I had visions of that kind that feels somewhere between spiritual and quantum that what was happening to me was that I was approaching my death, the state of 'me' in the universe was becoming unglued and breaking apart from the normally seamlessly averaged out path into lots of potential different timelines trying to find a way to survive with the panic increasing the degree of seeking different paths, but when I accepted that my fate seemed to be inescapable and gave in, the timeline was dissolved entirely, although luckily I returned to my human self afterward. At T+1:08, I first start taking notes about this experience.
T+1:13 - The trip intensity has rapidly declined but there's definitely still an imprint. I'm enjoying the body high that lingers from salvia mixing with the body high of the CBN, together they've combined into something a bit noticeably less subtle than either alone despite feeling kind of similar to either alone. Both make me feel like I can easily get a good stretch all over my body, and the combo definitely does as well. I'm not sure it stood out as super synergistic though. I am feeling quite happy with the experience overall at this point, nonetheless.
T+1:24 - I'm still marveling at the salvia experience and writing notes to myself and considering whether or not I want to smoke another bowl. Originally I was very open to it, but I felt that that first bowl hit me unexpectedly hard, and I really wanted to let it all sink in and see how it affected me. I decided against smoking more.
T+1:30 - I again note that the CBN seems to be having a weaker influence than I would have liked and wished I had taken 30 mg instead of 40 mg. Next time. I did however have some slight visuals that seemed to be a blend of both what I normally get from CBN and what I get from salvia similar to what was going on earlier, just pulsing out here and there. I also note that it feels a lot like a CBN high but I feel a little heavier because of the salvia, which detracts a little bit from how I normally feel about CBN because I like walking around on it. I still like the experience for the trip, though. In retrospect, that heaviness could also have resulted in part from taking too much CBN, so I'll try to reserve my opinion until the next test.
T+1:34 - I write that walking feels a little like floating but also disorienting, and my energy feels low.
T+1:36 - Suddenly I have a bit of a breakthrough when walking around accompanied a burst of energy and internal visuals, natural imagery with mixed concepts, like a branch twirling around in a snake-like motion with more branches coming out of it in flame-like motions all along the spiral. Mostly dark blue colors, but the branch texture is brown and mostly correctly detailed. I like it a lot. It kind of reminds me of a centipede, but I don't think it was actually "meant" to be, it just sort of looked that way enough to make me think of it.
T+1:40 - More geometry, it feels a little less developed than before but it has that sort of clashing blended style from the beginning of the salvia trip.
T+1:48 - I'm reflecting on the trip and start breathing in through my nose like I'm smelling a flower trying to grasp what all the perspectives in my dissociative episode meant.
T+1:50 - I see a spinning flower geometry in my mind's eye that reminds me of normal CBN visuals, but a bit more bold, cartoony, and detailed in a salvia-like way. It's of a rose surrounded by vines and leaves, with the rose deep red, the vines and leaves deep green, and the background behind it deep blue, creating a very rich and harmonious final image. This kind of geometry faintly continues for me for a short while.
T+2:00 - At this point, I decided to start smoking a bowl of high-THC cannabis flower. I figured that this would be an interesting point to experiment at, because smoking that at T+2:00 for the CBN alone would likely produce at least some modestly interesting diphenhydramine-like and manic episode-like effects for me, and this also being the equivalent of T+1:00 for the salvia means that I could plausibly still have a synergistic reaction between the cannabis and the lingering salvia effect, which for me lasts for about an hour and a half before its trippiness can no longer meaningfully directly mix with something else. I thought this could theoretically give me a taste of all three together, without having to go all the way and try to stack all three trips at the same time for the first time around. I cleaned out the bong of the cashed salvia bowl, loaded a bowl of cannabis with I think probably something around 30% Δ9-THC cannabis because it seems like everything my dispensaries have is about that these days, and took just one hit to start.
T+2:01 - I was absolutely floored by the reaction to this combination. The moment I put down the bong and started walking around my apartment again, I was met with a cavalcade of rapid-fire, rapidly-transforming animal visions, still just coming from the mind's eye rather than out of the environment, but being very 3D and close to realistically detailed, and feeling like they were almost happening in front of me, but just still not. It was like being in one of those Deep Dream AI videos where it's constantly finding animal pictures in the world around it, but more realistic and more detailed, but also less completely visually disorienting since I could still see clearly behind it if I wanted to. I obviously chose to focus on the visions, fascinated by this effect that I had not been expecting at all, although maybe I should have been based on what I think about the visuals of these drugs individually. I documented many of the animals that I saw rapidly playing out some scene in nature and then transforming into another animal to play out its own scene, with many of these happening all over my field of vision at once: fish leaping out of the water, monkeys swinging through trees (including me playfully going alone with the vision for that one, ending with me jumping to the ground feeling like I'm flying through the air and flexing), black panthers running through the trees, eagles soaring over creeks, and also something that reminded me of some ayahuasca art I've seen, that looked like a giant tiger face on the horizon behind a distant jungle scene, like taking the place of a sunset. I take some notes, and then it starts again: owls, salmon, dolphins, trees? The only non-animal in all this, although for a second they look like tree people. I marvel more at the rapid-fire nature, which reminds me of a past experience on Amanita pantherina with cannabis. I take more notes about what this must be doing to the part of my brain that recognizes animals. Then, another wave: spiders, insects, reptiles, snakes, birds, mammals, ending on squirrels. I write in my notes, "This is fucking awe-inspiring." It's just like a giant, constantly transforming collage of beautiful animal visions. The fact that it's not a vision doesn't make it not extremely impressive or captivating, it's as if seeing it, especially with the level of detail and change. I am absolutely stunned at this point.
T+2:10 - I take my second hit of the cannabis. Immediately, I see a snake swirling around in a spiral; I often stereotypically think of ayahuasca when I see this vision (which I have essentially seen before many times) but it actually reminds me especially of diphenhydramine, MDMA, and nutmeg essential oil. I made a quick note of this in my phone at T+2:11, which in real time was 11:11 PM. I wrote in my phone "It's Hell!!! lol" which was an inside joke with myself about my most recent manic episode, this last January. During that episode, there was a part involving lots of numbers and synchronicity along common psychotic themes like the number 1111 and the idea that this number represented the gates to Hell, and the number showing up in my life. It affected me a lot at the time, although I haven't really done anything but joke with myself about it since then.
