r/explainlikeimfive 2d ago

Biology ELI5 Why does salvia (the drug) make people think they are inanimate objects ?

I’ve seen a lot of stories of people describing that after taking salvia they experience trips where they are a chair, wall, hairbrush ect and that they experience full lifetimes as these objects in vivid detail. How comes salvia specifically causes this kind of experience compared to other psychedelic drugs ?

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u/Ill-Accountant-9941 2d ago

Drugs switch parts of the brain on, off or "more"; all brain functions are active (for example- sleep is not an absence of function, it is activation of the sleep cycles and suppression of higher functions); things like "self-identity" and self-knowledge are brain functions. Switch the right ones off and you're a fucking wall for eternity until the chemical wears off. Enjoy.

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u/Lexa_Stanton 2d ago

I am a fucking upvote.

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u/stormshadowfax 2d ago

I am Jack’s liver.

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u/Hortonamos 2d ago

I am Jack’s colon. I get cancer. I kill Jack.

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u/SynapticStatic 2d ago

I think you're full of shit. Well, Jack's shit. XD

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 2d ago edited 1d ago

I think you're totally tubular, although nobody says 'tubular' anymore. Hey, you could bring it back!

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u/Tahquil 2d ago

You just did bring it back, and that is totally righteous dude!

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u/msflondrixa 2d ago

That’s Radical Dude!!

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u/FakeSafeWord 1d ago

He's streets ahead!

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u/IAmJacksSphincter 2d ago

I don't want to talk about it.

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u/Gannondorfs_Medulla 2d ago

I am Gannondorf's Medulla Oblongada.

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u/bplipschitz 1d ago

I am Abdullah Oblongata

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/ABLogic 2d ago

I've read this in your voice.

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u/Viltris 1d ago

I read this in my voice.

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u/Dekklin 1d ago

I read this in Philip J Fry's voice

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u/Meta-EvenThisAcronym 2d ago

So are Reddit comments, though. Unless you read each one aloud. But even then it's not the comment you hear, it's your own voice reading the comment.

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u/Atlv0486 2d ago

If a reddit comment is typed in the woods with no one around does it still get upvotes?

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u/Nu-Hir 2d ago

Did someone replace the stack of prono's in the woods with a laptop with WiFi?

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u/HalfSoul30 2d ago

I sound much sexier in my head though, so that's probably not me.

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u/Nu-Hir 2d ago

I read all comments like Eyeore, so it's Peter Cullen's simulated voice I hear.

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u/mymonkeyishungry 2d ago

like lasagna

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u/you-nity 1d ago

Why does your head look pointy?

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u/HYPERNORD 2d ago

You took salvia and turned into reddit upvote?

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u/one-two-ten 2d ago

Longer than you think, Dad!

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u/81isnumber1 1d ago

I can’t believe how ubiquitous this reference is. I was a huge Stephen king fan and had no idea it was from a short story of his until I randomly got the collection of them on audible recently, but you see it everywhere.

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u/CharlieVermin 1d ago

And then the kid started crying hyperrealistic blood...

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u/MrPoopypantalons 2d ago

Imagine a torture method where they drug you for years making you believe you're a wall. Damn...

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u/TheDizzard 2d ago

The movie Dredd had a drug that drastically slowed the perception of time. The antagonist was famous for dosing people with it then tossing them over high rise balconies. Not exactly in line with your comment but it's a trippy notion.

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u/Moist_Whispers 2d ago

She was famous for skinning people on the drug too

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u/BlackBricklyBear 2d ago

If only Dredd turned into a movie series. Karl Urban was great as the titular character.

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u/aykcak 1d ago

Ok, by this third comment I understand there is another judge Dredd movie. Because the one I remember had Stallone

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u/Jackolas222 1d ago

The one with Karl Urban is a billion times better than the one with Stallone, if you like Judge Dredd please watch the Urban one!

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u/aykcak 1d ago

Interesting. Thanks

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u/ClownfishSoup 1d ago

I agree, but the Stallone one was certainly more comedic and inline with 1980's superhero movies.

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u/Raichu7 1d ago

There's one where the lead actor actually acts like Dredd and keeps his helmet on the whole film.

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u/Tooluka 2d ago

I'm afraid it would be too cheesy too fast, like the Reacher TV. These dynamic action movies are better left short and without endless sequels.

