Kaleida
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2015
- Messages
- 2,806
So, I continued my salvia experiments yesterday, and I finally had my first salvia breakthrough! It was definitely right on the threshold to where it was kind of like when you only wake up halfway and you're still dreaming but you can also still feel your body lying in bed, but it was still developed and first-person enough that I do believe it deserves to be called a breakthrough, even if just a threshold one. I'll get to that, there are several trips that happened all on the same day that helped build me up to that point.
The way the day actually started is that I decided to try to see if I could use salvia plain leaf in a way similar to how I normally use cannabis. I had gotten used to smoking these half bowls of plain leaf in my nice bong that I've been doing to the point where I no longer really had any apprehension about doing so, and the trips seemed to be becoming smoother and more developed in ways that I had never imagined before. I also continued to see what I previously referred to as opposite parallels in the effects of salvia to oral cannabis as well as in some ways smoked cannabis, where I thought that salvia clearly worked in the exact opposite of the ways that I would expect cannabis to work when analyzing individual traits, yet still also somehow managed to seem quite similar to it overall as a package deal, sort of like a mirror reflection, which is why I decided to see what would happen if I tried to use it like cannabis in this way.
I finally had a house to myself where I could smoke inside again, and that was the setting for this whole day of tripping. I again was loading half bowls of plain leaf as had become my go-to for now, and I started the first one without much fanfare. I've learned from my experiences that while salvia is often described as having a very short duration of action and I fell for this idea when I was younger too, I actually find that it's simply that it has a dissociative rush sort of like the opposite of the associative rush of a euphoric drug that really places you in your body as the effects first come on, but then the entire experience has a slower and more gradual effect that comes on and in general feels more similar to other drugs and especially psychedelics for me, and it lasts about an hour and a half in its entirety, so I no longer feel rushed about it like I used to when I was thinking of it as being the other way. The more I got used to the effects at this dosage, the less I really even noticed any rush at all, and I began to just experience it more like a psychedelic trip that comes on slowly and lasts a little while, and I treated this half bowl the same, quickly finishing smoking it, but then patiently waiting for it to come on as I put on some of the music I usually listen to and got up to dance.
However, as I began pacing around the house and letting go into my instinctive feelings of wanting to dance, I found that I actually started singing to the song without many accompanying body movements instead. I even began singing the instrumental parts of the song that I felt like I would normally be dancing the most to, and this struck me as particularly odd, and kind of backward-feeling. I felt as though if I was just relaxing on the couch I might not have noticed so much - and I have been starting to feel like some of the salvia effects I get may be particularly dependent on actually trying to do something with them, like I relate to some other hallucinogens and psychedelics in particular - but while trying to treat the salvia exactly as if I had smoked cannabis and gotten up to dance to the music, I couldn't help but notice that it once again felt very "opposite" yet parallel to what I would normally expect, where I was still performing the kind of action I would have been doing either way (responding to the music while pacing around the house) but that the specific expression of the action seemed to be in some ways a fundamental opposite on one drug or the other (dancing on cannabis and singing on salvia, which I feel like are at least basically the two distinct things you can do to react to music, and sort of opposite in some fundamental conceptual ways related to that).
Intrigued, seventeen minutes after the first half bowl, I smoked a second, theoretically adding the effects on top of each other even if not stacking the peaks of the rushes, since again I feel the whole experience lasts more like an hour and a half, and this difference was still only a fraction of that. At this point I also realized I was drinking water like I normally do while smoking salvia but I instead grabbed a Sprite to be more casual like when I'm smoking cannabis, and I don't regret it. I got up and started pacing around to the music some more, and again when I put on songs that I know very well I would normally be dancing to on cannabis, and specifically felt like I was giving into the same instincts that normally make me dance when I give into them on cannabis, I started singing along to them in an instinctive-feeling way instead. My opinion of my own singing is usually a lot more modest than my opinion of my own dancing which I'm quite fond of, but in this case, I was actually quite astounded with the ways I was managing to sing along, although again noting that they seemed to be connected to the same instincts that I normally felt were connected to the dancing that I'm proud of. I was really starting to think that I really might not be crazy about this and there really might be some sort of opposite parallel dancing/singing thing going on here for me with cannabis and salvia, but it was only just getting started.
Eight minutes after the second half bowl I began thinking about something I had posted online, just again trying to treat the experience in a casual way and go about my day while high on salvia in a relatable way to how I normally would while high on cannabis. While high on cannabis, I very frequently experience an effect where when I reflect on posts that I made online, I get very anxious about what I've said and question the posts and think about going back to delete things or add more posts trying to clarifying things that I'm now anxious about, and this tends to be accompanied with some somewhat faded and grainy mental imagery of myself planning ahead the scenarios where I try to correct myself or take back what I said or whatever, like my mind projecting me an expectation-based vision of how my social anxiety will be applied. Now, while high on salvia and doing the same type of reflecting, I noticed that my instincts actually seemed to be expressing that my posts were probably fine and there was nothing to worry about, not just a little bit, but in a comically severe way where in my mind's eye as I was shown expectations for what my instincts made me feel, I saw myself (literally) in a very manic way where I had this shiny psychedelic-like look to me and a confident stance and my butt popping out all sexy (poppin' butts is a recurring theme on this salvia trip as it turns out, but I'll get there), and the whole thing just made me start laughing as I began to perceive it as almost seeming like it was purposefully trying to go ridiculously far in the other direction of what I normally get on cannabis, where instead of a delirious vision of myself and anxious feelings about my posts I get a psychedelic vision of myself and grandiose feelings about my posts, where I feel confident in the things I say and how I came off while saying them, in a way that made me make a mental note to be careful to trust these perceptions in a similar, yet opposite way to how I try to be careful to trust the same yet opposite kinds of perceptions I get from cannabis, and I felt this to be a good lesson about perception and perspective in general that the juxtaposition of these two drug-induced altered states had given me.
After this I decided to load a third half bowl to see if I could carry the comparison between salvia and cannabis further, and I continued to experience the butt-popping sensation this time on my own body. I noted that while I was focusing on putting together another bowl of cannabis to smoke my dancing would normally shift into singing seemingly as my body had to be used for something else, but now, as I started putting together the next bowl of salvia, my singing from earlier had shifted to dancing with my butt, which still similarly spared the use of my hands as they were needed for putting the bowl together. I continue laughing at the realizations of the ridiculous opposite parallels between salvia and cannabis and the silly ways in which they are expressed through me, and I notice that my laughter sounds different from normal, I think perhaps lower pitch, and my mood feels different from normal while laughing, maybe more masculine. I finished loading the third half bowl of salvia plain leaf, but I decided I didn't need it yet and got up to keep exploring my desire to dance to the music to see if it kept making me sing instead.
