Theta:
On the flip side, some of the trip reports for Datura/Jimson Weed seem pretty terrifying. I might dig some of those up later and post them if I get a chance. Though as with all trip reports I read, I'm not entirely sure how much of the report is an accurate representation of the drug, and how much might have been "embellished".
Those are broadly the most entertaining trip reports to read. I only posted one because I knew that if I spent too much time thinking about which ones were the best I'd never escape, and if I did I'd come back with like fifty report links lol. Erowid > Datura > Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters > schadenfreude overload. Not to mention some of the most fascinating drug anecdotes ever recorded.
Speaking from experience with deliriants (though diphenhydramine, not datura), I find those reports to generally sound very believable, for what it's worth. Deliriants are a one-way ticket to having donkey brains, and there are little things about them that are pretty easy to recognize as realistic or not in what others write about them after you've experienced them, similar to psychedelics or basically any other kind of drug.
That being said, I'm sure there are some "I caught a fish THIS big" stories out there, especially with a drug as ridiculous as datura, it wouldn't take much embellishment because you're already starting pretty far out there.
This one spoke to me a bit too much. Fuckin hell.
That's an intense one, for sure, and one of my favorites on Erowid.
I'm glad it spoke to you too, even if a bit much, haha.
That's so fascinating! But still, that first time has still got to be pretty terrifying.
I wouldn't say no exactly, but I think Cream Gravy? used a more accurate word:
unnerving. That's the thing about salvia.... People don't usually come out of it scared, they come out of it incredibly perplexed and disoriented as to what just happened, but relatively emotionally even, most of the time anyway.
Strangely, we've actually introduced more people to salvia than probably any other drug, no other comes to mind that tops it. The responses, as previously alluded to, are shockingly consistent; I cannot tell you how many people claim to have thought they were waiting their turn for something when they're on it, something we have also experienced several times, and one time our ex-roommate tried it for the first time and literally said in mid-delirium, "Is it my turn yet?" Seeming lost in general is a common occurence, and just confused by the sensations like the shifts in gravity mentioned by Cream Gravy?; one we always felt bad about was when this guy we knew growing up and occasionally did drugs with when we first got into them came over to our house after the club one night, very hopped up on amphetamines (like very recently, they were still speeding hard) and decided to try salvia for the first time with us (us and one other person), and as soon as he started tripping he very obviously began moving his body to experiment with the gravity shift which caused the other person and us to start laughing because we could relate to the feeling, and he straight up looked right at us with the saddest face ever and said, "You're laughing at me...." We immediately apologized because it was so damn sincere and he just laid down on the couch, closed his eyes, and
was snoring ten seconds later. After another couple minutes, he immediately shot up again, saying, "Wow, fuck that shit." Of course, if you're on a highly dopaminergic drug and you smoke another drug that causes dopamine levels to plummet, you're going to have a bad time regardless of how the latter drug would be on its own, but notably, there was still no fear there.
Mostly, salvia is just incredibly weird, which it still is even after you learn to let go, you've just gotten used to it by then. I think people probably don't really understand the difference enough to say it this way while explaining their trips, but what people probably usually mean when they describe how they felt during their salvia trips is that they were dysphoric, which is a generally accepted effect of kappa-opioid receptor agonists. Being dysphoric can be incredibly unnerving especially if you're not used to the sensation or drug that causes it or if you're not prepared for the intensity of the effect experienced on whatever dosage you use, but it's not exactly the same as being afraid, and it's actually very rare that we witnessed people legitimately afraid on salvia, and literally all of those times were soon after confessed to have been done during a bad set or in a bad setting by the person who experienced it. In fact, a scientific study of the human effects of salvinorin A where people were thoroughly prepped for the experience that was to come and obviously knew they would be being watched by professionals claimed that: "End-of-day ratings of drug liking and good effects followed a similar dose-related pattern as ratings of overall drug strength, and the effect of dose was significant for both liking (F(16,48)=7.5, p<.001) and good effects (F(16,48)=4.4, p<.001). Mean ratings of drug disliking and bad effects were low (Ms < 1) across all sessions, and there was no significant effect of dose for either measure (ps > .30). Mean ratings of the highest dose indicated generally positive effects and a lack of dysphoric effects: liking M=3 (range=2–4); good effects M=2.25 (range=1–4); disliking M=.5 (range=0–2); and bad effects M=.5 (range=0–1), with only 1 participant indicating 'disliked somewhat.'" (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3089685/)
Personally, I think the reality of the situation is that salvia is simply one of the strongest hallucinogenic and mind-altering drugs ever discovered, and for some reason there's a subculture built around dosing it as high as humanly possible on your very first time, and for some other reason we as a larger culture trust that specific subculture as the guides on how to properly use this incredible plant, when they're the ones that know the least about it and are using it by far the most recklessly, probably just because they're the ones speaking loudly about how much they disliked their ridiculous overuse of the drug. Does literally anyone here think that mushrooms, for instance, would be anything other than dysphoric or terrifying to most people that took them if the standard was to use a dry ounce for your first ever psychedelic experience? We also started that way with salvia because we were introduced to it by that subculture, but all of our most dysphoric trips came from that time period and as we got used to the effects of salvia and opened up to them more, we also considerably lowered the dosage we would use without suffering in terms of the desirable subjective effects received. I think the whole salvia scene needs a massive overhaul, to give this very unfairly maligned an actual chance to show the true supposed psychonauts the good it can actually provide us similarly to many of our other cherished substances.
But again, that's just my perspective on the situation.
Every single person I've talked to who's tried salvia (myself included) has referenced the feeling of 'becoming an inanimate object'. What a weird drug. It's pretty much universal; gravity shifts, becoming objects, strange hallucinations.
Probably the most unnerving drug I've tried now thinking back.
Totally, I can relate to that too, I just haven't become a wall specifically lol. Becoming inanimate objects in general on salvia does seem very, very common, almost (not quite, but almost) enough to just be expected.
I'm not going to go too much into this theory here, but for what it's worth, we increasingly suspect that the effects of salvia are directly related to the kappa-opioid receptor serving as the mechanism of stress-induced dissociation. We actually experienced many salvia-like sensations throughout our life while not on salvia at all, and even before trying any drugs besides things like caffeine, that we really can't directly compare to any drug except salvia, but for the longest time just thought was something humans experienced, until year after year we saw the increasingly perplexed and concerned faces of every single person we talked to about such things... and then we finally realized and accepted that we have DID and started going to therapy and seeking out communities of people with DID to learn from and such, and found that these experiences were actually entirely common in the dissociative community. Just to be clear how direct the connection is, it even includes the perception of becoming an inanimate object: something that really fucks with our dissociation for example is sexuality, and especially when younger and more repressed it was common for us that (as we understand in retrospect) when one alter was out masturbating, the others would tend to dissociate, and we would have experiences like thinking we were the bed our body was lying in, or dissociating into their sexual fantasy and identifying as the clothes they were wearing in it, and just other odd stuff like that.
Basically, we think it's possible that the reason your identity moves into objects are other strange things is because while there are a lot of subjective experiences we call "dissociation", this one might be what the human brain literally uses to dissociate your sense of self to whatever is happening to your body, the easiest route I suppose just being shoving it in something else until that experience passes. And of course, the direct relation to dissociating from stressful events could probably also again have something to do with why salvia can be so unnerving especially if you're not in a good setting for it, because instinctively it should basically make you feel like you're dissociating away from something bad happening to you.
But again, those are just amateur theories of course, but I thought I'd share a little bit.
P.S., to be on topic:
An Experience with Salvia divinorum. 'We've Been Waiting For You' by Derewsna
erowid.org