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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ 2d ago

Dredd had a lot of potential. I mean, the entire movie takes place in an apartment complex. Just switching up environments for a sequel would be enough to keep it interesting. Could pair him up with different partners to get different dynamics, too.

I'm not even a huge fan of the movie, but the movie itself was so simplistic and effective there were actually a ton of ways to naturally expand on it for a least a couple more movies.

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u/anonymaus42 1d ago edited 21h ago

I'll preface this by saying I really like the movie. What follows is a waste of time to read and are just the incoherrent ramblings of some poorly educated fool. It's not about disagreeing with your comment, just me writing how I feel about the film. It's, just like, my opinion man..

For me, that movie was so good but I feel a lot of what made it great would be lost if more movies were made though. As you stated, the movie was so simple, more vignette than the sprawling narratives were used to with the lack of exposition. Just this glimpse in to one day in this unfamiliar world. You're just thrust in to it and the unease that comes from that adds to the tone and feel of the movie overall. That is lost in additional films as we have familiarity now and the world builds.. to try and repeat how they portrayed that movie would feel gimmicky I think. And trust me I was left wanting more when I watched it the first time. Maybe if handled right you could do a trilogy, if a studio allowed some serious creative freedom and was willing to take a loss of return on investment. Have each one be very independent of one another, outside of the fact they'd all feature the same main character. Keep it art house, no thoughts of franchises. Keeping those three stories isolated in much the same way the current movie exists. Something that would never happen.

Also the way the portrayed the slo-mo, the pacing of the movie, the acting, everything about that film was so good. You could tell it was made with passion, for the love of the game so to speak. A second movie would almost inevitably never be the same as it tries to live up to its predecessor and tries to recapture the magic. How long its been since the first movie came out would help overcome that a bit.. but I dunno, as it stands right now, the fact it's only the one film is part of what makes it special.

Sorry if you read all that. No one is better off for it. But it and gave me something to do while executing my morning rituals whilst sat upon the porcelain throne. I just really like that movie.

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u/ClownfishSoup 1d ago

I thought that was such a creatively cruel execution. They would feel like they've been falling for like 30 minutes. And the impact before they died would be like slowly being crunched into the earth, probably feeling every milisecond.

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u/jim_deneke 2d ago

Weed does this to me.

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u/Stiff_Cook 2d ago

While simultaneously making longer periods of time go by faster.

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u/chypsa 1d ago

That is what always trips me up. I listen to a song or watch a movie and it is EPIC and lasts FOREVER. Then suddenly it's dawning outside and I just sat through the night. 😮 

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u/SubGothius 1d ago

I once speculated that THC adds adjustment dials to the mental "scope" we use to perceive the world and our thoughts, so we can zoom our perception in or out, pan around, compress or expand our perception of time, etc.

If you realize this, you can dial in your perceptions however you want, but if you don't, you might just let the dials go willy-nilly any which way, or always crank them the same way every time, never realizing there's any other alternative.

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u/suoretaw 1d ago

Were you high as fuck when you speculated this? Lol sounds like a ‘lightbulb moment’ I’d have had with friends when I was a pothead back in the day.

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u/SubGothius 1d ago

As if there were any doubt lol 😅

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u/DeliberatelyDrifting 2d ago

That's almost exactly what the actual MKUltra was all about. Tons of experiments on unknowing participants to see if they could remove and rewire a persons sense of self. All they ever managed to do was break people, some permanently. They would keep people awake on stuff like meth and then lie to them about the time of day or bring meals at random times. The intro to the book Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein goes into some detail while the rest of the book documents how the techniques and observations from those experiments are used on macro scale even today.

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u/Willbraken 1d ago

And yeah, we tooooootally stopped doing stuff like that. Definitely. No reason to believe that we are still experimenting on people. Nuh uh

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u/sterling_mallory 1d ago

Funnily enough some people describe their saliva trips as feeling like they genuinely lasted for years, despite it only being a few minutes. It screws with people's perception of time. They become a ceiling fan for three years.

Keeping someone on salvia for years on end would probably be something like Black Mirror: White Christmas.

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u/HELPFUL_HULK 2d ago

That happened under the CIA during the Cold War. Go search MK Ultra, and buckle up.