By contrast, when I actually got up and started giving into my instincts, I realized that the song that was on was one I actually would have wanted to sing to instead, so I tried to give into my instincts to do that instead, but I started dancing. The dancing felt in some ways fundamentally similar to the dancing I do on cannabis, except that it felt like a lot of my body movements were mirrored to the opposite side of what I'm used to with cannabis, and whereas while high on cannabis I'm often moving my arms, hands, and fingers in very symmetrical and synchronized ways, this time I was moving them in very asymmetrical and asynchronized ways, which nonetheless still seemed to me to come off like deliberate dancing. However, by the end of the song I felt an actual desire to dance again, and thus my dancing stopped and I started singing instead, and I was amazed at what was actually coming out of my mouth so effortlessly, and definitely more confidently than I ever felt I normally would without being able to give into these backward instincts for them. Intriguingly, when I finish dancing to a very intense song in a very intense way while high on cannabis to a trippy point, it's actually not uncommon for me to hallucinate in a mind's eye kind of way that there is a crowd of people around me that starts cheering in a very casual and openly emotional kind of way, like that's just part of how my brain plays out those instincts when I let go to that higher level, and this time on the salvia, when I finished singing to the very intense in a similar very intense way, I instead got a mind's eye vision of a crowd of people all standing up and clapping as if I had just finished a very formal or classy performance, with no cheering involved (and I don't recall any clapping being involved in my typical cannabis hallucinations of cheering either, for the record).
Over the next ten minutes I continued to dance and sing to music in ways that felt opposite to what I would normally expect from my cannabis highs, and I started to feel like I was becoming more accustomed to recognizing what instincts went to what behaviors and trying to specifically let them play out in the way I actually wanted, trying to treat myself like an experiment to get results from and adjust to. I also noted a little after this that I noticed my first psychedelic geometric mental imagery, but I wasn't that interested in it, and that typing in my phone felt similar to taking notes or texting while on serotonergic psychedelics does to me, more laborious and harder to keep focus in a generally similar-feeling way. I also noted that I felt like I was generally stimulated in a kind of psychedelic-like way, but also a bit more heavy and mellow than those typically are for me. After this I put on a slow song that really made me want to sing along with it, and so obviously I started dancing, and this time it really seemed to go all the way to being alike my cannabis dancing, very symmetrical and with the same general kinds of movements I normally do, but still notably being distinct in the sense that this kind of dancing I usually do on cannabis while listening to fast songs, and dancing quickly along with them, whereas now I was doing it while listening to a slow song, and dancing slowly along with it. I'm not sure how I finished listening to that song, but I wrote in my notes that I finished with another hallucination of people clapping rather than cheering, and this time the vision also had me getting another butt popping feeling as I stood there as the center of the praise in my vision.
Finally, forty minutes after the second half bowl of salvia plain leaf and fifty-seven minutes after the first, I decided to smoke the third. I have music on and I started instinctively mouthing along to it while the high kicks in again, but I'm tired so I'm just lying on the couch now rather than pacing around like before. The song is really drawing me in so I try to really allow myself to sing it while lying there, and suddenly I feel like I am sort of split in two as there is one me that is lying still on the couch singing along to the song, and another me that goes shooting off into the distance of my mind's eye dancing along to the song with a dissociated body, and suddenly I am struck with an intense feeling of understanding. I feel as though I suddenly understand salvia perfectly as a result of this experience and now this most recent peak effect, and basically what it seems to me to come down to is that when I smoke or eat cannabis, the kind of high it gives me is the more stereotypical kind of manic high where it feels like anything I want to do translates into me performing those actions in an easier and more fully expressive sort of way, like that feeling where it's like the drug high makes you a well-oiled machine and you can do anything you set your mind to and it just feels natural, not like to the craziest degree ever with cannabis usually but still it's that kind of feeling, whereas with salvia, it was literally the opposite parallel, in the sense that the state seemed to affect me in exactly the same sort of way and to the same sort of theoretical degree, except that it went in the exact reverse direction, causing me to feel like literally anything I wanted to accomplish and set my mind on doing, the exact opposite of that would be expressed through me instead, so if a manic high makes you feel like everything you do is exactly what you wanted, this high makes me feel like everything I do is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. I also felt that I was seeing the salvia expressed via the visions I was getting while lying on the couch as the me on the couch being the one who was feeling and trying to express what I felt I was feeling and trying to express normally in that moment, while the me dancing off into a dissociative vision was the me who was taking those feelings and expressing the opposite, dancing rather than singing, and as I reached this incredible peak feeling of understanding and clarity in the me on the couch, I simultaneously watched and felt the me in my vision reach the opposite parallel peak feelings of disorientation and insanity, which seemingly caused me to laugh at the absurdity of it all, which seemingly caused my other self to suddenly orgasm as the opposite parallel to my laughter, and then that other me snapped back around to my body on the couch and the vision ended.
At the peak of this experience I actually literally thought to myself, "I understand salvia perfectly!!"; in retrospect I'm not so sure that's an accurate statement and I'm not sure every single observation I made as a part of this experience is correct, but I think and thought I was on to something. I got up and kept experimenting with my seemingly reversed dancing and singing instinctive expressions to more music that kept playing that I very much enjoyed, and I continued being fascinated with the results, and I also continued to get more of that hallucinated formal clapping in my mind's eye. I noted around this time, around ten minutes after smoking the third half bowl, that I no longer felt that I was in sort of a "not quite there" space like I had been from just the previous two half bowls, because up to that point I still felt like I was kind of in that bodily adjustment stage of tripping where I was still slightly bothered by things like head heaviness and dry mouth, but now I found myself in a place that was starting to feel pretty smooth and immersive and just enjoying going along with the energy of the high, like it was hitting that more fully developed point in general. I also noted that time had seemed to fly after the third half bowl, like time was starting to race by as opposed to how I was still very aware of the time course of the first two half bowls. After these notes I got up to pee, and on the way to the bathroom I had another quick flash of mind's eye psychedelic-like geometric imagery, except in this case I actually noted that the thing this imagery was most similar to for me of anything I've taken was methoxetamine, mostly just in the look and not much else about the state overall that overly stands out, but I thought the comparison was notable. I still didn't think too much of geometric visuals at that point, I was having fun with more complex things, but I noted it down as a spiral of geometry that looked kind of like smirking smiles, and the spiral itself also looked kind of like a smirking smile.
I noticed that the effects seem like they may be somewhat stabilizing in me, and I wasn't aware of this timeframe at the time, but in retrospect, I made this note at just about an hour and a half after the first bowl, so this makes sense to me; I was probably still feeling the second and third, but coming off of the first. I had wanted to try going for a full bowl for the fourth round instead of another half bowl earlier, but by the time I actually reached this point I didn't really think I should push it that much anymore, and decided to try just bumping myself up again with another half bowl. I had more music playing, but I was still just sitting on the couch at first shortly after smoking the half bowl. Pretty much as soon as I took my first hit, I started getting a hallucinatory effect that I've reported on here with salvia recently before, where it starts to feel like I become aware of voices and also faces spinning around subatomic particles that I can see all around me in macroscopic scale, although the effect was subtle. As I sat on the couch letting the effects kick in, my mind was still wandering through the thoughts I was having about salvia being a drug that basically makes me express the exact opposite of anything I actually try to do, and a strange question entered my mind: "What is the opposite of doing nothing? Is it doing everything?" Suddenly, I felt as though I may have understood something about the state that I had never managed to before, so I specifically chose to do nothing; I closed my eyes to the music, laid back on the couch lying down sideways with my legs crossed, and relaxed.