I put my phone down, and the spiraling snake continued to circle toward me, in the exact motion that I associate with a tentacle approaching me on diphenhydramine just as the experience is about to break apart into a burst of pure delirium, and I also once saw the snake specifically do this on MDMA, hissing at me as it reached my face, with spiders exploding out its mouth when it did so. This time, the snake once again hissed at me as it reached my face, but it didn't feel threatening to me like it did all those years ago on MDMA, and as I simply watched this happen with interests, it appeared to me as though the gates of Hell did indeed open up behind the snake, leading me into a netherland of monsters, demons, chimeras, mythology/fiction-like creatures, things that seem somewhere between alien and cosmic being, and dark gods. These visions passed over me just like the many animal visions before them, clearly feeling like this was now simply that same effect only pushed to an even higher level because the animal level was the influence of one hit of cannabis and this was the influence of two, and I was in awe of what I was seeing; I have been to levels of visionary hallucination like this before, but it's been rare for me up to this point. Of note, I also felt that I was hallucinating some cool black clothing on myself from the moment I entered Hell, something that has happened to me on experiencing like this before, including when having some more bizarre, notably salvia-like carnival visions with grotesque entities on oral CBN alone.
As the visions continue to develop, I arrive at the being who really makes me say "dark gods" because that's exactly what I perceive him as, he appears massive, with a gray body composed of many hands all fused together so that it all seems like one cohesive form, but you can still clearly tell that it's all a bunch of hands, with glowing yellow eyes. He looks very similar, although not identical to the character called Satan in the movie "This Is The End", although I specifically don't feel that I perceive him as Satan, who I have felt I perceived in other altered states, but instead just as this more general dark god being, for whatever that's worth. He seems to be simply roaming around the netherworld, causing destruction to the landscape or something, I only get a glimpse of this so I'm not entirely sure what was going on. At this point in real life, I'm walking around the apartment, but the experience reminds me of smoking salvia extracts many years ago, when I would be walking around the home I grew up in and despite still being fully in my body and mobile, I would feel as though there was an unseen female entity communicating with me, sometimes seeming to be directly talking to me. In this trip, I remember it as that I could feel that the dark god seemed to be aware of my presence, and he shortly began speaking to me in clear English, addressing me by my real name. He said, "[Kaleida], why have you come here?" I replied, "Oh, I'm just trying a new drug combination." He said, "That's fair, sweetie. Enjoy your high." I believe I smiled. He seemed familiar to me, not because I remember having seen him in an experience like this before, but in a way that beings such as this often do also when I'm having a manic episode and particularly deep into the psychotic visions. They're always telling me that I've lived an eternal life traveling the entire multiverse through all of absolute infinity through to the end and back around again, and so even though I don't remember it, I just know them and they know me. I seek to confirm this with the dark god, who gives me a "yes and no" answer. Classic non-dualistic humor-seriousness. The dark god watches over my shoulder as I take notes in my phone on the interaction.
T+2:28 - After that dark god interaction experience slowly fades out, suddenly like turning off a light switch, those apparently salvia-influenced hallucinations are over; I'm still feeling the effects of oral CBN combined with smoked cannabis, but there's no Hell visions, nor even the animal visions, nor anything that feels like more than the very, very slightest still lingering influence of the salvia, just enough to make the visuals' colors seem very vaguely bold and smooth and such. It is now T+1:28 for the salvia, so I figure it makes sense.
T+2:30 - I take the third hit of the cannabis, which cashes it. Instantly there is an increase in trippiness again, but it's weak. A fainter spinning rose-like flower pattern, some flashes of light, which do notably feel like they inhabit a somewhat 3D space, the flashes that is.
From this point on, the experience is extremely similar to what I normally get from taking oral CBN and then smoking high-THC cannabis in the later hours of the former's experience. It's a lot like just being stoned except that I also feel kind of psychotic for it, and I tend to just go about my day in a similar way to how I would while stoned from smoking cannabis alone, just enjoying the trippy weirdness of it, albeit cautiously as I try to make sure I don't slip into some manic delusion. Like I said, perhaps I'll write a more CBN-specific report another day, but that's not really the story I mainly wanted to tell in this report. Obviously, at this point in the experience, I thought the salvia-influenced part of the trip was basically over, other than just a lingering antidepressant glow that it always gives me that was definitely making the phytocannabinoid mix better, but I do actually have one more part of the story to share as well. I spent the rest of the night getting and being stoned, mostly just being that, not too crazy, but definitely having lots of thoughts similar to my manic episodes, and talking to (and arguing with) alters about stuff.
The next morning, I got up and started getting really high from just smoking cannabis and lounging around the house, still feeling really tired and dipping in and out of hypnagogic dream snippets as I lazed around on the recliner in my living room. This happens to me all the time when I'm high and also somewhat tired, and these experiences are never lucid nor that concrete, just very short, abstract little bursts of dream-like hallucinations while nodding out, but usually then snapping back to alertness somehow. At just about T+24:30, I passed into one of these nods, but something unusual happened: a scary event developed, I suddenly became lucid and the dream snippet became more concrete, and it felt like I was back on salvia again, in a life-threatening situation. Specifically, there was a super creepy, human-like and clearly meant to be human but definitely not actually human man standing in front of me, brandishing a knife. He looked like an indie horror game enemy, with a super jacked up cartoony smile and balloon-like head, and he was clearly preparing to attack me. He came at me with the knife, and I try to stop him, but fail, and he gets me, or seems to... but as it's all approaching the inevitable, suddenly it's looping back to the beginning, and he hasn't come at me with the knife yet. He comes at me again, and I try to stop him again, but once again fail, only this time it happens in a slightly different way compared to the previous time... and then the loop starts again. Again, it happens differently than the previous times. This happens again, and again, and again, and the loops start to play a little faster the more they go, although I think they're perceived as being about the same speed as one another in terms of the actual events. This snowballs until it seems like every single possible loop has been simulated, and I think they all still didn't conclude in a win for me, but then they all collapse into one final reality, where when the guy comes at me with the knife, I grab his arm and flip him over like a WWE wrestler or something, disabling him and preventing his attack, which I feel victorious about, and then suddenly the simulation is over, the dream snippet ends, and I'm back in my recliner in my living room.