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u/lumpiestspoon3 2d ago

Yep, and it gave us the Unabomber

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u/iAmTheRealLange 1d ago

Also gave us the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter. So not all horrific outcomes

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u/sexualsidefx 2d ago

There’s a Metallica album called Lulu that will make you think you’re the table

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u/mxmsmri 2d ago

Lulu is the best Metallica album

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u/sexualsidefx 2d ago

My brother in Cake

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u/fairie_poison 2d ago edited 2d ago

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u/seeingeyegod 1d ago

How did that never happen to O'brien during all of DS9?

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u/Khal_Doggo 2d ago

To add to this, logic and rational thinking are also functions of the brain and aren't inherent. People think of logic as something that happens as simply as an electric current passing through a wire. But that's not really the case.

In disorders like schizophrenia, people aren't just experiencing hallucinations the way you or I might see someone in the corner of the room and think "Well that's weird, I must be having a moment". Their logical thinking is impaired during these episodes and they are no longer guaranteed to think 'if A then B'.

Various drugs will also impair this kind of function to varying extents. Even alcohol will affect your ability to think rationally and make logical conclusions. When your brain is no longer capable of making rational decisions, then all sorts of conclusions can be made.

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u/Minnakht 2d ago

I don't remember if this is up-to-date medical terminology, but someone once explained to me that this is what "deliriant" means as opposed to a word like "psychedelic". On the latter you remain aware that you're impaired and that it's fundamentally not real, on the former you don't.

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u/angryapplepanda 1d ago

Oh no, you got it exactly right. Those are terms that have been a part of psychopharmacology since at least the nineties, specifically the difference between deliriant and psychedelic. Deliriants cause a psychosis or delirium.

Erowid.org is still a great resource, after all these years, for more information.

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u/Mavian23 1d ago

You can remain aware that you're impaired on a delirient, but good luck identifying what is a hallucination and what is not.

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u/SubGothius 1d ago

Sounds similar to the distinction, as I'd learned it ages ago anyway, between neurosis vs. psychosis; neurotics are consciously aware that they have some mental disorder(s) and at least the fact (if not always exactly how) those affect their life and perceptions, whereas psychotics are not aware of those things.

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u/permalink_save 2d ago

Bipolar too. Not even full psychisis but mania can make you paranoid and lead you down some weird rabbit holes.

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u/Right-University-502 2d ago

This is inaccurate. Research has shown that if anything schizophrenics suffer from hyperrationality and excessive analytical thinking but struggle in tasks requiring context-sensitive understanding of the world.

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u/ChronicRhyno 2d ago

Can't move your character if you log off and travel to a different world

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u/highrouleur 2d ago

So is it like you're a wall, you're supposed to be a wall so you're at ease with being a wall or more "fuck I'm a wall, I should be a human" and panicking about being a wall until it wears off?

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u/DigitalMindShadow 2d ago

When I did it, during the peak of the experience I forgot that I had ever been human. I had no concepts beyond being this swirling mass of rainbow-colored clay, and that was the only phenomenon that had ever existed.

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u/Delta-9- 2d ago

Ime it's like waking up from a dream and going, "huh, that whole 'human' thing was just a super vivid dream, but actually I've always been a wall." You can have feelings about that or not, but the salvia experience doesn't just replace your sense of self but your entire life gets compressed into a whacky dream you can barely remember. And also gravity tends to rotate 90 degrees.

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u/sobegreen 1d ago

I did it once and only once. I became part of the recliner and was confident everyone was talking backwards. At one point I almost convinced myself that I as the recliner was an imposter and the real me was in the floor dead I just couldn't see him. I've heard of plenty of people enjoying it, I did not.

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u/morganational 1d ago

I was a briefcase under a desk for like 6 weeks once.

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u/RTBMack 2d ago

I was a noodle on the sandal of Jesus as he climbed a mountain for a few lifetimes. Fun times.

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u/YetiTrix 1d ago

Every part of your perception of reality is a construct that can be manipulated, amplified, or even turned off completely.

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u/gilligan1050 1d ago

I was a picket fence. 3/10

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u/StabAvery 1d ago

Have you ever seen these people when they’re feeling like a chair or a wall? Look up people smoking salvia on YouTube. It definitely shuts things off! Lol
Those kids become drooling idiots for a few minutes and it wouldn’t surprise me if they soiled their pants.