This part of the experience is a little bit fuzzy in my memory, but I distinctly remember that almost immediately after I closed my eyes, I saw large psychedelic-like patterns as well as a body in the center of them which was detached from me visually but I recognized it as my own - something I'm used to from some other dissociative experiences while meditating - and I remember it kind of feeling like I shot forward out of myself first around an abstract representation of the world (I remember relating this to a trip on salvia a friend once told me many years ago where they "got up and ran around the entire world" from the chair they were sitting in) and then further beyond it into a blinding white light, which saturated my vision with itself as well as some dark and transparent but neon psychedelic colors around the edges of that light. I was starting to see not-very-distinct but fast-moving colorful geometries in my closed eye space, resembling salvia visuals I've had before where it feels like the geometries are being pulled or sliding away from me at a very fast pace. And suddenly, seemingly pretty much out of nowhere, the breakthrough hit.
The abstract, psychedelic-like geometries I was seeing in nearly an instant hardened into a completely realistic dream-like world that I was now completely emotional and instinctively immersed in, although as I mentioned at this beginning of this report, I could still feel my body lying on the couch too, but that didn't stop it from otherwise feeling like a full breakthrough. Specifically, the geometries I had seen quickly sliding away from me hardened into the contours of a bullet train speeding away from me at a high pace, leaving me standing at the train station where I was waving goodbye. I was instinctively aware that there were children on the train that I was waving goodbye to, and knew that they would be waving goodbye to me and likely yelling it as well even though I logically wouldn't have been able to hear them. I could clearly see the city all around me, which reminded me of a Japanese city looking like I would see in a realistic anime at a bullet strain station, although it was detailed in a way like real life rather than like a cartoon, but I think, at least based on my potentially faulty memory, still maybe at least slightly surreal-feeling. This all came on so quickly and went by so fast that I was still startled when the train was out of my sight, but I let go into the feeling of the trip and felt like it twisted me further into some kind of abstract hallucinogenic tunnel, where I felt I could see myself from a third-person perspective - and I should note that the bullet train scene I perceived from a first-person perspective - and in this third-person place, I perceived myself as wearing this sort of futuristic but also magical pink outfit that made me feel very powerful, and I felt like I was expressing some kind of magical power, and as that power was fully expressed, I suddenly found myself warping down to another train station like the one I had just teleported away from, and this station I had teleported to was now the station where the bullet train that I had initially been waving goodbye to was traveling to, and I was suddenly waving hello to it as it arrived, back in a first-person perspective to be clear. As the train stopped, the children who I earlier knew to be on the train all ran out and ran up to me astounded, looking like they wanted my autograph or something, and asking me (in very clear and audible English) questions like "Woah, how'd you get here before the train did?!" and "Can you show us any other magic powers?!" A little embarrassed, I said sure and attempted to show them something, trying to do something that randomly came to mind like using a power in a lucid dream, but as soon as I started doing that, it occurred to me that the reason the teleportation power had worked the first time was because I just gave into the trip, not because I tried to take control of it, and that now that I was trying to purposefully use a power, it was doomed to fail. Just as I predicted, the power failed and made me look completely powerless like when a lucid dream power you're not used to totally fails in an embarrassing way, and the whole group of children started laughing at me, acting like they had discovered I was a fraud and had just faked the whole thing somehow, and were no longer impressed with me. Even more embarrassed, I kind of froze up not really sure what to do, and like a dream that ends when you stop moving or interacting with anything, the whole scene crumbled apart, back into fast-moving abstract psychedelic-like geometries, and the breakthrough was over.
About fifteen minutes after smoking the fourth half bowl of plain leaf, I finished writing my notes about the breakthrough experience and continued on where I had left off. I noticed that I still had some of the fast-moving geometries in my closed eye visuals, still looking like they were rapidly sliding around particularly in the four corners of my peripheral vision, but there wasn't much going on with them anymore. I put on some more music, and about ten minutes in I listened to one particular song I really like, and the beauty of it struck me on such a deep level that I felt that it was about to start making me cry. As I mentioned in my latest report here on 50 mg of Δ9-THC orally, I've been wanting a drug to make me cry again lately, and the cannabis edibles combined with smoking did tease that that time, but it didn't actually give me a satisfying release, and I left the trip still wanting. I started thinking about how happy I was that I was finally going to cry, but then that started to make me feel like because I now voluntarily wanted to cry, I was going to experience the opposite instead, and the crying feeling started going away and I started laughing at the apparent futility of it, but as I let those feelings pass the crying feeling did start coming back anyway, and finally reached a release in which I was fully crying and it was definitely finally at the intensity that I had been searching for from a drug lately. This felt like a very beautiful part of the trip to me, and was by far one of the most psychedelic-feeling things I think I've ever felt on/from salvia, and it really caused me to see it in a new light perhaps even more than everything else before this had too (or, maybe at least as much... maybe).
For a lot of this trip, I had also been getting this sensation I've been getting from salvia many times where it felt like a wheel was spinning horizontally around me body in a faint and fleeting but occasionally recurring way, and it felt like that wheel was spinning up and over me. This is significant to point out because I sometimes feel the same sort of thing from cannabis when it's trippier for me as well, but it feels like it's spinning down and under me instead, at least when the high is euphoric, but when I get too high and the cannabis becomes dysphoric, it reverses and starts spinning up and over me like salvia, the state feels sort of backward and wrong like I need a palate cleanser, and I've referenced this at times here before because this is also when my cannabis highs suddenly start including imagery of volcanoes and barren landscapes rather than flowers and trees, and the upward movement of the eruptions seems to line up with the up and over spinning wheel sensations for me. Well, now, in my salvia trip which up to this point had been going up and over, I suddenly found it spinning down and under me instead after I got past the crying part, which had never happened to me on salvia before, and I'm now suspicious that that occurred when I reached yet another opposite parallel to cannabis for me, where I trip hard enough that some things about the experience start to shift instinctively in the opposite direction from how they were at lower dosages building up to this newfound peak.... Fascinating me, I noticed that the salvia trip no longer felt backward now either, but rather everything felt very forward, like suddenly instead of reaching the point of cannabis where it suddenly "felt more like salvia" as I used to think about it, I was now reaching the point with salvia where it suddenly "felt more like cannabis" to me, if that makes enough sense.... Although, by relevant contrast, I'll note that at this point on the salvia, I kind of felt like I needed a palate cleanser too, something that seems to apply to both cannabis and salvia to me at the higher dosage ranges, but not the lower dosage ranges. I decided to keep an eye on those feelings as this salvia high continued to do its thing.