I took note of this in my phone, and was extremely fascinated by the fact that not only was this a recurrence of the type of loop that occurred during the salvia peak the following day during a hypnagogic half-dream state, but also seemed to me to be functionally opposite from the previous experience in some ways: whereas the one during the peak of the salvia trip has been an apparently inescapable death loop that involved having to give up and accept fate, this one appeared to be more like an apparently escapable death loop, where instead of giving up the answer was to keep trying all the way to infinity, or as long as it might take anyway, until you finally find the way through. That's how I interpreted it at the time, anyway.
Of note, in the days following this trip, I've had an incredible afterglow, just feeling really happy and motivated and good. I like it a whole lot, and look forward to trying to experiment more with this combination again, although I'm not sure I've found the absolutely perfect way to mix them as of yet. I think it seems like there's a lot of potential there to look into, at least based on my own reactions to these substances.
I have been happily telling the friends I've made at work about my trip and enjoying their reactions as well. Multiple people have mentioned experiences they were told about by other friends or family members that also involved going to Hell or speaking with Satan, and the parallels they have to the things that I have experienced here (and in other experiences as well). This is one of the things I find most interesting about exploring these kinds of experiences, and desire to keep returning to them to continue understanding, and being able to discuss with others. I really love all of the substances that I described taking here, but a special mention goes out to Salvia divinorum as well, salvinorin A specifically, the reason I desired to write this report specifically.
Stay safe and be well, friends!
Ever since moving to a state where cannabis is legal a couple of years ago now, I have been eagerly albeit somewhat slowly experimenting with phytocannabinoids in a way that I was never able to before, starting with taking Δ9-THC orally in measured, increasing dosages. My plan was to get into the 100+ mg range and see how much I could get it to really turn into a quasi-psychedelic trip, spacing it out to be on weekends like a trip to get the most of it and such, but I turned out to not need either of those measures; it's pretty much guaranteed to be trippy for me at anything 30+ mg, and often feels a bit so at least at 20 mg or sometimes briefly even on 10 mg. I've realized in the time since then just how much people vary widely in their response to oral Δ9-THC, so I suppose I just lucked out in that regard. I think the highest I've gone so far is 50 mg, which I've only done a handful of times because it's so strong that I'm not sure taking more even feels worth it.
At 50 mg, oral Δ9-THC feels psychedelic to me in a way comparable to taking multiple hits of LSD or multiple grams of mushrooms, like exactly the same in certain ways, but also unignorably different in others, and that's somewhat true of the comparison between them at any level of effect for me. For example, the first time I took 50 mg after moving here I spent a period at the peak marveling at a very complex and 3D large, transparent, sort of neon geometric structure hovering over me that distinctly reminded me of once many years ago a time I took 5 blotters of LSD and saw something very similar, but this visual is the kind that simply hovered over my field of vision, whereas the kind that were present on LSD at the same time that involved things like patterns on textures in the environment and melting surfaces were completely absent on this dosage of Δ9-THC. Similarly, there was a euphoric high on the 50 mg Δ9-THC trip that went much beyond anything I ever experience from smoking cannabis and reminded me of serotonergic psychedelics, but simultaneously there were also typical cannabinoid body feelings both good and bad, including a head heaviness and nausea that I sometimes experience from high dosages of oral Δ9-THC in general that also goes beyond anything I ever get from smoking cannabis, and is unpleasant enough that it's part of the reason I don't want to keep pushing the Δ9-THC further now. I have found so far that 30 mg seems to be a nearly optimal dosage for me, practically guaranteeing relatively impressive quasi-psychedelic effects much beyond anything smoking cannabis has ever given me, while having little to no chance of feeling too physically heavy and unpleasant unlike what starts to become more common for me on 40+ mg.
All this being said, once I had my relationship with oral Δ9-THC pretty much nailed down, I decided to run another set of experiments attempting to do the exact same thing with oral CBN, and compare and contrast the two phytocannabinoids. While CBN is often said to be a very weak cannabinoid and scientific data seems to generally support this notion for CBN itself, I was inspired by a recent study paper that claimed that when CBN is taken orally, similar to the metabolism of Δ9-THC into the stronger 11-OH-Δ9-THC, it forms a metabolite called 11-OH-CBN that is a more potent and efficacious CB1 and CB2 receptor agonist than CBN itself, performing similarly to Δ9-THC at those sites, and being formed via metabolism such that a similar amount of 11-OH-CBN gets to the brain as CBN itself, meaning it very likely plays a major role in the effects of oral CBN. Additionally, after reading this I scoured the internet looking for any accounts of people having trippy experieces from taking oral CBN, and I did find a few including some mentioning things like strong visuals or mystical experiences, so I decided it seemed worth giving it a shot. There was nowhere I knew to buy CBN on its own in person - all the dispensaries around here carry those "sleepy gummies" that are always a 1:1:1 mix of Δ9-THC, CBN, and CBD, but in addition to wanting to take the CBN without the Δ9-THC mixed in, I also find that CBD drastically reduces the quasi-psychedelic component of oral Δ9-THC for me, so the three-way mix contains a double whammy for me - but I found a website willing to ship gummies containing only CBN isolate in them here, so I ordered some and eagerly awaited. When they arrived, I quickly started my experiments, which have been running for the last half a year or so, and I've now taken CBN up to 50 mg orally. These are my primary observations about oral CBN itself and in comparison to oral Δ9-THC for me so far:
1. The body high and sense of general euphoria are milder on CBN than on Δ9-THC at the same dosage, but other than that aspect, I think CBN kind of feels better overall. It definitely has the familiar feeling of being stoned and being more physically relaxed, but weaker. However, whereas Δ9-THC tends to make me want to curl up in bed and hold myself in the euphoria, CBN tends to give me a loose, jelly legs sort of feeling, while simultaneously making me want to pace around the house as much as possible, although part of it still feels a little heavy at the same time. I like the feelings of CBN a whole lot despite their subtlety, and I also like the lucidity that comes with those effects being lighter sometimes, even though other times I do wish it got me a little higher still. This is of course one of its main recognized characteristics, producing a much lighter intoxicating effect than Δ9-THC.