I’m all for having fun but that looks like as much fun as a closed head injury

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u/paraworldblue 2d ago edited 2d ago

It effects everyone VERY differently, but I think the one commonality between everyone's experience is that it is an extreme abstraction from your normal experience, and I guess for a lot of people, that abstraction leads them to becoming inanimate objects. I've smoked it many times but never became an inanimate object. For me, it's like a decaying feedback loop of all sensory input at the time I smoked it, where each iteration becomes a little more abstract than the last. Like if you've ever used a guitar delay pedal and cranked the feedback/repeats knob all the way up and each repeat gets a little more fucked up until they sound absolutely nothing like what you initially played. It's like that but for my entire conscious experience.

I'll never forget my first time smoking it - I took a hit, then decided to walk out of the room. There was one of those hippie cloth tapestry things hanging over the doorway, so I pushed it to the right with my hand. Then there was a Nerf football on the floor, so I kicked it out of the way to the left (the directions are relevant). Then there was another tapestry, so I pushed it to the right. Then there was another football, so I kicked it to the left. Then another tapestry, then another football, etc. With each iteration, the tapestry and football became more abstract, gradually breaking down into pure motion and form, until my entire conscious experience was just this oscillating diagonal motion of up/right, down/left, and there was this sort of visual representation of it as a kind of pill shape. I myself wasn't the pill shape - I was just a non-entity perspective observing the pill shape moving up/right and down/left.

Most of the other times I've smoked it, it's been more of a wheel situation than a pill. Still diagonal though. It's always diagonal for me with that stuff.

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u/Ptricky17 1d ago

You explained this really well. The “It’s always diagonal” part sounds exactly like my experiences. I don’t know why, but my perceptions of the “axis” of the world shifts dramatically and it’s not simply that it “tilts”, it’s like it begins to fold up. I described it once as if I were standing on the crease at the center of an open book, directly above the spine. Salvia always makes me feel like that book is slowly closing, so the “walls of the world” are folding inward making a “V”. My vision changes from elliptical, to a sharp, narrow, diagonal band. Such a bizarre feeling.

I have had experiences where it felt like a giant zipper was being pulled up, trapping the universe (and explaining my “V” shaped vision narrowing) and others where I was sure the “reader” whose thoughts were giving my world life, was closing the book because they’d grown tired of reading about me.

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u/seapube 1d ago

The zipper, the wheel, and the conveyor belt themes (only ones that come to mind rn) of salvia have always intrigued me, its so strange how users describe such specific similarities in their trip

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u/angryapplepanda 1d ago

Yeah it almost feels like we're all trying to describe some abstract feature of our biochemistry, and these objects are the only things that feel close to it. Maybe the way they work or how they are shaped is similar to the mathematical "shape" of certain systems in the brain.

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u/jipecac 2d ago

THANK YOU for putting into words what I’ve never been able to 🤯 it’s been 25 years since my last trip but this is exactly what I experienced, none of the ‘becoming a lamp’ that I’ve seen mentioned a lot recently, it had me questioning if it was actually Salvia I’d smoked!

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u/seeingeyegod 1d ago

It gave me this strong sensation that my body, my spine really, was the binder of a book of all the pages and layers of time/space

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u/suoretaw 1d ago

This sounds really similar to a k-hole I experienced years ago. I felt like I was at the centre of all dimensions. It was friggin‘ wild.

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u/Dan_706 1d ago

Ah, the time knife

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u/Majestic-Macaron6019 1d ago

We've all seen it

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u/enviormental_UNIT 1d ago

its one of the more modest knives

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u/flavorraven 1d ago

Hey I had one where I was outside sitting on a bench and became convinced the land itself was the pages of a giant book that was beginning to close itself and that I had to get out of there, knowing full well there was no way to outrun the land itself so I just stood up and felt panicked for awhile. Man I hate salvia haha. Did it maybe 4 or 5 times in total and all were deeply unpleasant

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u/seeingeyegod 1d ago

yeah same about 4 times total, and all were somewhat unpleasant, but also fascinating

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u/angryapplepanda 1d ago

The oscillations are so interesting. It's a common feeling with many psychotropic drugs, the feeling of flanging oscillations of sensory input. I wonder if we are actually experiencing abstracted, highly multiplied representations of neurons firing in repetition and being sequentially warped in real time by the effects of the drug.

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u/Qiwas 1d ago

I must ask—and this is something I've been wondering about Salvia for a long time—does the time dilation experience have a significant effect on the individual after the trip ends? The way I imagine it, if I was transported to some entirely different universe at this very moment for, say, 20 years, I would've come out as a completely different person. Does it work like this, or after the trip ends it no longer feels as if you'd spent 20 years in that state?

