Saturday, December 13th, 2008
Last night I went to spend the evening with Michal and Ema down by the Thames in the south west. We drank cava and laughed through rapid fire anecdotes and conversation, and they cooked me some amazing food, the kind that only the Poles could serve.
A whole duck, jointed and cooked in an oven dish with garlic and marjoram, allowing the fat to fill up the bowl so the pieces of meat are dripping with it! We had the meat with some lovely salad, though this hardly detracted from the sheer fatty indulgence of the duck meat and the lovely bowl of hot tasty fat which we could dip meat and bread back into when we wanted another fix. Mmmmmmmm!
Then we retired to the carpet, moved the table and candles away, and got down to introducing Michal and Ema to salvia divinorum. The first time round Michal and I smoked it, but Ema was unable to inhale any at all. She coughed it straight back out. It was interesting as she often smokes things, she said afterwards that she had never had that before, it was as if the white smoke expelled itself from her, refusing to enter.
Everything always seems pregnant with meaning when you do salvia, so perhaps the Lady in her benevolence had decided that one of us needed to be sober for the first hit. It was handy that she was, as Michal took a lot and we needed an alert sitter to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or knock things over. Michal and I both lay down on the carpet facing each other. I had a fairly mild dose, I still knew I was on salvia and was feeling glad that Ema hadn’t taken any because I could see that blank look on Michal’s face, almost like a frightened animal, as he lost awareness of who he was or what was happening. As my sensations intensified, I saw Michal’s face turn green and elven, with energy flowing out of it in every direction like roots from a tree. Meanwhile, Michal was in another world in which his side of the room represented the world of life, while the side that I was on was stretching away from him into the past and death. During the experience he made a choice not to die yet, within the experience that death was just the return to a state before birth.
After some discussion, we all took it again. This time, I took a dose as big as my first dose from Kayla, enough so I completely lost all sense of who or where I was. From a kneeling position I slowly sank forwards into the carpet, between the two chairs Michal and Ema were sitting in.
It was terrifying in the way that my first high dose was terrifying, a sudden all consuming timeless terror. Reality, which was one and the same as the terror, floated upwards around me in rods or lines, and floated through me like burning pins and needles. I thought I might be better prepared for it, but it is difficult to take any lessons with you. You are just suddenly there again, caught in the terror. Yet there was a difference this time, because although I didn’t know who or what I was I did remember this sensation and terror. I was there on the carpet, and I was on my bed again, experiencing that first high dose dose of salvia I had with Kayla. It wasn’t even that I remembered it, it was actually the case that I was experiencing both together. Both experiences were the same moment: one timeless moment that I had returned to. And I knew that this place, this sensation, this terror, is what exists outside time.
I slowly returned and talked to Michal and Ema about their experiences, after we’d shared a massive bout of good hysterical laughter together. Their experiences were much more concrete and visual in many ways, but shared my trip’s preoccupation with time. We had been talking earlier in the evening about the past, both our shared past living in London, and stories of Poland and recent Polish history. Perhaps this shaped the direction of our experiences. Ema went back in time, to a very specific time, 1984 or 1985. Michal went back to his birth, his grandfather and father were sitting by his side, and he remembered into the future the whole of his life from the perspective of his unborn self.
When I write about the “terror” of the full salvia experience I don’t mean that it was a bad trip. Words like “good” and “bad” don’t really apply. It’s just very powerful and very frightening, but also wondrous to experience and to reflect on afterwards.
It’s hard to keep in mind as you seem to transcend your body that the experiences of salvia must reflect the physical situation of how you’re feeling and where you are. I wonder whether taking it on a green hill on a warm twilight evening would create a less terrifying and more benign experience. Or I wonder if terror is just my default state when stripped of any knowledge of who or what I am.
A few lines from a poem about salvia divinorum I read on the Erowid website keep coming back to me.
I had not expected fear, but terror came with her
and tho I sought a dying moment, she showed me a dying eternity
and tho I sought to bring wisdom into the real, she tore the real from me
and I was no more, and in unbeing, I lost my fear
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Friday, December 12th, 2008
Went round to see Jim and Kal last night for an hour or two of salvia divinorum journeying. I took quite mild amounts all evening, which was nice, just allowing the sensations of reality twisting around and rising up through me to swell, but not overcome me.