2. The quasi-psychedelic effects seem to be of about similar strength on both CBN and Δ9-THC for me, producing a similar level of trip at the same dosages as one another, albeit of very different character. I did seem to luck out here as well, as I'm able to trip very easily off of oral CBN much as I am with oral Δ9-THC. The aforementioned differences between Δ9-THC and serotonergic psychedelics also apply to CBN compared to the latter for me: some of the types of visuals like especially the more visionary and "on top of what you see" visuals are present, while others such as patterns and distortions in the environment mostly aren't, and it does feel like being on a serotonergic psychedelic in some more abstract and recreational ways too, but simultaneously has unignorable cannabinoid-typical aspects. The latter includes the uncomfortable body high and nausea that start to develop at higher dosages; similarly to Δ9-THC, so far my sweet-spot dosage of CBN seems to be 30 mg, just enough for a good trip and not enough for a bad body high, which not only sucks but seems to kind of detract from the trip as well. Set and setting are very important for me with getting the most psychedelically out of these phytocannabinoids, so being physically comfortable goes a long way with them.
3. The psychedelic effects of oral Δ9-THC tend to remind me most strongly of things like psilocin, DMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, and nutmeg essential oil, whereas the psychedelic effects of oral CBN tend to remind me most strongly of things like LSD, MPT, 4-HO-MiPT, and TMA-2. I could go really in-depth into my comparisons here and in giving theories about how and why I think this is all the case, but I'll spare you that within this particular report. This factors a huge amount into how I desire to use these phytocannabinoids though now that I've gotten to know both of them better, much as it does with how I use those serotonergic psychedelics. While this may just be a coincidence with the drugs I happen to have tried so far, CBN also has reminded me of non-serotonergic psychedelic hallucinogens more frequently than Δ9-THC has so far too; it tends to remind me a lot of arylcyclohexylamines like 2'-Oxo-PCE, methoxetamine, and ketamine, and also of Salvia divinorum (which is part of why I wanted to try mixing them at some point too). Notably, both CBN and Δ9-THC also produce a small number of hallucinations that remind me of diphenhydramine which are different from almost all other hallucinogens I've taken, although salvia sometimes does similar things too (another reason I thought they might make a good combo here).
4. CBN seems to have a good antidepressant effect for me, making me feel generally happier in the days after the trip and also notice more details in nature, like paying closer attention to the details in leaves on trees as I walk by. I like this effect a lot, and it's not something I remember ever getting from Δ9-THC. However, CBN doesn't really seem to work as an "all day, every day" kind of high the way Δ9-THC does for me (oral too although admittedly much more so when smoked instead), quickly making me feel disoriented and like I'd rather save my CBN experiences for when I really have time to focus on them. For this reason I've gotten to a point where I generally only consume cannabis via smoking high-THC flower on my busy days and then alternate between using oral Δ9-THC or oral CBN on my days off. I have not tried taking both phytocannabinoids orally at the same time yet, although I have interest in it.
5. CBN and Δ9-THC orally both seem to follow a similar time course of effects for me: I notice the psychedelic effects within roughly the first twenty minutes, they peak after around an hour, the recreational buzz though is still more slowly coming in at that point, and then the psychedelic effects start fading quickly and are mostly gone by around two hours after dosing, but the recreational buzz actually starts peaking at around that time, and then the next few hours I feel stoned with a minor trippiness still lingering from earlier, and I'll feel both kind of effects at least very vaguely after that for pretty much the rest of the day.
6. Finally, a strange but important note: something I have discovered is that when I take oral CBN and then smoke high-THC cannabis flower during the experience, the resulting effect is distinctly different from either experience alone and actually extremely similar to the way my manic episodes work (my natural, not drug-induced ones, which happen around the beginning of the year usually). It's by far the most similar experience I've induced with drugs to my manic episodes since I first started experiencing full-blown mania and psychosis. It's not 100% the same, but feels like it's probably at least about 90-95% there, just based on my handful of experiments with it so far; it's enough that it keeps making me recognize something very familiar from my episodes, but then go, "Oh wow, it's not usually like that!" Luckily, the combination seems more grounded and calm than my actual episodes, which has given me interest in using them as a way to briefly dip my toes back in the manic waters every now and then and try to gain perspective on things I would normally have a harder time gaining perspective on without them, but I am exploring it cautiously too and would definitely recommend the same to anyone else who may find this combination to produce similar effects. These cannabinoids together are shockingly episode-like for me, to the point of having produced experiences like the kind of thought broadcasting and telepathy that people experience during psychosis, for instance, which neither alone has ever done for me.
Before the experience that this trip report is about, my most recent attempt at using oral CBN was also the first time I tried smoking high-THC cannabis flower exactly an hour after dosing, trying to stack it with the CBN peak rather than waiting until at least two or three hours after dosing trying to stave off the manic episode-like reaction. What I discovered when doing this is that when allowing the peak effects to stack, it may increase the risk of mania-like response, but also causes a synergy between the more diphenhydramine-like hallucinations that are mostly unique to these drugs compared to other psychedelic substances for me. Something that stood out as really fun to me about this combination is that I could actually see transparent but 3D-looking and -feeling fish swimming around my apartment, just a couple here and there, but leaving long lighter blue neon streaks behind them as they swam through the air, and definitely feeling more like full-blown hallucinations than anything I had ever gotten from just cannabinoids before. There was some other ocean-themed imagery that occurred during this experience as well, like actually getting panoramic visions of the ocean with the sun shining down on it at the center like the white light at the end of the tunnel, and seeing and feeling a mermaid tail on myself. This experience got me very excited about the idea of mixing oral CBN with other substances as well, especially salvia since I both already thought CBN and salvia had some similarities and also thought salvia seemed like one of the few other hallucinogens that could also produce some diphenhydramine-like hallucinations for me. That experience was just about exactly a month ago as I type this, with the experience this report is about having been four days ago. I waited until I felt I was really ready to smoke salvia again, which it had been about a year or so since I had done previously, but which I had been feeling the itch to do again lately anyway, waited for the perfect day for me to do nothing but trip and enjoy it, and finally took the plunge.