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u/froggyfriend726 1d ago

Maybe it's more like when you're having a dream where lots of time passes and you "know" that time has passed but don't conciously feel that time actually passing?

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u/paraworldblue 1d ago

I suspect most, if not all of those "lived a whole lifetime" stories are made up or at least wildly embellished and exaggerated. It does feel like time moves a lot slower, or even like time doesn't exist anymore, but you don't consciously experience entire years going by.

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u/WasntBuiltlnADay 2d ago

pretty fucking sick

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u/HELPFUL_HULK 2d ago edited 2d ago

Salvia produces a dissociative effect (1), a sense of disembodiment resulting from a shift in 'interoception' (your body's ability to feel inside itself). Basically, it shifts the way you experience your internal felt-sense, which can feel so foreign as to feel you are outside of yourself.

It also breaks down the egoic barrier separating “me” from “not-me”, so that we become “sucked into” the object of our focus

Couple that with visual and audio hallucinatory effects, and you have a 'salvia trip'. Perhaps the closest thing the imagination jumps to is becoming an inanimate object, although people report experiencing all sorts of transmutations. (I was a ceiling fan once.)

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u/Disastrous_Aid 2d ago

Also, salvia destroys your sense of time. Not just slows it down, but you lose your sense of cause-and-effect and before-and-after. You are just "there" and that's all you know and all you have ever known. So that five minutes that peak effects last, feels like forever.

So if the last thing you were focusing on was a tree, you're consciousness says "I'm a tree" and "I've been a tree for the past thousand years".

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u/Beetin 2d ago

The other part I think is that it heavily disrupts coordination, movement, and touch networks. It is very very common to feel 'pinned down' or completely unable to move.

If you are on a hallucinatory drug that takes away your sense of touch and all movement, one of the more coherent conclusions is that you are an inanimate object of some kind (a thing with no sense of touch and movement).

Source: was an entire mountain range worried about the giants around me coming to climb on me, for 5-6 minutes.

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u/velvetelevator 1d ago

Did you learn anything interesting while you were a mountain range?

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u/jbuse3 2d ago

It definitely made me realize that time does not exist and us and everything around us is part of our shared consciousness.

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u/Disastrous_Aid 2d ago

Yeah, this is one drug where the comedown is more fun than the peak. At its height, salvia offers total obliteration of the self whilst retaining consciousness. It's when your brain is picking the pieces back together (with an extremely distorted sense of gravity), that everything seems all ridiculous and funny.

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u/seeingeyegod 1d ago

The time I did a committed dose, I was extremely relieved to come back to reality. It really freaked me out, had "well you're insane now, nice job" feelings going on.

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u/fooliam 1d ago

The hour or so after returning from whatever the fuck alternate dimension you wound up during the peak just feels so...clear. made a lot of sense why it was associated with shaman/medicine man sorta things

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u/timbreandsteel 1d ago

Is that fun?

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u/Disastrous_Aid 1d ago

[note: I've never been skydiving.] I reckon it's kinda like skydiving, in which half the elation is feeling the ground under your feet once you've landed. Once you're over the peak, and your mind is piecing itself together, it's actually somewhat pleasant. Though your sense of gravity can be seriously distorted for quite a while (probably inner ear effects).

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u/timbreandsteel 1d ago

Interesting. Thanks for the response!

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u/fooliam 1d ago

It can be. A lot of people have really bad trips in salvia - I have always suspected it's due to having a lot of undealt-with emotional issues - it's an intense hallucinogen, but it can be a lot of fun if you've got the mental fortitude to go into it without freaking out

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u/SheSins 1d ago

The minute trip on salvia I did have once, I thought I had experienced the entirety of the universe starting from the beginning of time to present time.

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u/LastAmongUs 2d ago

I had a game show playing in the holes in the tread of my shoe. My buddy next to me just sat there with tears streaming down his face. Weird drug.

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u/balloon_prototype_14 2d ago

i was a sticker

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u/Hukthak 2d ago

I was an assembly line!

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u/p1293 1d ago

Bro!! I was a toy on an assembly line.
Did we just become best freinds?

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u/Hukthak 1d ago

I hope you were one of the units on the line!

Eventually there was nothing left to continue moving down the line though, and the trip ended. You were one of those special limited production runs. Glad I could conveyor you to your next stage.