I kept kind of enjoying the unusual psychedelic-likeness of the high for me at this point, doing things like stretching euphorically on the couch, enjoying the taste of my Sprite which was leaving some little sparkles in my mind's eye seemingly just because of the tasty flavor, and I was still getting into the music. I got up and tried to use the instincts that I had been training throughout this trip where I felt like I was dancing but would actually end up singing or where I felt like I was singing but would actually end up dancing, but it felt like I was trying to force myself to do something super weird and pressured, and when I finally was able to adjust to getting back into the groove of the music, I felt that, as stated above, I suddenly felt forward, and when I felt like I wanted to dance I did indeed dance, and when I felt like I wanted to sing I did indeed sing. Because of this I felt that a lot of the trippiness I had noticed from earlier was now essentially over, and I just spent a lot of the lingering trip enjoying it like I would a cannabis high, very much like that, pretty straightforward without too many surprises. I listened to music all the way up until about an hour and ten minutes after the fourth and final half bowl of plain leaf I had smoked, which in my estimation was enough for that to mostly wear off, and enough for all the previous half bowls to have completely worn off by then. At that time I decided to see how my imagination was working, and when trying to bring up some mental imagery, I was clearly presented with some abstract psychedelic-like imagery of women with more poppin' butts, which I took as a good sign of where my headspace was. I kind of felt like the salvia had pushed me to a point where I had gotten used to the backward logic of everything earlier and now it wasn't so much that the trip was forward but rather that I was still backward in a way that felt forward to me now because I had totally given into it - whether this perception was correct or not - and this feeling of "being backward by default" as I'd put it is something I’ve felt from exploring my natural altered states before, so I explored my mindset a little more and found some more signs of that like fleeting colorful hexagram imagery in my mind's eye, and a propensity to have my mind wander to subjects like witchcraft.... These are things I think about in the state that I associate with mania, so I did think I still needed to actually reset myself. Luckily, I have learned from my past experiences that if I get myself into these states of mind from using drugs that seem to linger in me afterward, I can just wait a little while to come down and then relax with a bowl of cannabis in a small pipe, and the high kicking in seems to bring me out of any funk and back to the, ehm, well-medicated stonerly state of mind that I'm normally in, and that is what I did this time too and it worked as well as always.
I don't think there's much else to say about the experience.... The cannabis was a little bit trippier than normal in a way that felt like it was synergizing with the still slightly lingering salvia from earlier, but not enough for anything notable to happen at that point. I had a good rest of my day, relaxing and eating good food and generally just enjoying myself. Incidentally, I had another day with Δ9-THC edibles today, the day after this, 30 mg early on and 30 mg later, to somewhat parallel what I went through with this salvia experiment, although there wasn't too much interesting to say about it that immediately comes to mind. I was glad to save the cannabis edibles trip for a different day than the salvia trip though, unlike the last time where I felt I didn't really give myself enough time or rest to refresh in between.
I feel like this salvia trip day was extremely insightful for me, although I'm still trying to make sense of everything I experienced (and I'm still feeling a little jumbled up now, especially since I spent the whole next day/today still high on a decent dosage of cannabis edibles too and now am staying up to type this all up, but I felt a desire to get it out before I got too much more sleep and distance between myself and the trips). I don't want to just trust everything that I thought to be true while actually deep in the salvia-induced state as that seems unwise, but I feel like there's a lot of merit to a lot of the observations I was making about how salvia seems to be in some ways opposite yet also parallel to cannabis for me, as I also have in the past, and now I'm starting to extend those further into other states I think might be more generally straightforwardly manic or euphoric for me as well, or that is to say, states that feel more forward than backward for me. For example, I made comparisons between the salvia breakthrough and a lucid dream, but also noted that when I tried to use a power on salvia in a way that I would in a lucid dream, I instantly knew that the fact that I was trying to do it deliberately would make it not work, because my previous salvialand power seemed to have specifically worked because I didn't try to do anything and just gave into the trip. However, this contrasts to an actual lucid dream for me, where deliberately trying to use a dream control power actually is the way to make that power happen for me, as long as I know what I'm doing and how to work that particular power, and just letting go and giving into the dream is, I think, based on my past experience, more likely to just make the dream return to a normal, more non-lucid plot instead. In general, being in a lucid dream makes me feel very powerful and like what I want will happen no matter how crazy that might be (and I've practiced at them extensively many years ago for the record, I'm no newcomer to lucid dreaming), which again to me seems very much like it matches the concept of a "forward" experience in contrast to the "backward" experience that salvia seems to give me.
I hadn't actually really had a notable lucid dream in a while until relatively recently, but after I had some of the natural altered state experiences I described here not long ago that inspired me to start thinking about salvia and oral cannabis in the way I did, I started having some lucid dreams where I was having even stronger dream powers than I ever had before too, coming to me very effortlessly and smoothly. In one of the lucid dreams that really stood out to me at the time, I became lucid in I think some kind of supermarket or something, and I walked up to another woman who happened to be standing there, and I reached out to her and grabbed her shoulder and instinctively felt as though I was using a power to trade identities with her, like a body swap, which is something I had practiced as a dream power before but always had some trouble executing (much more so than something like, say, walking through walls or flying), but this time the power seemed to work right away exactly as it should, and for the actual body swapping or whatever, I actually switched from viewing things in first-person to viewing a body that I perceived as my own in third-person, seemingly doing a backflip through the air and landing upside down on the other side but also still somehow right side up, except as the person I swapped bodies with instead, I think.... Suddenly, I was back in first person in the supermarket except as the other person I had swapped with or whatever but also still as myself as them, and I looked around and there were many other women in the supermarket all watching me, and I threw my arms up and they all seemed to let out some supportive screams or something for me, and I specifically remember instinctively saying, "I am a goddess!!!" And then the dream fell apart and I woke up.
So, let's review. Both the salvia breakthrough and this particular lucid dream, as far as I can tell, actually were identical in one particular aspect of their trajectory: first the breakthrough or dream began in first-person, then there was a "flip point" where I saw myself in third-person and the breakthrough or dream fundamentally shifted into a version of itself where some of its plot or character elements were literally mirrored as they then reformed on the other side of the "flip point" with me in first-person again, and then the breakthrough and dream both ended with some kind of emotional narrative climax. However, embedded within this clear parallel were also some clear opposites, at least if you ask me.... This is what I personally see them as:
Basically, in the salvia breakthrough, I was just waving goodbye to a bullet train full of children, merely submitting to the trip, and it activated a magical teleporting power, causing me to reunite with the children from the bullet train who asked me to use another power, which I tried to dominantly take control of the trip and do, but it failed, and the children ridiculed me. On the other hand, in the lucid dream, I was dominantly trying to use a power to swap bodies with someone else and it worked, going through a whole magical power sequence, returning me to the same scene I left in the first place but as the other person with everyone else (all the other women I saw) there watching me, but there was no need for me to do any more powers because the one I tried already worked and they all saw, and they all seemed to show their support for me immediately after.
For the above reasons, I think I have to propose the possibility that a salvia breakthrough is the opposite of a dream. Sure, I was talking about a lucid dream specifically, but a lucid dream is still just a regular dream that you're lucid for, and I was lucid for this salvia breakthrough as well, so perhaps that helped further the comparison, but what I'm specifically proposing is that salvia breakthroughs may be the opposite of dreams in general.
Anyway... I'm tired and I think that's about all I had to say about all that. Time for bed.
The way the day actually started is that I decided to try to see if I could use salvia plain leaf in a way similar to how I normally use cannabis. I had gotten used to smoking these half bowls of plain leaf in my nice bong that I've been doing to the point where I no longer really had any apprehension about doing so, and the trips seemed to be becoming smoother and more developed in ways that I had never imagined before. I also continued to see what I previously referred to as opposite parallels in the effects of salvia to oral cannabis as well as in some ways smoked cannabis, where I thought that salvia clearly worked in the exact opposite of the ways that I would expect cannabis to work when analyzing individual traits, yet still also somehow managed to seem quite similar to it overall as a package deal, sort of like a mirror reflection, which is why I decided to see what would happen if I tried to use it like cannabis in this way.