T+0:00 - I ingested 40 mg of CBN orally in the morning not long after waking up. Frankly, I don't know why I decided to go with 40 mg instead of my typical sweet-spot 30 mg dosage, and I will just say now, I did end up regretting it throughout the experience. I feel like I mostly gave into the urge because I wanted to try to maximize the trippy synergy, but I ended up getting that slight heaviness that dosing too high on oral phytocannabinoids can give me, and the CBN alone actually ended up feeling underwhelming during the coming up phase compared to most of my experiences with it, so I think that whole "sweet-spot" deduction was probably very right after all. Next time I try this combo I'll go with 30 mg for sure.
I took a shower and didn't take any notes about what was going on with the CBN as it was coming up alone over the first hour. I think this is mostly because it didn't hit very hard and not much interesting was going on, but I definitely could feel the familiar effects kicking in and all that.
T+1:00 - Sitting in bed with the lights on, dried off after my shower with my clothes on but legs under my bed sheets, back against the panel against the wall, I loaded and smoked a single bowl of plain leaf salvia in a new bong I bought recently. The bong was specifically purchased to be a salvia bong for me, although I hadn't used it yet; based on my experiences using it with cannabis so far, it hits very hard, but the bowl is also pretty shallow. I loaded enough plain leaf into the bowl to get three modest-sized hits off of it before it was cashed. Many years ago, when I first had access to salvia, this definitely would not have done anything more to me than making me feel a little weird and sweaty, but I also lost access to salvia years ago when the country was freaking out about it, and only recently was able to return to it upon moving to my new state since it's still legal here, and was thus able to start experimenting with it again similarly to how I can finally use all of these oral phytocannabinoids as well. I smoked a lot of salvia soon after moving here in the same time period I was first experimenting with oral Δ9-THC, and immediately found that these days, plain leaf can actually get me pretty far; I did buy some 10X extract which I intend to move up to eventually, but I haven't even touched it yet in the couple years of being here now. I wasn't totally sure that this bong and its bowl were necessarily going to afford me enough salvinorin A to really get that far in the first bowl alone, but I was very quickly and happily proven wrong when I started rapidly feeling the familiar salvia state kicking in after taking only the first of the three hits (I took short pauses between them to gauge my state, but still smoked the whole bowl pretty quickly overall, probably within around a minute or so).
While the beginning of the trip is just a little bit hazy in my memory now, I do clearly recall that the first visual I saw was by far the most similar thing I've seen to salvia art (thinking of Salvia Droid in particular) on an actual salvia trip. First, there were just some geometric visual effects kicking in which I noticed off to the top-left part of my field of vision, although they felt like they were coming from within rather than distorting the environment. They were the extremely familiar type of geometry you'll probably know if you've smoked salvia before, which I always feel possessed to describe in bizarre terms. (The one that just immediately came to mind was "It sort of has the vibe and texture of a well-made pamphlet about seeing exhibits at the zoo." For some reason salvia frequently sends me to the zoo.) For me they tend to have darker, bolder colors (even the whites somehow feel like they fit that description) and seem angular, and also like I'm seeing them at weird angles on top of that. However, as these geometric effects began, I immediately noticed a style mixed in with them that was very unfamiliar to past salvia experiences of mind, but seemed very similar to CBN visuals I've gotten in the recent past, despite the CBN itself not having been very visual on its own yet prior to me smoking the salvia, which made me happy. Although, that being said, I felt the visual styles actually sort of clashed; something about the textures and tones was off, like the CBN visuals looked like softly colored construction paper mixed in with the deep, high resolution but cartoony renderings of the salvia. The oral phytocannabinoids often make me see nature as my primary circular geometries like in the forms of flowers or lily pads, for example, and these mostly salvia-fueled geometries definitely looked more flowery than normal particularly around the parts that also seemed like they had a lot of CBN influence, and I did think it was really cool the way they were mixing despite some visual clashing, and I thought it seemed like a good sign of things to come.
I don't remember when exactly this started now, but at some point between the first and the third hit, this vaguely flower-like abstract geometry transitioned into the thing that makes me compare the visual to Salvia Droid art: suddenly, there was what I perceived to be a jester entity, and would in retrospect describe as also maybe sort of elf-like, positioned in the middle of the flowery shape, and as the geometry was turning to the left, it felt like the jester entity was attempting to pull me up and into the visuals, carrying me away into some fantasy land. And indeed, that is what happened. After taking the third hit and seeing that the bowl was clearly done, I put down the bong and relaxed into the trip, and immediately something more powerful started.
This next part of the trip I understood as it was happening in two completely different ways simultaneously. One of these ways I actually visually saw as a hallucinogenic effect, while the other I simply felt as an inarguable metaphor for what was happening, or sort of like an ink blot or blueprint that the hallucinogenic experience was layered over, causing them to both follow the same sort of abstract themes throughout, despite their concrete content being very different.
First, I'll explain the abstract part of it. This entire short experience I'm about to describe, which lasted around seven or eight minutes and was the peak of the smoked salvia effect, appeared to follow this very distinct structure: it was as if I was hallucinating having sex, and I experienced a full rotation of my focus and sense of self into my male partner's body, then into his genitals, then out of his genitals and into my own, then back into my own body, completing the loop, at which point the dissociation ended and I returned to myself. Of note, I never actually dissociated from my environment during this, but my sense of self did dissociate from my body; I was still fully aware of what my body was doing in bed and able to make choices about it I think to at least some extent, but the visions I was clearly seeing erupting out of my mind's eye were immersive to the point that I couldn't not experience them as if they were happening to me, although again, they had nothing to do with what I just described. I just knew, and felt, as I was experiencing them, that they were exactly mirroring this sexual experience that I just described. It seemed undeniably clear to me that that's what the peak essentially was, but then transformed into something also much stranger than that.
