My last salvia experience was bizarre enough to warrant mentioning, and I wonder if anyone here has had the same experience. It's also connected to my first time breaking through, so I'll explain that one first. The first one's a bit long and the second is short, so bear with me.
FIRST BREAKTHROUGH:
For my first break-through, I'd taken a huge hit of the stuff and was just sitting on my girlfriend's roommate's bed before falling backward into oblivion -- I literally blacked out, and when I "awoke" (imagine a slow fade-in from black), I was staring into a two-dimensional scene composed of an immensely large circle, everything in hues of orange.
The circle framed some kind of landscape, but the most interesting part was the edge of the circle, as there was a procession of small orange triangles sliding down the edge of the circle from the top of my vision and growing as they slid out of view on the other side. I got the impression that each triangle was the ancestor of the triangle behind it, like a father and son, and the triangles were passing some kind of "legend" down to each other throughout their lives (which consisted entirely of sliding along the circle -- weird, I know). The "legends" were like small individual stories, and I got the impression that there was some majestic importance if you listened to the legends put together. At this point, I had no awareness of myself; I *was* the scene, because I could not separate myself as an observer from what I was observing.
Then things got weirder. I slowly became aware of myself again, to the point where I got a really weird suspicion that the "legends" that were being passed down were actually just parts of what I was hearing and trying to say -- as I listened closer, each triangle was actually passing on a brief snippet of my girlfriend's constant questioning if I was alright. For instance, if she said "Are you ok?", the triangles would be passing "Ar-", "e", "y-", "ou", etc.
This was a huge realization at the time: I realized that everything I was seeing, all of that majesty, was simply pieces of what I was hearing and saying -- totally mundane sensations. The entire universe, both salvia-land and reality, became some kind of joke, because it was based in totally subjective physical experience. I had the sensation of slowly returning to "myself", with whom I still felt uneasy, because I'd had the experience of not being that self. My girlfriend tells me I said something to the effect of "I feel bad for him. When he gets back, he's going to be so embarrassed to be himself again." or something weird like that. After that, it was smooth sailing all the way back, with some minor tingling and images of vines growing out of a cellar when I closed my eyelids (which could've been the veins on the inside of my eyelid). I also realized that the "orange-ness" of the trip was due to me staring at an orange christmas light on a strand hung around the room.
SECOND "BREAKTHROUGH":
It'd been about a year since my previous experience, and I decided to try it again with a bunch of people who'd never done it before. It was already pretty late at night when we started, and by the time it got to me it was around 3am or so. The owner of the room was getting visibly nervous about getting caught what with all the laughing, so I was also apprehensive about making a lot of noise.
I hit it, held it, and had that distinct sensation of "this is way too familiar" as I started to fall back. I was going to just run with the trip, but something told me that if I did I'd end up making a lot of noise and something bad would happen because of that. Halfway through falling over, I got back up and started to trip vividly while trying to explain to everyone in the room what was happening.
It was very similar to how it was before (orangeness, circle, triangles), except that the triangles had now become teeth on a "zipper" that extended across my vision, once again a two-dimensional view, but this time I could still see the room like a photograph with the zipper lying across it. The room was literally divided by the zipper, and I was fighting as hard as I could to keep the zipper from opening (which would mean I'd be dropped into the trip and lose control). I was frantically trying to tell the frozen figures in the photograph of the room (whom I believed to be no longer human) that there was a zipper running across the room, and that reality was just these layers and layers of paper held together at the seams by intelligent "teeth" that, if given the chance, would simply separate and leave you in an oblivion of nothing (the orange void behind it that I could literally see at that moment).
As I sat there waving my arms frantically, I started to trip less and less, and began to realize that my friends probably though I was psychotic, which I guess I was at the time...I finally got to the point in my "re-personalization" that I accepted that, even though normal reality didn't feel right, I'd eventually feel more and more resigned to it. It kind of sucked to come back to a world where everyone thought you were some kind of psychedelic lightweight, though in retrospect, no one there actually thought this -- paranoia at that point was pretty severe.
So, my question: have any of you had "standing" trips on salvia, where you're tripping, but still articulating to people around you? Or is it always kind of a knock-out experience if you're having a heavy trip?