I finally had a house to myself where I could smoke inside again, and that was the setting for this whole day of tripping. I again was loading half bowls of plain leaf as had become my go-to for now, and I started the first one without much fanfare. I've learned from my experiences that while salvia is often described as having a very short duration of action and I fell for this idea when I was younger too, I actually find that it's simply that it has a dissociative rush sort of like the opposite of the associative rush of a euphoric drug that really places you in your body as the effects first come on, but then the entire experience has a slower and more gradual effect that comes on and in general feels more similar to other drugs and especially psychedelics for me, and it lasts about an hour and a half in its entirety, so I no longer feel rushed about it like I used to when I was thinking of it as being the other way. The more I got used to the effects at this dosage, the less I really even noticed any rush at all, and I began to just experience it more like a psychedelic trip that comes on slowly and lasts a little while, and I treated this half bowl the same, quickly finishing smoking it, but then patiently waiting for it to come on as I put on some of the music I usually listen to and got up to dance.
However, as I began pacing around the house and letting go into my instinctive feelings of wanting to dance, I found that I actually started singing to the song without many accompanying body movements instead. I even began singing the instrumental parts of the song that I felt like I would normally be dancing the most to, and this struck me as particularly odd, and kind of backward-feeling. I felt as though if I was just relaxing on the couch I might not have noticed so much - and I have been starting to feel like some of the salvia effects I get may be particularly dependent on actually trying to do something with them, like I relate to some other hallucinogens and psychedelics in particular - but while trying to treat the salvia exactly as if I had smoked cannabis and gotten up to dance to the music, I couldn't help but notice that it once again felt very "opposite" yet parallel to what I would normally expect, where I was still performing the kind of action I would have been doing either way (responding to the music while pacing around the house) but that the specific expression of the action seemed to be in some ways a fundamental opposite on one drug or the other (dancing on cannabis and singing on salvia, which I feel like are at least basically the two distinct things you can do to react to music, and sort of opposite in some fundamental conceptual ways related to that).
Intrigued, seventeen minutes after the first half bowl, I smoked a second, theoretically adding the effects on top of each other even if not stacking the peaks of the rushes, since again I feel the whole experience lasts more like an hour and a half, and this difference was still only a fraction of that. At this point I also realized I was drinking water like I normally do while smoking salvia but I instead grabbed a Sprite to be more casual like when I'm smoking cannabis, and I don't regret it. I got up and started pacing around to the music some more, and again when I put on songs that I know very well I would normally be dancing to on cannabis, and specifically felt like I was giving into the same instincts that normally make me dance when I give into them on cannabis, I started singing along to them in an instinctive-feeling way instead. My opinion of my own singing is usually a lot more modest than my opinion of my own dancing which I'm quite fond of, but in this case, I was actually quite astounded with the ways I was managing to sing along, although again noting that they seemed to be connected to the same instincts that I normally felt were connected to the dancing that I'm proud of. I was really starting to think that I really might not be crazy about this and there really might be some sort of opposite parallel dancing/singing thing going on here for me with cannabis and salvia, but it was only just getting started.
Eight minutes after the second half bowl I began thinking about something I had posted online, just again trying to treat the experience in a casual way and go about my day while high on salvia in a relatable way to how I normally would while high on cannabis. While high on cannabis, I very frequently experience an effect where when I reflect on posts that I made online, I get very anxious about what I've said and question the posts and think about going back to delete things or add more posts trying to clarifying things that I'm now anxious about, and this tends to be accompanied with some somewhat faded and grainy mental imagery of myself planning ahead the scenarios where I try to correct myself or take back what I said or whatever, like my mind projecting me an expectation-based vision of how my social anxiety will be applied. Now, while high on salvia and doing the same type of reflecting, I noticed that my instincts actually seemed to be expressing that my posts were probably fine and there was nothing to worry about, not just a little bit, but in a comically severe way where in my mind's eye as I was shown expectations for what my instincts made me feel, I saw myself (literally) in a very manic way where I had this shiny psychedelic-like look to me and a confident stance and my butt popping out all sexy (poppin' butts is a recurring theme on this salvia trip as it turns out, but I'll get there), and the whole thing just made me start laughing as I began to perceive it as almost seeming like it was purposefully trying to go ridiculously far in the other direction of what I normally get on cannabis, where instead of a delirious vision of myself and anxious feelings about my posts I get a psychedelic vision of myself and grandiose feelings about my posts, where I feel confident in the things I say and how I came off while saying them, in a way that made me make a mental note to be careful to trust these perceptions in a similar, yet opposite way to how I try to be careful to trust the same yet opposite kinds of perceptions I get from cannabis, and I felt this to be a good lesson about perception and perspective in general that the juxtaposition of these two drug-induced altered states had given me.
After this I decided to load a third half bowl to see if I could carry the comparison between salvia and cannabis further, and I continued to experience the butt-popping sensation this time on my own body. I noted that while I was focusing on putting together another bowl of cannabis to smoke my dancing would normally shift into singing seemingly as my body had to be used for something else, but now, as I started putting together the next bowl of salvia, my singing from earlier had shifted to dancing with my butt, which still similarly spared the use of my hands as they were needed for putting the bowl together. I continue laughing at the realizations of the ridiculous opposite parallels between salvia and cannabis and the silly ways in which they are expressed through me, and I notice that my laughter sounds different from normal, I think perhaps lower pitch, and my mood feels different from normal while laughing, maybe more masculine. I finished loading the third half bowl of salvia plain leaf, but I decided I didn't need it yet and got up to keep exploring my desire to dance to the music to see if it kept making me sing instead.
By contrast, when I actually got up and started giving into my instincts, I realized that the song that was on was one I actually would have wanted to sing to instead, so I tried to give into my instincts to do that instead, but I started dancing. The dancing felt in some ways fundamentally similar to the dancing I do on cannabis, except that it felt like a lot of my body movements were mirrored to the opposite side of what I'm used to with cannabis, and whereas while high on cannabis I'm often moving my arms, hands, and fingers in very symmetrical and synchronized ways, this time I was moving them in very asymmetrical and asynchronized ways, which nonetheless still seemed to me to come off like deliberate dancing. However, by the end of the song I felt an actual desire to dance again, and thus my dancing stopped and I started singing instead, and I was amazed at what was actually coming out of my mouth so effortlessly, and definitely more confidently than I ever felt I normally would without being able to give into these backward instincts for them. Intriguingly, when I finish dancing to a very intense song in a very intense way while high on cannabis to a trippy point, it's actually not uncommon for me to hallucinate in a mind's eye kind of way that there is a crowd of people around me that starts cheering in a very casual and openly emotional kind of way, like that's just part of how my brain plays out those instincts when I let go to that higher level, and this time on the salvia, when I finished singing to the very intense in a similar very intense way, I instead got a mind's eye vision of a crowd of people all standing up and clapping as if I had just finished a very formal or classy performance, with no cheering involved (and I don't recall any clapping being involved in my typical cannabis hallucinations of cheering either, for the record).