For that concrete part of it that I was actually seeing, what happened was that as I got pulled up by the jester entity and into the swirling visuals, the visions increasingly solidified until they became a field of grass and I think flowers much like I often get from the phytocannabinoids, and my attention seemed to be specifically focused on a rose. I feel like I actually saw the field sort of emerge into existence and the rose shoot up out of the ground, but it's very hard to remember this transition phase now.... I remember having what seemed like sort of a close-up bird's-eye view of the rose, with I think like either a solid blue or orange wall of color in the background and for some reason it's hard to remember which (and just now I had the sudden urge to type "both"), spinning around it in such a way that it felt like spinning all the way around was connected to an intrinsic part of the dissociative experience, like that was a climactic point in the narrative of the experience playing out. As that spin completed, suddenly I felt that I personally became the pollen in the rose, and started seeing the vision from that "first-person" perspective.
To compare to the abstract part, what I interpreted this as so far is that my male lover from the hallucinated sex was the field of grass and maybe other flowers, and my focus shifting to him at the beginning of the cycle was reflected in my attention being pulled up with the spinning visuals by the jester entity to the field, and then the rose (which again I feel like I remember actually seeing emerge from the field, but it's hard to remember clearly now) was his penis, and since him ejaculating was the exact midpoint of the cycle that shifts focus from his genitals to mine and then back up to the rest of my body, in the dissociative equivalent of the experience that moment perfectly correlated with completely loss of my sense of self and substitution into that which was the equivalent of the ejaculate in the dissociative vision, which was the pollen in the rose. This also seemed and seems to make sense to me with what happened next, as the dissociative analogue of that ejaculate being released into my vagina, shifting the focus back to myself.
Suddenly, again as the perspective of the pollen in the rose, I saw the nose of someone coming to smell the rose, and felt the pull of the sucking as I was being drawn up into their nostril. I remember distinctly thinking that it seemed bizarre that I could feel that this was the equivalent of me being ejaculated, but whereas that would have been a release out, this dissociative parallel of the experience instead involved me moving in the same direction but instead by being sucked in to where I'm going, like the force of movement itself was directly opposite despite the trajectory being the same, which reminded me of moments I've had during psychotic episodes where it felt like time was moving forward and backward at the same time; salvia has before seemed to produce some similar phenomena to bizarre subjective experiences I've had during episodes in the past, including the apparently circular focus-shifting nature of this entire experience, so it seems worth mentioning. At this point, perhaps in tandem with this climactic point being reached although I'm only thinking about that now in retrospect, the experience shifted from exciting to scary, in a way not out of line with what I would expect from salvia.
To put it simply, I didn't want to be sucked into the nostril. I knew what goes on in those places, somehow, even as rose pollen. I had visions of the grossness and wanted to resist it. I internally screamed and struggled, but nothing I did made any meaningful impact, and it seemed futile; there was no resisting the pull of the nostril. However, I couldn't manage to actually give into it just yet.... I went all the way up until the nostril like going toward the light at the end of the tunnel, but I didn't let go, and suddenly, I was back in the rose... but the sequence began again, and I was being sucked up into the nostril once again. I knew what this was the moment it started: a death loop. I struggled a bit longer not wanting to have to give into the grossness of the nose, going through a handful more loops, but I knew that it was going to take me accepting the inevitable to get through this, so before long I gave in. I thought to myself a silly thought that seemed much more profound at the time: "This is the life of a pollen." And with that, I released myself into the fate of the nostril, being absorbed into the possibly gross void as I went in.
In the real world, the whole time this was going on, I was sitting in bed laughing my ass off at the absurdity of what I was experiencing. That's pretty common when salvia first starts kicking in for me, and I remember wondering if my neighbors were going to hear it, as I often worry after the fact about the goofiness and loudness of it. I don't actually remember what was happening at the point that I accepted getting inhaled into the nostril. But, after doing so, I suddenly found myself completely back in my body, with that simulation ending and me returning to my normal sense of self, again, seemingly in accordance with the sexual metaphor of my focus returning back to the rest of my body as well. All but the subtle, lingering part of the salvia experience was now clearly over, and I was thinking about the things I perceived when I experienced what I perceived to be my death as the pollen. I had visions of that kind that feels somewhere between spiritual and quantum that what was happening to me was that I was approaching my death, the state of 'me' in the universe was becoming unglued and breaking apart from the normally seamlessly averaged out path into lots of potential different timelines trying to find a way to survive with the panic increasing the degree of seeking different paths, but when I accepted that my fate seemed to be inescapable and gave in, the timeline was dissolved entirely, although luckily I returned to my human self afterward. At T+1:08, I first start taking notes about this experience.
T+1:13 - The trip intensity has rapidly declined but there's definitely still an imprint. I'm enjoying the body high that lingers from salvia mixing with the body high of the CBN, together they've combined into something a bit noticeably less subtle than either alone despite feeling kind of similar to either alone. Both make me feel like I can easily get a good stretch all over my body, and the combo definitely does as well. I'm not sure it stood out as super synergistic though. I am feeling quite happy with the experience overall at this point, nonetheless.
T+1:24 - I'm still marveling at the salvia experience and writing notes to myself and considering whether or not I want to smoke another bowl. Originally I was very open to it, but I felt that that first bowl hit me unexpectedly hard, and I really wanted to let it all sink in and see how it affected me. I decided against smoking more.
T+1:30 - I again note that the CBN seems to be having a weaker influence than I would have liked and wished I had taken 30 mg instead of 40 mg. Next time. I did however have some slight visuals that seemed to be a blend of both what I normally get from CBN and what I get from salvia similar to what was going on earlier, just pulsing out here and there. I also note that it feels a lot like a CBN high but I feel a little heavier because of the salvia, which detracts a little bit from how I normally feel about CBN because I like walking around on it. I still like the experience for the trip, though. In retrospect, that heaviness could also have resulted in part from taking too much CBN, so I'll try to reserve my opinion until the next test.
