This is the next installment of "How to kill your social media profile" or how to turn a piece of plankton into an amoeba, today I'm doing a Salvia divinorum trip report.

The other stories in the series can be found here
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@khufu/dmt-trip-report
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@khufu/dmt-trip-report-continued
https://steemit.com/anrachy/@khufu/trichocereus-bridgesii-trip-report

I joined an ethnobanic forum years ago after it came up on a web search I'd done on plants that are useful for pain relief. I'd broken my back a few years earlier and the prescribed medicines just didn't sit well with me, the doctor kept prescribing stronger and stronger opiates and I was on the verge of addiction so I was looking for a safer alternative. I didn't know anyone on the forum when I joined but after a few weeks I received a pm from one of the other members asking me if I was interested in going to his house and checking out his garden.

I thought to myself, I've got an invite from a random stranger on a somewhat dubious website (some of the plants discussed on the forum were legal and some were illegal) what could possibly go wrong. To be honest I was a bit concerned but curiosity got the better of me so I arranged to go & see him, he didn't live too far away so I arranged to go and see him about two weeks later.

When I arrived at his house I was greeted with a warm welcome and invited in for a cup of coffee and a tour of his garden. As it turned this guy had possibly the best ethnobotanical garden in the southern hemisphere or at least the best I'd ever seen or heard of anyway. As coincidence has it his name was Dave just like the guy in my previous story.

After the tour of his garden we sat and talked for a few hours and it turned out we had quite a few common interests and had read quite a few of the same books. I'm glad I went there day because we ended being really good mates. So when I was about to leave he said he had a few things I could take with me if I wanted them. He gave me several large pieces of cactus, a few smaller cactus plants growing in pots and just before I left he gave me a tiny little bag of enhanced Salvia divinorum which was labeled X50. The Salvia was non scheduled in those days and it could be legally purchased in shops, so I didn't hesitate to take some home and try it.

When I got home I unpacked all the cactus but I forgot all about the Salvia he'd given me. Later that night I was telling my Mrs about his garden and then I remembered the Salvia, so I went out to the car and brought it in. I asked her, what do you reckon, you want give it a nudge?
She didn't think much of it because she'd tried a few other bogus legal high mixes we'd come across a few times before. She asked me
If it's legal how good could it be?
I don't know , there's only one way to find out.

So we got the bong out and got ready to go. I was going to let her have the first one but she insisted I go first, so I loaded one up and ripped it in and then passed the bong to her. Before I blew the smoke out I was starting to feel it taking effect and then as I was blowing it out I was looking at myself from outside my body. I decided it might be a good idea to lye down and as I did I saw my upper torso moving downwards like the second hand on a clock,moving and then stopping every second or so. By the time I hit the floor I was catapulted into an alternate reality.

Suddenly I appeared in a two dimensional world and it seemed like I was a character in a cartoon show, I knew I was seeing myself but I looked like a hand drawn caricature in a bizarre cartoon show complete with loony tunes sound effects. All my features were distorted and my sense of spacial awareness had lost all perspective. One second I was seeing through my nowmal perspective and a second later I looking at myself from outside and intermittently I felt like I was somewhere else looking through someones else's eyes in 3D and seeing a completely different reality I couldn't even comprehend. Then I felt like I was being sucked into the space between the walls and that space was being compressed into two dimensions. It really screwed with my head and I was starting to question my own sanity by this point as most of what was happening just didn't make any sense at all.

Then the trip took on a new twist. Our Prime Minister at the time (Kevin Rudd) materialised in the hallway in cartoon form and switched on the light in the hallway and sat down on the floor. I still thought I was in the wall cavity and he hadn't seen me so I knocked on the wall to get his attention hoping he'd help me get out. He had a really dejected look on his face so I asked him what was wrong. He slowly looked up to me through the wall and told me.
I'm fucked mate, the bastards have shafted me.
What do you mean they've shafted you?
They've cut me out of the picture, I'll be gone tomorrow.
That seemed to make perfect sense as his character looked like it was cut out from a different cartoon and had been pasted into the cartoon I was in. Then he got up & slinked away.

After that the Salvia started to wear off and 3 dimensional form started to return but only partially at first. The top half of my body seemed like it had emerged from the 2d wall space and the lower half got stuck there for what seemed like an eternity. I'd emerged just above a light switch on the wall and the switch was right where my navel should have been. My Mrs was still on the floor with her eyes closed and I couldn't get her attention, it was like one of those nightmares where you try to scream but nothing comes out. So I was reaching down to my navel and flicking the light on and off to try and get her attention. This was hands down the biggest head fuck I've ever had, none of it made any sense at all.

A few minutes later it wore off and I was back to baseline trying work out what had just happened. My Mrs was just starting to come back to reality herself and when she opened her eyes it was like she didn't know who I was or where we were, she was totally disoriented and had moved about three feet away from where she was when she smoked hers. I tried to comfort her but she was looking at me like I was an alien trying to abduct her, she tried to get up and i was going to let her but I was worried she might hurt herself trying to get away. So I just held her and kept reassuring her until she started to regain her senses.We were both in shock for about half an hour and we both agreed we'd never try that again.

Perhaps the strangest part of the whole experience occured the next day. I came home and watched the evening news to see that Kevin Rudd had fallen victim to a leadership coup and had been ousted from the PM position. My first thought was that the Salvia (Diviners sage) really must give insights into the future but after a bit of contemplation I'm inclined to think it was just my subconscious putting the pieces together and coming to a logical outcome and displaying it to me in pictorial form. I had heard banter about a possible leadership spill on the day I smoked the Salvia, so maybe that's all it was who knows?

Image: http://www.sagewisdom.org/salviaphotos.html