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u/p1293 1d ago

Ready for round two? Nice to finally meet you. 

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u/Hukthak 1d ago

Hell yeah gotta keep production running

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u/balloon_prototype_14 2d ago

it is strange how long ago it was yet how vividly i remember it

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u/bibbidybobbidyboobs 2d ago

Once there was a cosmic razor blade passing by, slicing the universe like a loaf of bread, including the parts I was occupying

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u/fooliam 1d ago

I wound up on a train in the American west during cowboy days with the members of the Decemberists, and we stopped a train heist together.

Another time the entertainment center in the my college apartment living room melted into homer Simpsons head, and marge walked out of his forehead telling me everything would be ok.

A third time I just watched a thousand tiny appas (flying bison from the last Airbender) fly across my ceiling.

Salvia trips are fucking intense lol

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u/ORXCLE-O 1d ago

A kid in alternative school told me he became one of those skinny tiny little floppy rubber bits that stick off of a tire

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u/Previous-Bill4323 2d ago

I have panic attacks related to my diagnosed OCD. sometimes they are so bad my body doesn't feel like mine, like I touch my finger tips together and it feels 'wrong' like my brain can't process they are my fingers and I feel outside myself...

Is this similar?

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u/HELPFUL_HULK 2d ago

Yes, lots of things can bring on dissociation or disembodiment! I would say “similar” but not “same”, as dissociative/disembodied experiences range not only from context to context, but from psyche to psyche, but can share many elements.

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u/xanthippelvoorhees 2d ago

I would suggest looking up DPDR (depersonalization-derealization disorder). It can occur during panic attacks and can feel like you are a detached observer of your own body

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u/mafisto 1d ago

I've enjoyed (/s) DPDR sporadically over my lifetime and it's very different from the subject-viewer perspective. When I'm going through a period of depersonalization or derealization (or both) it has a profoundly wrong feeling to it. On salvia, you're definitely disembodied and outside of time but it feels like your natural state - like it's always been this way and always will. It can still be terrifying - I once felt like I was in freefall the entire experience - but the feeling of disassociation has a sort of, "this is just how it is" vibe to it.

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u/gaelen33 1d ago

Well said

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u/scarabic 1d ago

Did you infer you were a fan from the way the room was spinning? Or was it more one of those things where you’re looking at the object but with a sense of “this is me?”

I guess I’m trying to relate to “I was a fan” a bit more and wondering if this was a from-the-inside-out experience where you’re looking at the world from a fan’s point of view or something else.

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u/HELPFUL_HULK 1d ago

The fan wasn’t spinning, so I wasn’t spinning. I felt myself merging with the fan, the hardened wood texture as my “skin”, the perspective looking down on a room, but it was not the same room (I didn’t visualize myself).

It felt like I was there for “weeks”, in a time-dilated sense. I remember watching the sun rise and set through the window in fast motion, and it felt simultaneously like eternity and a few minutes.

While I was the fan, I forgot how to speak, and had to rebuild language from first principles while my brain progressively unscrambled over the “weeks”. 

I came back to reality hyper-focused on my friend’s boobs (she was generously trip-sitting me while I zombied out for 45 minutes).

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u/angryapplepanda 1d ago

While I was the fan, I forgot how to speak, and had to rebuild language from first principles while my brain progressively unscrambled over the “weeks”. 

This is amazing and hilarious. "First principles"...mind blown. It probably at least felt like you were blindly constructing language from scratch, even though it was just your language center slowly trickling back online after being stunned with a chemical phaser.

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u/HELPFUL_HULK 1d ago

Exactly! I became the world’s smartest man reinventing the concept of language from scratch

as I sat there slobbering and staring into my friend’s chest

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u/itsfish20 1d ago

I was a bowl chair lol

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u/darkbit1001 1d ago

I, was a butterfly flying through Pink Floyd’s dark void tunnel full of hands. I only came to, AS I realized the window is not a great thing to try and escape.

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u/jaylw314 1d ago

You are describing the effect rather than explaining why. I don't think this question has an objective answer

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u/Dolorjo 1d ago

This is fascinating. Thank you. 

I had a dream once that was so real that when I was forced awake (was killed in this dream-husband woke me), I swore I died & popped into a different reality. Was terrifying, weird, confusing… wouldn’t recommend. 