T+1:34 - I write that walking feels a little like floating but also disorienting, and my energy feels low.
T+1:36 - Suddenly I have a bit of a breakthrough when walking around accompanied a burst of energy and internal visuals, natural imagery with mixed concepts, like a branch twirling around in a snake-like motion with more branches coming out of it in flame-like motions all along the spiral. Mostly dark blue colors, but the branch texture is brown and mostly correctly detailed. I like it a lot. It kind of reminds me of a centipede, but I don't think it was actually "meant" to be, it just sort of looked that way enough to make me think of it.
T+1:40 - More geometry, it feels a little less developed than before but it has that sort of clashing blended style from the beginning of the salvia trip.
T+1:48 - I'm reflecting on the trip and start breathing in through my nose like I'm smelling a flower trying to grasp what all the perspectives in my dissociative episode meant.
T+1:50 - I see a spinning flower geometry in my mind's eye that reminds me of normal CBN visuals, but a bit more bold, cartoony, and detailed in a salvia-like way. It's of a rose surrounded by vines and leaves, with the rose deep red, the vines and leaves deep green, and the background behind it deep blue, creating a very rich and harmonious final image. This kind of geometry faintly continues for me for a short while.
T+2:00 - At this point, I decided to start smoking a bowl of high-THC cannabis flower. I figured that this would be an interesting point to experiment at, because smoking that at T+2:00 for the CBN alone would likely produce at least some modestly interesting diphenhydramine-like and manic episode-like effects for me, and this also being the equivalent of T+1:00 for the salvia means that I could plausibly still have a synergistic reaction between the cannabis and the lingering salvia effect, which for me lasts for about an hour and a half before its trippiness can no longer meaningfully directly mix with something else. I thought this could theoretically give me a taste of all three together, without having to go all the way and try to stack all three trips at the same time for the first time around. I cleaned out the bong of the cashed salvia bowl, loaded a bowl of cannabis with I think probably something around 30% Δ9-THC cannabis because it seems like everything my dispensaries have is about that these days, and took just one hit to start.
T+2:01 - I was absolutely floored by the reaction to this combination. The moment I put down the bong and started walking around my apartment again, I was met with a cavalcade of rapid-fire, rapidly-transforming animal visions, still just coming from the mind's eye rather than out of the environment, but being very 3D and close to realistically detailed, and feeling like they were almost happening in front of me, but just still not. It was like being in one of those Deep Dream AI videos where it's constantly finding animal pictures in the world around it, but more realistic and more detailed, but also less completely visually disorienting since I could still see clearly behind it if I wanted to. I obviously chose to focus on the visions, fascinated by this effect that I had not been expecting at all, although maybe I should have been based on what I think about the visuals of these drugs individually. I documented many of the animals that I saw rapidly playing out some scene in nature and then transforming into another animal to play out its own scene, with many of these happening all over my field of vision at once: fish leaping out of the water, monkeys swinging through trees (including me playfully going alone with the vision for that one, ending with me jumping to the ground feeling like I'm flying through the air and flexing), black panthers running through the trees, eagles soaring over creeks, and also something that reminded me of some ayahuasca art I've seen, that looked like a giant tiger face on the horizon behind a distant jungle scene, like taking the place of a sunset. I take some notes, and then it starts again: owls, salmon, dolphins, trees? The only non-animal in all this, although for a second they look like tree people. I marvel more at the rapid-fire nature, which reminds me of a past experience on Amanita pantherina with cannabis. I take more notes about what this must be doing to the part of my brain that recognizes animals. Then, another wave: spiders, insects, reptiles, snakes, birds, mammals, ending on squirrels. I write in my notes, "This is fucking awe-inspiring." It's just like a giant, constantly transforming collage of beautiful animal visions. The fact that it's not a vision doesn't make it not extremely impressive or captivating, it's as if seeing it, especially with the level of detail and change. I am absolutely stunned at this point.
T+2:10 - I take my second hit of the cannabis. Immediately, I see a snake swirling around in a spiral; I often stereotypically think of ayahuasca when I see this vision (which I have essentially seen before many times) but it actually reminds me especially of diphenhydramine, MDMA, and nutmeg essential oil. I made a quick note of this in my phone at T+2:11, which in real time was 11:11 PM. I wrote in my phone "It's Hell!!! lol" which was an inside joke with myself about my most recent manic episode, this last January. During that episode, there was a part involving lots of numbers and synchronicity along common psychotic themes like the number 1111 and the idea that this number represented the gates to Hell, and the number showing up in my life. It affected me a lot at the time, although I haven't really done anything but joke with myself about it since then.
I put my phone down, and the spiraling snake continued to circle toward me, in the exact motion that I associate with a tentacle approaching me on diphenhydramine just as the experience is about to break apart into a burst of pure delirium, and I also once saw the snake specifically do this on MDMA, hissing at me as it reached my face, with spiders exploding out its mouth when it did so. This time, the snake once again hissed at me as it reached my face, but it didn't feel threatening to me like it did all those years ago on MDMA, and as I simply watched this happen with interests, it appeared to me as though the gates of Hell did indeed open up behind the snake, leading me into a netherland of monsters, demons, chimeras, mythology/fiction-like creatures, things that seem somewhere between alien and cosmic being, and dark gods. These visions passed over me just like the many animal visions before them, clearly feeling like this was now simply that same effect only pushed to an even higher level because the animal level was the influence of one hit of cannabis and this was the influence of two, and I was in awe of what I was seeing; I have been to levels of visionary hallucination like this before, but it's been rare for me up to this point. Of note, I also felt that I was hallucinating some cool black clothing on myself from the moment I entered Hell, something that has happened to me on experiencing like this before, including when having some more bizarre, notably salvia-like carnival visions with grotesque entities on oral CBN alone.