Over the next ten minutes I continued to dance and sing to music in ways that felt opposite to what I would normally expect from my cannabis highs, and I started to feel like I was becoming more accustomed to recognizing what instincts went to what behaviors and trying to specifically let them play out in the way I actually wanted, trying to treat myself like an experiment to get results from and adjust to. I also noted a little after this that I noticed my first psychedelic geometric mental imagery, but I wasn't that interested in it, and that typing in my phone felt similar to taking notes or texting while on serotonergic psychedelics does to me, more laborious and harder to keep focus in a generally similar-feeling way. I also noted that I felt like I was generally stimulated in a kind of psychedelic-like way, but also a bit more heavy and mellow than those typically are for me. After this I put on a slow song that really made me want to sing along with it, and so obviously I started dancing, and this time it really seemed to go all the way to being alike my cannabis dancing, very symmetrical and with the same general kinds of movements I normally do, but still notably being distinct in the sense that this kind of dancing I usually do on cannabis while listening to fast songs, and dancing quickly along with them, whereas now I was doing it while listening to a slow song, and dancing slowly along with it. I'm not sure how I finished listening to that song, but I wrote in my notes that I finished with another hallucination of people clapping rather than cheering, and this time the vision also had me getting another butt popping feeling as I stood there as the center of the praise in my vision.
Finally, forty minutes after the second half bowl of salvia plain leaf and fifty-seven minutes after the first, I decided to smoke the third. I have music on and I started instinctively mouthing along to it while the high kicks in again, but I'm tired so I'm just lying on the couch now rather than pacing around like before. The song is really drawing me in so I try to really allow myself to sing it while lying there, and suddenly I feel like I am sort of split in two as there is one me that is lying still on the couch singing along to the song, and another me that goes shooting off into the distance of my mind's eye dancing along to the song with a dissociated body, and suddenly I am struck with an intense feeling of understanding. I feel as though I suddenly understand salvia perfectly as a result of this experience and now this most recent peak effect, and basically what it seems to me to come down to is that when I smoke or eat cannabis, the kind of high it gives me is the more stereotypical kind of manic high where it feels like anything I want to do translates into me performing those actions in an easier and more fully expressive sort of way, like that feeling where it's like the drug high makes you a well-oiled machine and you can do anything you set your mind to and it just feels natural, not like to the craziest degree ever with cannabis usually but still it's that kind of feeling, whereas with salvia, it was literally the opposite parallel, in the sense that the state seemed to affect me in exactly the same sort of way and to the same sort of theoretical degree, except that it went in the exact reverse direction, causing me to feel like literally anything I wanted to accomplish and set my mind on doing, the exact opposite of that would be expressed through me instead, so if a manic high makes you feel like everything you do is exactly what you wanted, this high makes me feel like everything I do is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. I also felt that I was seeing the salvia expressed via the visions I was getting while lying on the couch as the me on the couch being the one who was feeling and trying to express what I felt I was feeling and trying to express normally in that moment, while the me dancing off into a dissociative vision was the me who was taking those feelings and expressing the opposite, dancing rather than singing, and as I reached this incredible peak feeling of understanding and clarity in the me on the couch, I simultaneously watched and felt the me in my vision reach the opposite parallel peak feelings of disorientation and insanity, which seemingly caused me to laugh at the absurdity of it all, which seemingly caused my other self to suddenly orgasm as the opposite parallel to my laughter, and then that other me snapped back around to my body on the couch and the vision ended.
At the peak of this experience I actually literally thought to myself, "I understand salvia perfectly!!"; in retrospect I'm not so sure that's an accurate statement and I'm not sure every single observation I made as a part of this experience is correct, but I think and thought I was on to something. I got up and kept experimenting with my seemingly reversed dancing and singing instinctive expressions to more music that kept playing that I very much enjoyed, and I continued being fascinated with the results, and I also continued to get more of that hallucinated formal clapping in my mind's eye. I noted around this time, around ten minutes after smoking the third half bowl, that I no longer felt that I was in sort of a "not quite there" space like I had been from just the previous two half bowls, because up to that point I still felt like I was kind of in that bodily adjustment stage of tripping where I was still slightly bothered by things like head heaviness and dry mouth, but now I found myself in a place that was starting to feel pretty smooth and immersive and just enjoying going along with the energy of the high, like it was hitting that more fully developed point in general. I also noted that time had seemed to fly after the third half bowl, like time was starting to race by as opposed to how I was still very aware of the time course of the first two half bowls. After these notes I got up to pee, and on the way to the bathroom I had another quick flash of mind's eye psychedelic-like geometric imagery, except in this case I actually noted that the thing this imagery was most similar to for me of anything I've taken was methoxetamine, mostly just in the look and not much else about the state overall that overly stands out, but I thought the comparison was notable. I still didn't think too much of geometric visuals at that point, I was having fun with more complex things, but I noted it down as a spiral of geometry that looked kind of like smirking smiles, and the spiral itself also looked kind of like a smirking smile.
I noticed that the effects seem like they may be somewhat stabilizing in me, and I wasn't aware of this timeframe at the time, but in retrospect, I made this note at just about an hour and a half after the first bowl, so this makes sense to me; I was probably still feeling the second and third, but coming off of the first. I had wanted to try going for a full bowl for the fourth round instead of another half bowl earlier, but by the time I actually reached this point I didn't really think I should push it that much anymore, and decided to try just bumping myself up again with another half bowl. I had more music playing, but I was still just sitting on the couch at first shortly after smoking the half bowl. Pretty much as soon as I took my first hit, I started getting a hallucinatory effect that I've reported on here with salvia recently before, where it starts to feel like I become aware of voices and also faces spinning around subatomic particles that I can see all around me in macroscopic scale, although the effect was subtle. As I sat on the couch letting the effects kick in, my mind was still wandering through the thoughts I was having about salvia being a drug that basically makes me express the exact opposite of anything I actually try to do, and a strange question entered my mind: "What is the opposite of doing nothing? Is it doing everything?" Suddenly, I felt as though I may have understood something about the state that I had never managed to before, so I specifically chose to do nothing; I closed my eyes to the music, laid back on the couch lying down sideways with my legs crossed, and relaxed.
This part of the experience is a little bit fuzzy in my memory, but I distinctly remember that almost immediately after I closed my eyes, I saw large psychedelic-like patterns as well as a body in the center of them which was detached from me visually but I recognized it as my own - something I'm used to from some other dissociative experiences while meditating - and I remember it kind of feeling like I shot forward out of myself first around an abstract representation of the world (I remember relating this to a trip on salvia a friend once told me many years ago where they "got up and ran around the entire world" from the chair they were sitting in) and then further beyond it into a blinding white light, which saturated my vision with itself as well as some dark and transparent but neon psychedelic colors around the edges of that light. I was starting to see not-very-distinct but fast-moving colorful geometries in my closed eye space, resembling salvia visuals I've had before where it feels like the geometries are being pulled or sliding away from me at a very fast pace. And suddenly, seemingly pretty much out of nowhere, the breakthrough hit.
