SHITTTT.Salvia Divinorum and Lucid Dreaming - Hardly Related
At the root of it, lucid dreaming is taking control of your mind. It requires commitment, learning and practice. As you know, there is NO drug that can take the place of these things in any endeavor. No drug is a shortcut that will allow you to bypass the work involved, in lucid dreaming or anything else. If you can only do something when you're using a drug, it's more likely the effect of the drug than your ability.
There has been a great deal of interest here lately concerning the use of salvia to promote lucid dreams. If you are familiar with the effects of salvia, you already know that it's not the sort of thing you use before going to sleep to foster a productive night's dreaming. It's not calea, it's not pot, and it certainly isn't B6 or mint tea. Even mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD are pale comparisons to a salvia experience.
My intention with this text is to discourage casual and irresponsible salvia use. This is a lucid dreaming site, and I came here with the intention of learning more about dreaming, and perhaps sharing experiences. As you will see if you keep reading, I am not trying to promote salvia, or any, drug use. When I saw the amount of interest the subject of salvia has among the members, my experience compelled me to try & offer sound, responsible advice: Know what you're getting in to.
Note that the 'danger' of salvia is in what it can do to your mental state. (there is no known threat to physical health, other than that attributed to smoking of any kind)
Salvia is incredibly intense. When an effective dose is ingested, it works quickly, and completely removes the user from the reality they currently exist in. You lose all sense of physical being. You lose your sense of time, place, and ego. The world you know is no longer there in front of you. Your perceptions aren't altered, they are focused on the world as it exists without the 'reality' we've constructed in it. Lucid dreams are based in large part on the world as we know it. Salvia space is outside that, with it's own set of 'typical' occurrences and sensations. Orienting yourself and acting in a lucid dream is far easier than choosing your direction in salvia space. Most users also find salvia space inhabited by entities that 'speak' to them, and sometimes even appear to them. They are not dream characters subject to your influence or understanding, and when they are there, they decide what they will talk to you about. This can be even more frightening than it sounds.
A lack of experience with salvia would lead you to believe that this is an interpretation of the effects, but this is not the case. What occurs in salvia space is, for anyone who's been there, completely real. I have used most of the known psychedelic and consciousness-altering substances, and in every case other than salvia, I retained the awareness that it was induced and temporary. Salvia is not like that. Salvia is like a vehicle that takes you out of this reality, and deposits you in another, wholly unrelated one. You don't 'peek' into salvia space with one foot here on the ground, and more often than not, you wonder if you'll find your way back.
The salvia experience might be useful for a lucid dreamer (or anyone else) in the sense of expanding your scope of the world, but it is not going to make anything easier for you. In most cases, the salvia user's concept of reality is drastically, if not permanently altered. Think of salvia space as viewing the most extreme emotional thing you can think of. The memory haunts you. It may eventually fade, but you aren't the same for having seen it. You could use it to influence your future behavior, or you may use it to excuse future failures, but you won't quickly blow it off & forget about it.
Following are some excerpts from user experiences collected at Sage Wisdom ( http://www.sagewisdom.org ) I chose them as I can vouch for their authenticity by my own experience.
Quote:
I was instantly bi-located - sat with my eyes still open, but at the same time somewhere else altogether. Please remember that this entire description is difficult - words cannot remotely capture it, they feel misleading to the point of ludicrousness.
"Salvia's rather beyond the level of my own likes and dislikes, if you know what I mean. I was just there. It was as 'real' as now, but unfamiliar and horribly strange. I didn't have much say in what happened, I don't think." I slicked back my hair, held my head, and thought for a bit, concentrating on nothingness, before the memory faded from my memory. "Wow." I shuddered a bit. "Where the fuck was I?
No one should jump onto this bandwagon without careful consideration. Salvia is supernally strange. It can show even the most experienced psychonauts places they never imagined, with a laughably minuscule amount of enhanced leaf.
Considering myself to be an old hand at exploring psychedelic states of consciousness, I chose to forgo a sitter. That was a mistake. I had the leaf in my van and had pulled up to my driveway, a wooded setting in Marin County. I decided that now was as good a time as any, and lit up my pipe, took a long deep pull on it, coughed and pulled again. Somehow I managed to hold in the unexpectedly harsh smoke. The next thing I knew I was struggling to get up off the floor of the van. I was extremely stoned and disoriented. I was struggling for my LIFE. The reality of the immediate environment had been altered and had taken on an incredible life-threatening character. It is nearly impossible to describe it. It was as if all of my familiar reality was made of a flimsy, spongy fabric that was somehow being pulled into the teeth of a set of gigantic symmetrical enmeshed gears rolling together and drawing EVERYTHING into its teeth. And on the other side of these gears was another reality, a separate reality, and I was terrified that I would never come back to this reality.
I saw that all my life had been an artifice. My parents, the home I was raised in, my friends, my entire life history was just dream...and I had fallen under the illusion that it was real. I was simply in awe of this realization, and terrified of the implications. I was to die, irrevocably, and there was no way around eventual death. Perhaps for the time being, I would avoid it, but one day, all would be taken from me, my wife, my daughter, and me. Total oblivion for my beloved ego, which had never even been real to begin with. Above all, I felt truly insane. Gradually I got a grip on my familiar reality. I had survived, with the utmost respect for the entity behind this substance. For I had felt a presence; a powerful, detached observing presence.
At this time I was not watching this like a spectator but completely immersed in it, I had no recollection of having smoked salvia and what was happening was utterly real.
I felt pushed and had the sensation of all of space/time condensing and collapsing quickly. I also completely forgot in any tangible way that I had just smoked salvia. It creates for me a "skip" or discontinuity in my mental cognition, although not in my visual perception. I had the feeling of suddenly waking up, while having to deal with the immediate after effects of whirling to dizziness like a child does to have fun, but remembering nothing of the physical act of spinning.