As the visions continue to develop, I arrive at the being who really makes me say "dark gods" because that's exactly what I perceive him as, he appears massive, with a gray body composed of many hands all fused together so that it all seems like one cohesive form, but you can still clearly tell that it's all a bunch of hands, with glowing yellow eyes. He looks very similar, although not identical to the character called Satan in the movie "This Is The End", although I specifically don't feel that I perceive him as Satan, who I have felt I perceived in other altered states, but instead just as this more general dark god being, for whatever that's worth. He seems to be simply roaming around the netherworld, causing destruction to the landscape or something, I only get a glimpse of this so I'm not entirely sure what was going on. At this point in real life, I'm walking around the apartment, but the experience reminds me of smoking salvia extracts many years ago, when I would be walking around the home I grew up in and despite still being fully in my body and mobile, I would feel as though there was an unseen female entity communicating with me, sometimes seeming to be directly talking to me. In this trip, I remember it as that I could feel that the dark god seemed to be aware of my presence, and he shortly began speaking to me in clear English, addressing me by my real name. He said, "[Kaleida], why have you come here?" I replied, "Oh, I'm just trying a new drug combination." He said, "That's fair, sweetie. Enjoy your high." I believe I smiled. He seemed familiar to me, not because I remember having seen him in an experience like this before, but in a way that beings such as this often do also when I'm having a manic episode and particularly deep into the psychotic visions. They're always telling me that I've lived an eternal life traveling the entire multiverse through all of absolute infinity through to the end and back around again, and so even though I don't remember it, I just know them and they know me. I seek to confirm this with the dark god, who gives me a "yes and no" answer. Classic non-dualistic humor-seriousness. The dark god watches over my shoulder as I take notes in my phone on the interaction.
T+2:28 - After that dark god interaction experience slowly fades out, suddenly like turning off a light switch, those apparently salvia-influenced hallucinations are over; I'm still feeling the effects of oral CBN combined with smoked cannabis, but there's no Hell visions, nor even the animal visions, nor anything that feels like more than the very, very slightest still lingering influence of the salvia, just enough to make the visuals' colors seem very vaguely bold and smooth and such. It is now T+1:28 for the salvia, so I figure it makes sense.
T+2:30 - I take the third hit of the cannabis, which cashes it. Instantly there is an increase in trippiness again, but it's weak. A fainter spinning rose-like flower pattern, some flashes of light, which do notably feel like they inhabit a somewhat 3D space, the flashes that is.
From this point on, the experience is extremely similar to what I normally get from taking oral CBN and then smoking high-THC cannabis in the later hours of the former's experience. It's a lot like just being stoned except that I also feel kind of psychotic for it, and I tend to just go about my day in a similar way to how I would while stoned from smoking cannabis alone, just enjoying the trippy weirdness of it, albeit cautiously as I try to make sure I don't slip into some manic delusion. Like I said, perhaps I'll write a more CBN-specific report another day, but that's not really the story I mainly wanted to tell in this report. Obviously, at this point in the experience, I thought the salvia-influenced part of the trip was basically over, other than just a lingering antidepressant glow that it always gives me that was definitely making the phytocannabinoid mix better, but I do actually have one more part of the story to share as well. I spent the rest of the night getting and being stoned, mostly just being that, not too crazy, but definitely having lots of thoughts similar to my manic episodes, and talking to (and arguing with) alters about stuff.
The next morning, I got up and started getting really high from just smoking cannabis and lounging around the house, still feeling really tired and dipping in and out of hypnagogic dream snippets as I lazed around on the recliner in my living room. This happens to me all the time when I'm high and also somewhat tired, and these experiences are never lucid nor that concrete, just very short, abstract little bursts of dream-like hallucinations while nodding out, but usually then snapping back to alertness somehow. At just about T+24:30, I passed into one of these nods, but something unusual happened: a scary event developed, I suddenly became lucid and the dream snippet became more concrete, and it felt like I was back on salvia again, in a life-threatening situation. Specifically, there was a super creepy, human-like and clearly meant to be human but definitely not actually human man standing in front of me, brandishing a knife. He looked like an indie horror game enemy, with a super jacked up cartoony smile and balloon-like head, and he was clearly preparing to attack me. He came at me with the knife, and I try to stop him, but fail, and he gets me, or seems to... but as it's all approaching the inevitable, suddenly it's looping back to the beginning, and he hasn't come at me with the knife yet. He comes at me again, and I try to stop him again, but once again fail, only this time it happens in a slightly different way compared to the previous time... and then the loop starts again. Again, it happens differently than the previous times. This happens again, and again, and again, and the loops start to play a little faster the more they go, although I think they're perceived as being about the same speed as one another in terms of the actual events. This snowballs until it seems like every single possible loop has been simulated, and I think they all still didn't conclude in a win for me, but then they all collapse into one final reality, where when the guy comes at me with the knife, I grab his arm and flip him over like a WWE wrestler or something, disabling him and preventing his attack, which I feel victorious about, and then suddenly the simulation is over, the dream snippet ends, and I'm back in my recliner in my living room.
I took note of this in my phone, and was extremely fascinated by the fact that not only was this a recurrence of the type of loop that occurred during the salvia peak the following day during a hypnagogic half-dream state, but also seemed to me to be functionally opposite from the previous experience in some ways: whereas the one during the peak of the salvia trip has been an apparently inescapable death loop that involved having to give up and accept fate, this one appeared to be more like an apparently escapable death loop, where instead of giving up the answer was to keep trying all the way to infinity, or as long as it might take anyway, until you finally find the way through. That's how I interpreted it at the time, anyway.
Of note, in the days following this trip, I've had an incredible afterglow, just feeling really happy and motivated and good. I like it a whole lot, and look forward to trying to experiment more with this combination again, although I'm not sure I've found the absolutely perfect way to mix them as of yet. I think it seems like there's a lot of potential there to look into, at least based on my own reactions to these substances.
I have been happily telling the friends I've made at work about my trip and enjoying their reactions as well. Multiple people have mentioned experiences they were told about by other friends or family members that also involved going to Hell or speaking with Satan, and the parallels they have to the things that I have experienced here (and in other experiences as well). This is one of the things I find most interesting about exploring these kinds of experiences, and desire to keep returning to them to continue understanding, and being able to discuss with others. I really love all of the substances that I described taking here, but a special mention goes out to Salvia divinorum as well, salvinorin A specifically, the reason I desired to write this report specifically.
Stay safe and be well, friends!
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