The abstract, psychedelic-like geometries I was seeing in nearly an instant hardened into a completely realistic dream-like world that I was now completely emotional and instinctively immersed in, although as I mentioned at this beginning of this report, I could still feel my body lying on the couch too, but that didn't stop it from otherwise feeling like a full breakthrough. Specifically, the geometries I had seen quickly sliding away from me hardened into the contours of a bullet train speeding away from me at a high pace, leaving me standing at the train station where I was waving goodbye. I was instinctively aware that there were children on the train that I was waving goodbye to, and knew that they would be waving goodbye to me and likely yelling it as well even though I logically wouldn't have been able to hear them. I could clearly see the city all around me, which reminded me of a Japanese city looking like I would see in a realistic anime at a bullet strain station, although it was detailed in a way like real life rather than like a cartoon, but I think, at least based on my potentially faulty memory, still maybe at least slightly surreal-feeling. This all came on so quickly and went by so fast that I was still startled when the train was out of my sight, but I let go into the feeling of the trip and felt like it twisted me further into some kind of abstract hallucinogenic tunnel, where I felt I could see myself from a third-person perspective - and I should note that the bullet train scene I perceived from a first-person perspective - and in this third-person place, I perceived myself as wearing this sort of futuristic but also magical pink outfit that made me feel very powerful, and I felt like I was expressing some kind of magical power, and as that power was fully expressed, I suddenly found myself warping down to another train station like the one I had just teleported away from, and this station I had teleported to was now the station where the bullet train that I had initially been waving goodbye to was traveling to, and I was suddenly waving hello to it as it arrived, back in a first-person perspective to be clear. As the train stopped, the children who I earlier knew to be on the train all ran out and ran up to me astounded, looking like they wanted my autograph or something, and asking me (in very clear and audible English) questions like "Woah, how'd you get here before the train did?!" and "Can you show us any other magic powers?!" A little embarrassed, I said sure and attempted to show them something, trying to do something that randomly came to mind like using a power in a lucid dream, but as soon as I started doing that, it occurred to me that the reason the teleportation power had worked the first time was because I just gave into the trip, not because I tried to take control of it, and that now that I was trying to purposefully use a power, it was doomed to fail. Just as I predicted, the power failed and made me look completely powerless like when a lucid dream power you're not used to totally fails in an embarrassing way, and the whole group of children started laughing at me, acting like they had discovered I was a fraud and had just faked the whole thing somehow, and were no longer impressed with me. Even more embarrassed, I kind of froze up not really sure what to do, and like a dream that ends when you stop moving or interacting with anything, the whole scene crumbled apart, back into fast-moving abstract psychedelic-like geometries, and the breakthrough was over.
About fifteen minutes after smoking the fourth half bowl of plain leaf, I finished writing my notes about the breakthrough experience and continued on where I had left off. I noticed that I still had some of the fast-moving geometries in my closed eye visuals, still looking like they were rapidly sliding around particularly in the four corners of my peripheral vision, but there wasn't much going on with them anymore. I put on some more music, and about ten minutes in I listened to one particular song I really like, and the beauty of it struck me on such a deep level that I felt that it was about to start making me cry. As I mentioned in my latest report here on 50 mg of Δ9-THC orally, I've been wanting a drug to make me cry again lately, and the cannabis edibles combined with smoking did tease that that time, but it didn't actually give me a satisfying release, and I left the trip still wanting. I started thinking about how happy I was that I was finally going to cry, but then that started to make me feel like because I now voluntarily wanted to cry, I was going to experience the opposite instead, and the crying feeling started going away and I started laughing at the apparent futility of it, but as I let those feelings pass the crying feeling did start coming back anyway, and finally reached a release in which I was fully crying and it was definitely finally at the intensity that I had been searching for from a drug lately. This felt like a very beautiful part of the trip to me, and was by far one of the most psychedelic-feeling things I think I've ever felt on/from salvia, and it really caused me to see it in a new light perhaps even more than everything else before this had too (or, maybe at least as much... maybe).
For a lot of this trip, I had also been getting this sensation I've been getting from salvia many times where it felt like a wheel was spinning horizontally around me body in a faint and fleeting but occasionally recurring way, and it felt like that wheel was spinning up and over me. This is significant to point out because I sometimes feel the same sort of thing from cannabis when it's trippier for me as well, but it feels like it's spinning down and under me instead, at least when the high is euphoric, but when I get too high and the cannabis becomes dysphoric, it reverses and starts spinning up and over me like salvia, the state feels sort of backward and wrong like I need a palate cleanser, and I've referenced this at times here before because this is also when my cannabis highs suddenly start including imagery of volcanoes and barren landscapes rather than flowers and trees, and the upward movement of the eruptions seems to line up with the up and over spinning wheel sensations for me. Well, now, in my salvia trip which up to this point had been going up and over, I suddenly found it spinning down and under me instead after I got past the crying part, which had never happened to me on salvia before, and I'm now suspicious that that occurred when I reached yet another opposite parallel to cannabis for me, where I trip hard enough that some things about the experience start to shift instinctively in the opposite direction from how they were at lower dosages building up to this newfound peak.... Fascinating me, I noticed that the salvia trip no longer felt backward now either, but rather everything felt very forward, like suddenly instead of reaching the point of cannabis where it suddenly "felt more like salvia" as I used to think about it, I was now reaching the point with salvia where it suddenly "felt more like cannabis" to me, if that makes enough sense.... Although, by relevant contrast, I'll note that at this point on the salvia, I kind of felt like I needed a palate cleanser too, something that seems to apply to both cannabis and salvia to me at the higher dosage ranges, but not the lower dosage ranges. I decided to keep an eye on those feelings as this salvia high continued to do its thing.
I kept kind of enjoying the unusual psychedelic-likeness of the high for me at this point, doing things like stretching euphorically on the couch, enjoying the taste of my Sprite which was leaving some little sparkles in my mind's eye seemingly just because of the tasty flavor, and I was still getting into the music. I got up and tried to use the instincts that I had been training throughout this trip where I felt like I was dancing but would actually end up singing or where I felt like I was singing but would actually end up dancing, but it felt like I was trying to force myself to do something super weird and pressured, and when I finally was able to adjust to getting back into the groove of the music, I felt that, as stated above, I suddenly felt forward, and when I felt like I wanted to dance I did indeed dance, and when I felt like I wanted to sing I did indeed sing. Because of this I felt that a lot of the trippiness I had noticed from earlier was now essentially over, and I just spent a lot of the lingering trip enjoying it like I would a cannabis high, very much like that, pretty straightforward without too many surprises. I listened to music all the way up until about an hour and ten minutes after the fourth and final half bowl of plain leaf I had smoked, which in my estimation was enough for that to mostly wear off, and enough for all the previous half bowls to have completely worn off by then. At that time I decided to see how my imagination was working, and when trying to bring up some mental imagery, I was clearly presented with some abstract psychedelic-like imagery of women with more poppin' butts, which I took as a good sign of where my headspace was. I kind of felt like the salvia had pushed me to a point where I had gotten used to the backward logic of everything earlier and now it wasn't so much that the trip was forward but rather that I was still backward in a way that felt forward to me now because I had totally given into it - whether this perception was correct or not - and this feeling of "being backward by default" as I'd put it is something I’ve felt from exploring my natural altered states before, so I explored my mindset a little more and found some more signs of that like fleeting colorful hexagram imagery in my mind's eye, and a propensity to have my mind wander to subjects like witchcraft.... These are things I think about in the state that I associate with mania, so I did think I still needed to actually reset myself. Luckily, I have learned from my past experiences that if I get myself into these states of mind from using drugs that seem to linger in me afterward, I can just wait a little while to come down and then relax with a bowl of cannabis in a small pipe, and the high kicking in seems to bring me out of any funk and back to the, ehm, well-medicated stonerly state of mind that I'm normally in, and that is what I did this time too and it worked as well as always.