I cannot emphasis strongly enough the reality of this experience, it was not fantasy, it was not a formulated theory in response to stimulation. It was as direct an apprehension and perception of actuality as I can ever remember in my whole life. In comparison - daily thinking, perceiving and explaining seems a snail-paced cumbersome crawl through someone else's dictionary by contrast. There was so little room for speculation and doubt in fact that I was utterly overwhelmed and appalled by the experience. I sat there and tried desperately to deny what I was remembering, I felt like I was deliberately trying to press my face back up against an immense wall and trying to get back home, trying to regain my grip on 'normal' life and perception here. I was trying desperately to re-narrow my focus on this tiny little cosmos and life and forget everything that I was seeing.
I never closed my eyes during this experience. I have retold just a fraction of what occurred and what I knew. My partner was with me, I grabbed for her hand and began to talk with her, holding her, trying to get back here - overwhelmed and frightened, astonished and filled. About one minute here had passed.
The last words to pass through my head went something like, "Just as I thought. This stuff is inactive. I'll go toss it in the trash." Then quite suddenly I found myself in a confused, fast moving state of consciousness with absolutely no idea where my body or my universe had gone. I have little memory of this initial period of the experience, but I do know that a lot was happening and that it seemed quite literally like an eternity, when in fact it must only have lasted a few minutes.
I felt that something had gone wrong and I wanted desperately to get back to the "real" world. I searched my memory trying to remember where it was that I had been just moments before. I had no memory of the fact that I was experiencing the effects of a compound that I had isolated from Salvia divinorum. I tried to remember what my body felt like, what my house looked like, and so forth. Anything, just something to reconnect me with the "normal" world. But the more I searched for a strand of "normality" to grab a hold of, the more I was shown something else. At some point I realized that what I was trying to get back to did not exist-it was just an ephemeral dream. At this point I realized that I had no actual memory of ever having existed in any other state of consciousness than the disembodied one I was now in. So I decided to stop panicking and just relax. After all, there was no place to get back to. I was totally convinced that this state of existence was all there ever was.
Then I suddenly found myself standing in the living room. The effects of the substance were wearing off. All of the confusion dissolved, and I returned to the physical world. I looked around me, and the room came into sharp focus. I was relieved to be back. But then I saw that something was very wrong! This was not my living room. It was the living room of my deceased maternal grandparents. And it was furnished as it was when I was a child, not as it was later in their life. The most extraordinary thing about this was that this was the real world, not a memory or vision. I was really there, and it was all just as solid as the room I'm sitting in now. I had the sudden realization that although I had managed to pull myself back into my body I had somehow ended up back in the wrong spot in the timeline of my physical existence. I was convinced that I might be stuck in this situation and would have to continue my life from this point in my past. As I panicked and desperately tried to remember where it was that I was supposed to be, I lost awareness of the physical world again and found myself without a body-lost. Then it happened again. I found myself regaining consciousness in the real world. And again, as soon as I saw everything clearly, I realized that this was not my home, it was a friend of mine's. Then again I panicked and lost consciousness.
I grabbed a pen and tried to write down a few notes while the experience was still fresh. The first thing I wrote down in big letters was:
"IT IS TOTAL MADNESS."
then:
"TEARING APART THE FABRIC OF REALITY."
then:
"This is tooooooooo strong. It is tearing apart the fabric of existence. It is madness. Thank god it only lasted 10-15 minutes!"
For the next two hours I felt light headed and restless. I couldn't sit still. Whenever I sat down I felt compelled to get up. I tried to eat something and drink a little wine in order to get grounded and relaxed, but I couldn't seem to swallow anything. I had been shaken to the soul.
As wild as they sound, these are TYPICAL experiences from NORMAL doses. I have seen these things first-hand. My first impression, in spite of my experience with psychedelics, was terror, and "What the FUCK did I do to myself?" I spent many a salvia session after that, when I knew what to expect, repeating "DAMN....DAMN....DAMN...", hardly able to believe it.
Salvia is serious. Salvia is heavy. Salvia is not going to 'help' you lucid dream. If anything, it could affect your view of lucid wakefulness. You need to understand what you're getting into with salvia. Most people who use it successfully NEVER want to see it again. I have only recommended salvia once, to someone with similar experience to mine. They use it VERY rarely, and actually are still smoking from the small sample I sent 4 months ago. Aside from that, I've not recommended it to anyone. Rather, I suggest people research it fully before experimenting, if they are intent on trying it despite the warnings.
One of the most important things you can do, if you are going to try salvia after careful consideration, is to be sober when you do it, and have a sitter. I can't tell you how many times I've read about uninformed, ignorant asshats trying salvia for the first time by themselves, after a blunt & six beers, and the next thing they know, the local police are trying to figure out why they're in the road, in their underwear. If they don't know how they got in the road, I don't know how they made it down the stairs without serious injury. A sober sitter is essential. Despite the way salvia is marketed in head shops, it is, by no stretch of the imagination, a party or recreational drug.
Aside from the safety concerns, irresponsible behavior will lead to this substance being made illegal everywhere, like it is already in Australia and Denmark, or regulated like it is in Finland and Italy. (I don't imagine Finnish or Italian doctors are writing a whole lot of salvia prescriptions)
In closing, there are a lot of things a person can learn from salvia, IF they have the correct temperament for the experience. Lacking that temperament, they could have their world horribly upset by a first-hand look into salvia space.
the passage about being insane was EXACTLY what i experience on my lasy mushroom trip (aside from the wife/daughter thing).
I understand that this is very intense and im researching/reading trip reports thoroughly. I'll post more laterrrrr