Jim and Kal both had quite heavy doses: Kal had a particularly powerful one. Suddenly his real world dropped away and he was in another reality with no memory that he had taken a drug. It is peculiar to salvia that there is almost no transition or warning, when you’ve taken a big dose, suddenly everything drops away, the veil of reality is gone and you are floundering in some huge inscrutable narrative that feels like an eternity but actually only lasts a few minutes. From the outside, Kal’s face went completely blank, he just didn’t seem to be there, as if he had switched from human to animal. He moved forwards from the sofa and his legs gave way, tumbling against the table.
I was mildly tripping but thought it would be a good idea to pull the table away from him, and move some boxes and stuff out of his way. In Kal’s slowed down world, me pulling the table and boxes and away was contributing to the narrative he was experiencing, in which reality was being sucked away from him into my side of the room into a crushing fold in space and time. He was struggling away from this vortex, which somehow also represented his family and past, to try and reach the other side of the room and the window, which represented the real world.
We discussed afterwards how different from other hallucinogens and how specific the sensations of salvia are. Everything rotates around you, and reality twists around, almost as if you’ve almost turned your head to glance into another dimension. There’s a feeling that you are being squeezed along a membrane, the way reality breaks up into vertical stripes or rods and you can only focus on one of them at a time, the slowing down or pausing of time. There’s that feeling too of being in a place before birth and after death. Kal said afterwards that he kept thinking of Buffy being dragged back to the world in series six.
Most of all, salvia feels like you are engaging with a sentient intelligence. It’s as if Lady Salvia is investigating you as you are investigating her. This alien sentience briefly occupies your head and makes you see reality as it sees it: timeless and terrible, spilling out into infinity. If acid gently unlocks parts of your brain and allows you to see things like a god, then salvia is a god, powerful and inscrutable, coming into your head to make you see the world through its eyes.
This morning reality was definitely back in place, but there’s an afterglow, a pregnancy of possibility in the air. Jim wrote a nice email earlier about leaving the house to go to work:
Two squirrels appeared from nowhere to run along the fence on either side of me. Now, I’m not saying I believed they were trying to communicate with me, or that they signified some vast gloriousness but I certainly wouldn’t have bet against it. I like to think me and the squirrels had a whole mutual respect thing going on, whereby I wasn’t going to mess with their nuts and in return they wouldn’t cause my entire ‘reality’ to fold in on itself…
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Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Popped round to see Jim on the way to Geli’s birthday party. We smoked some salvia together. It was a moderate hit, not as powerful as the one that took me out when Kayla was round but powerful nonetheless. I sank back into the sofa, my consciousness fragmenting out until all that was in my head was a single phrase repeating over and over again.
I thought afterwards that the phrase might have been “what is it? what is it? what is it? what is it?” and now I wonder if it was more like “what did you do? what did you do? what did you do? what did you do?”
The phrase was accompanied by an overwhelming sensation that reality and time were breaking apart and as I seemed to be the consciousness of reality I felt that perhaps I had broken something, or gone too far. What did you do? What did you do?
Then I returned to myself again and rolled around a bit on the carpet. The afterglow of the intense scary bit is always really nice. Very peaceful and meditative.
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Foxes! came to stay last night after their London gig, including Alan and Dymphna, who drove them around. Kayla had some salvia divinorum with her. I was really interested in trying it so we smoked some. I had tried to take it before, to no effect, so this time I inhaled lots and kept it in, and got hit quite hard by the psychedelic experience!
I suddenly felt I was flying backwards through the room and my vision became fuzzy, and then everything started breaking up into floating rods of reality. I just about held it together to stagger from the room, though it felt more like I had become the room and I was ejecting this piece of consciousness out of it.
What was left of me fell on to the bed and at this moment I felt I was in several places at once. I was the bed, I was floating in little rods through the air above the bed, and some of me was within this human body too. Most of all I felt like I was the bed and I remember thinking: what will those others say when they come in here and find that I, the bed, have become conscious? I won’t be able to walk or talk for one thing. I knew it wasn’t a good thing.
Then Kayla popped her head round the door and I returned to my human self. It had all lasted just a few minutes. I staggered back into the living room. They had taken some in my absence. Matt felt like he was rotating inside a giant pine cone, made of up spikes from the rapid drums of the Nina Simone version of I Did It My Way that was playing at that moment. He had to put out his legs and hold one finger up in the air to rotate with the pine cone. Kayla pressed her face to the floor and had to shift objects through some sort of carpet house that she found herself in.
Kayla and I took a second milder dose and this time it was more of a mushrooms experience, lots of giggling and amplified cartoon reality.
It’s a really interesting drug. The effect is so intense, but then it’s over so quickly, and the high is quite different from anything else I’ve taken. The sensation of fragmenting your consciousness and actually becoming objects around you is quite an extraordinary feeling.
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