I don't think there's much else to say about the experience.... The cannabis was a little bit trippier than normal in a way that felt like it was synergizing with the still slightly lingering salvia from earlier, but not enough for anything notable to happen at that point. I had a good rest of my day, relaxing and eating good food and generally just enjoying myself. Incidentally, I had another day with Δ9-THC edibles today, the day after this, 30 mg early on and 30 mg later, to somewhat parallel what I went through with this salvia experiment, although there wasn't too much interesting to say about it that immediately comes to mind. I was glad to save the cannabis edibles trip for a different day than the salvia trip though, unlike the last time where I felt I didn't really give myself enough time or rest to refresh in between.
I feel like this salvia trip day was extremely insightful for me, although I'm still trying to make sense of everything I experienced (and I'm still feeling a little jumbled up now, especially since I spent the whole next day/today still high on a decent dosage of cannabis edibles too and now am staying up to type this all up, but I felt a desire to get it out before I got too much more sleep and distance between myself and the trips). I don't want to just trust everything that I thought to be true while actually deep in the salvia-induced state as that seems unwise, but I feel like there's a lot of merit to a lot of the observations I was making about how salvia seems to be in some ways opposite yet also parallel to cannabis for me, as I also have in the past, and now I'm starting to extend those further into other states I think might be more generally straightforwardly manic or euphoric for me as well, or that is to say, states that feel more forward than backward for me. For example, I made comparisons between the salvia breakthrough and a lucid dream, but also noted that when I tried to use a power on salvia in a way that I would in a lucid dream, I instantly knew that the fact that I was trying to do it deliberately would make it not work, because my previous salvialand power seemed to have specifically worked because I didn't try to do anything and just gave into the trip. However, this contrasts to an actual lucid dream for me, where deliberately trying to use a dream control power actually is the way to make that power happen for me, as long as I know what I'm doing and how to work that particular power, and just letting go and giving into the dream is, I think, based on my past experience, more likely to just make the dream return to a normal, more non-lucid plot instead. In general, being in a lucid dream makes me feel very powerful and like what I want will happen no matter how crazy that might be (and I've practiced at them extensively many years ago for the record, I'm no newcomer to lucid dreaming), which again to me seems very much like it matches the concept of a "forward" experience in contrast to the "backward" experience that salvia seems to give me.
I hadn't actually really had a notable lucid dream in a while until relatively recently, but after I had some of the natural altered state experiences I described here not long ago that inspired me to start thinking about salvia and oral cannabis in the way I did, I started having some lucid dreams where I was having even stronger dream powers than I ever had before too, coming to me very effortlessly and smoothly. In one of the lucid dreams that really stood out to me at the time, I became lucid in I think some kind of supermarket or something, and I walked up to another woman who happened to be standing there, and I reached out to her and grabbed her shoulder and instinctively felt as though I was using a power to trade identities with her, like a body swap, which is something I had practiced as a dream power before but always had some trouble executing (much more so than something like, say, walking through walls or flying), but this time the power seemed to work right away exactly as it should, and for the actual body swapping or whatever, I actually switched from viewing things in first-person to viewing a body that I perceived as my own in third-person, seemingly doing a backflip through the air and landing upside down on the other side but also still somehow right side up, except as the person I swapped bodies with instead, I think.... Suddenly, I was back in first person in the supermarket except as the other person I had swapped with or whatever but also still as myself as them, and I looked around and there were many other women in the supermarket all watching me, and I threw my arms up and they all seemed to let out some supportive screams or something for me, and I specifically remember instinctively saying, "I am a goddess!!!" And then the dream fell apart and I woke up.
So, let's review. Both the salvia breakthrough and this particular lucid dream, as far as I can tell, actually were identical in one particular aspect of their trajectory: first the breakthrough or dream began in first-person, then there was a "flip point" where I saw myself in third-person and the breakthrough or dream fundamentally shifted into a version of itself where some of its plot or character elements were literally mirrored as they then reformed on the other side of the "flip point" with me in first-person again, and then the breakthrough and dream both ended with some kind of emotional narrative climax. However, embedded within this clear parallel were also some clear opposites, at least if you ask me.... This is what I personally see them as:
Element | Salvia Breakthrough | Lucid Dream |
Beginning Phase | Don't Attempt to use Power, Power Occurs | Attempt to use Power, Power Succeeds |
"Flip" Mid-Point | Complete Submission to the Trip | Complete Dominance in the Dream |
Ending Phase | Attempt to use Power, Power Fails | Don't Attempt to use Power, Power Doesn't Occur |
Narrative Climax | Ridicule from Children | Acceptance from Other Women |
Basically, in the salvia breakthrough, I was just waving goodbye to a bullet train full of children, merely submitting to the trip, and it activated a magical teleporting power, causing me to reunite with the children from the bullet train who asked me to use another power, which I tried to dominantly take control of the trip and do, but it failed, and the children ridiculed me. On the other hand, in the lucid dream, I was dominantly trying to use a power to swap bodies with someone else and it worked, going through a whole magical power sequence, returning me to the same scene I left in the first place but as the other person with everyone else (all the other women I saw) there watching me, but there was no need for me to do any more powers because the one I tried already worked and they all saw, and they all seemed to show their support for me immediately after.
For the above reasons, I think I have to propose the possibility that a salvia breakthrough is the opposite of a dream. Sure, I was talking about a lucid dream specifically, but a lucid dream is still just a regular dream that you're lucid for, and I was lucid for this salvia breakthrough as well, so perhaps that helped further the comparison, but what I'm specifically proposing is that salvia breakthroughs may be the opposite of dreams in general.
Anyway... I'm tired and I think that's about all I had to say about all that. Time for bed.
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Lots goes over my head. But glad someone is talking about Salvia. It has been over a year for me. Need to revisit. I only had one daytime one. My first breakthrough which I described here somewhere. It stands today as one of the most bizarre but earth shattering experiences where I actually saw a woman and her 3 little helpers trying to show me what I was looking for. I heard the woman say as I went to get up "stay put on the bed". Ever since I am pinned to the bed or couch. The next interesting thing was I heard "he has been tripping all his life trying to see what is going on here, let's show him" What happened next there are no words. Nowadays regular leaf in a tobacco pipe works just fine. But it did take a breakthrough for me to feel the lower doses. (can't type the whole thing again, it is probably in the Big and Dandy Salvia thread (that is shamefully dead lol)