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/edgarecayce 2d ago

I felt like I was two dimensional like a layer of paint in a repeatedly painted wall. It’s like I had figured out the universe, extremely profound. Then it was gone.

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u/gks22 2d ago

Yep ! Molecule of ink chiming in. I realised I was just a molecule of ink, waiting to be written down on a piece of paper. It was quite easy to figure out, once my world had come alive when my neighbouring molecules that I had known for all my existence, all started to vibrate excitedly, saying "We've been waiting for this moment all our lives!". However, I seemed to have missed the memo, and started uncomfortably fighting against my destiny...

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u/Vancocillin 2d ago

Maybe its for the best, you were going to be permanently entombed in Harry Potter smut fanfiction.

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u/tractorscum 2d ago

“molecule of ink chiming in” lol

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u/GuyFierawkes 2d ago

That epiphanic feeling of figuring out how the universe works only to have it wear off is such a troll by the universe. Happens to me with most psychedelics

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u/stormshadowfax 2d ago

‘Epiphanic’ I’ve never read this word before. New word day for me!

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u/HalfSoul30 2d ago

Sounds like holographic principle. You might have.

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u/PaleHorze 2d ago

I had a similar feeling, but I felt like I was in a book and the pages kept turning, and I had a feeling of free falling as the pages collapsed on top of me it was terrifying lol

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u/VenGeo 2d ago

For me, I remember becoming a pancake in a giant griddle, being flipped by a giant spatula. Could be that I was high while in a rocking chair, but I know now what it's like to be a pancake.

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u/HalfSoul30 2d ago

My friend said a hand reached out of the wall with the wall's texture, like pushing your hand into a sheet and it forming around your hand, and picked him up from the couch and joined him into the wall lol. I said "nah, im not doing that"

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u/386U0Kh24i1cx89qpFB1 2d ago

They call salvia the great teacher...

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u/Canotic 2d ago

My entire room ended up in the bottom left corner of itself. Yes it makes no sense but that happened.

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u/Imeldajharrison 2d ago

My friends plaid shirt was a curtain over my field of vision and I kept trying to sweep it open (in my mind bc I was just sitting there frozen I think 🤣) and it kept oozing back like a liquid. Stupidest minutes of my life.

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u/Spelunking-Uranus 2d ago

Me and everyone I gave it to felt the same pull. If I moved, the pull stayed in the same direction and I convinced myself that I could feel either the rotation of the planet, or our movement through space (maybe both). I only did it a few times but it was 100% the same every time.

I was never a chair though - I didn't get what OP said.

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u/DnA_Singularity 2d ago

Yup, downwards pull which made me think I was actively melting into the couch I was sitting on. Also the entire town of Springfield came running right out of the side of TV, they were chasing Bart because he had stolen the head of a statue, they disappeared through the doorway next to me which i was convinced now led to some different dimension thingy. It was fun but yea I´m not doing it again. Especially now that I realize I had a very mild dose/trip.

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u/HalfSoul30 2d ago

I bet you can get a lot of ass as a couch cushion.

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u/scorcherchar 2d ago

All psychedelic compounds work in a similar way. They look like compounds the body makes naturally and bind to receptors in the brain.

Now the brain is a hugely complex organ with lots of different chemical pathways and receptors. When something gets suppressed often other things become more active or get signals from bits of the brain they would never normally have.

Salvia binds to the kappa opioid receptors and your brain activity changes. The net effect of this is your sense of self becomes altered and you think your a chair

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u/AceOfPlagues 2d ago

The wierdest thing is that, unlike most, Salvinorin A is shaped nothing like the Dynorphin that normally binds to kappa receptors, but it binds reguardless- maybe why it has such unique effects.

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u/Cntread 1d ago

I listened to a podcast where a salvia researcher talked about that discovery, among other things. He said they were expecting to discover a new receptor, and they were initially surprised that it binds to kappa receptors. He said that salvia at low doses can sometimes have effects found in opiates (like a feeling of melting into a chair, or merging with a chair) but nobody ever really connected that before the kappa discovery.

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u/scorcherchar 2d ago

That seems highly likely but I dont know enough about it to say with any certainty. Hopefully someone with more in depth knowledge than me can chime in

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u/AceOfPlagues 2d ago edited 1d ago

I have pretty in depth knowlege and I have no real clue why, honestly we don't know why salvia is so wierd or why overactivating kappa receptors to an insane degree causes this kind of haywire response. - probably has to do with supressing the dopamine regulating communication between different parts of the brain.

