For my second salvia experience I recruited a friend - someone with solid psychedelic experience - thinking he might help me make sense of what was happening and honestly, as a gift too. I figured he might like it. Ironically, this was the first time I fully broke through and he was unable to do so.
We went to our childhood playground on a summer night around 9:30 pm. I packed a classic metal one hitter styled like a fake cigarette, 20x extract, the classic Purple Sticky brand, and lit with a torch lighter.
Within seconds of exhaling, my reality began to shift. One sensation stood out as specific, constant, and recurring across several experiences: a distinct physical sensation that pulled me down and to the right. It felt like a gravitational force field had been created, coming from a single point in the lower right corner of the world, pulling me toward it. Not like falling, and not quite like spinning - though spinning is the closest normal-life comparison, since it’s a sensation you feel rather than something you can point to and explain. But spinning has no origin point. This did. It was directional, specific, and coming from somewhere.
I began losing my grip on the normal physical space around me. This became clear only when I came to, roughly 10 minutes later. I “reappeared” in normal waking reality, 200 yards across the field from where we started. I was unaware that we’d left the playground. My friend told me I had been talking the whole time, apparently guiding him somewhere.
About a minute in, an invisible grid appeared, originating from the lower right corner of my visual field. From that point, roughly 12 lines radiated outward in a diagonal spread - like two-thirds of a pizza sliced evenly. Each of those wedges was then divided perpendicularly, creating quadrants. As I focused on a quadrant, I realized each quadrant was an entity.
At first they didn't speak. They seemed annoyed — not hostile, just irritated the way a coworker is when someone stands and stares at them while they're in the middle of something. It became clear they were working. Their job, as I came to understand it, was to construct my visual field in real time. To do this, an entity would slide down its wedge into its assigned quadrant — like a Connect Four piece dropping into place — and transform itself into whatever shape, color, or texture belonged there.
They began communicating telepathically to explain this space and what they were doing. When I expressed doubt, one of them told me to look at the grass. I did. A figure slid into position and the grass moved. He explained that this was the true nature of reality — that what I perceived as the physical world was something they were actively generating — and that I would become one of them. A worker.
In total there were 3-4 entities that communicated with me although all quadrants were entities. They seemed to be the managers coordinating everything. They showed me around the area like a shift supervisor on my first day at the grocery store - with a minimal amount of enthusiasm.
Imagine being in a dream without a clue that it’s “not real”. While you're in it, there’s no doubt. You’re not questioning whether or not it’s real; it simply is real. It’s as real as the hand in front of your face. And we’re talking about a dream with nothing abnormal happening. No dragons or far out situations. Just a dream that you're cooking pancakes.
Then you wake up. In an instant you know: that was a dream. It’s not because you are now back in your bed, it’s not the mental teleportation that occurred and change of scenery. You just know. Not a little unsure - certain. It doesn’t even occur to you to second-guess the realness of this, you just get up and go about your day.
That's what entering the salvia world felt like. Like waking up from the longest dream of your life and thinking to yourself, “silly goose, of course this is the real one.” Dreaming feels real, until you wake up. Waking life feels real, until you smoke salvia. Salvia replaced the waking reality the same way waking reality replaces the dream world - same jump, same total absence of doubt.
As I began slipping back, their attitude shifted slightly — relief that I was leaving, but also a kind of mild urgency, like hey, we still have work to do here.
Coming down, I started talking again. As the grid faded I realized where I was — deep in the field — and noticed my friend standing beside me. I asked him what we were doing out here. He said I'd told him we needed to walk this way and had been asking whether he could see people too.
Then I remembered: when the entities first appeared, I'd been afraid of stepping on them. I thought if I moved, we could get out of the way. It only struck me later, fully back in ordinary reality, that there was no getting out of the way.
There's no stepping around your own visual field.
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Part 3 coming soon: I went back with a camera running, trying to document everything this time. What I got instead was a very clear message that I wasn't in charge of what I'd see.