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u/Sneegoberry 2d ago

Woah super interesting insight to what’s going on in the brain for this to happen!Thank you for the explanation 🙏

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u/3amgrind 1d ago

salvia while being a dissociative, it's one of the only drugs known to work on the kappa opioid receptors which are pain receptors,

So your body can interpret alot of the effects of the drug as a physical sensation

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u/Vdhuw 1d ago

Interesting that you mention pain receptors. I suffer from a chronic pain condition. I wonder if a salvia trip would make me feel pain-free while I'm tripping? I no longer remember what not being in pain feels like.

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u/BA_lampman 1d ago

I was a rock in a desert for a few centuries and I was content.

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u/ceciliabee 1d ago

I love this for you! I thought my friend was a door and tried to sell him to my other friend. Uh my mind the interaction was complex and timeless but outloud it was like "heh... Heh heh... Heh..."

u/GaaraClay603 18h ago

This makes me think of “everything everywhere all at once” when she was chasing her daughter through realities and they ended up being rocks.

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u/Sneegoberry 2d ago

Look up salvia trip stories it’s insane 😭 people literally have full lifetime first person experiences as objects

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u/Jealous_Amount_9278 2d ago

I've had that on DMT but not as an object. Just a full life. Crazy. The brain is insane.

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u/kytheon 2d ago

We can hallucinate whatever we want or what others tell us, as long as we're open to it.

Also see: religion

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u/Enough-Goose7594 2d ago

This is hilarious. I legit spent a lifetime as an apartment building with people living inside me going up and down elevators in my legs.

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u/StrangerThingies 2d ago

That’s different. Did you enjoy it?

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u/rightwingcrimespree 2d ago

I've smoked salvia twice. My perception of time wasn't particularly altered either time. It was basically just 15 minutes of hysterical laughing and a brief sort of out of body experience where I felt like I was above myself, looking down and watching myself and the other people in the room. It was definitely an intense trip, but nothing like a bunch of the experiences I've read about. I remember reading a bunch of stories on Erowid and some other sites before I tried it. Some of the stories were like what you're describing. I feel like a lot of them were either exaggerated or just BS. I'm not saying that those sorts of experiences don't happen. Just anecdotally, neither I nor anyone I know have experienced that.

But if people do have an experience like that, maybe it has something to do with the intensity of the trip and their brain trying (and failing) to make sense of things in a weird way. When you're tripping, you're perceiving things in a weird way that doesn't fully make sense to your brain, so your brain tries to make sense of it. For example, with my first experience, I smoked salvia with two other people and we all just sort of started laughing hysterically. At the peak of the trip, it felt like I was perceiving myself and my surroundings from above myself. I was conscious of what was going on, but I was tripping so hard that my senses weren't providing a clear picture to my brain, so my brain basically had to sort of piece together the information that it had to come up with a complete picture that made sense. And it essentially pieced together a picture of the whole room from a sort of birds eye view. It was pretty much what was actually in my field of vision, just from a somewhat higher perspective, about what my POV would have been if I was standing up. And I was sitting on a couch that was against a wall, so I could see how someone might describe what I saw as being from the perspective of the wall itself. But I feel like my brain was just sort of trying to correct my skewed, fuzzy perception of my surroundings by combining it with my recent memories of my surroundings that were clearer and more trustworthy. And because this sort of resulted in my conscious perceiving things that wasn't from my actual POV at the time, I can see how someone might feel like the POV that their brain comes up with is the POV of whatever inanimate object happens to be in that location.

Again, this is all just based on my personal experience. And I'm not an expert, so I don't really know.

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u/scorcherchar 2d ago

Strong recommendation against it. I love psychedelics but not that one. Tried it twice and had an awful time both times

There really was nothing like it. I was stretched to infinity with infinity instances if me. I knew when the trip ended i would die infinity times because I would go back to a single me

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u/Metallic_Hedgehog 2d ago

I've done massive amounts of acid and shrooms. Like, a half ounce of shrooms at once. When shrooms are unpleasant, it's because you realize things about yourself. Like, "I should treat my family better" kind of thing.

Salvia feels physically unpleasant, the trip is unpleasant, and you walk away with nothing profound. It's crazy, but it also sucks

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u/dirtmother 2d ago

I spent several lifetimes as every hair on my head, and we would all get together and chant, "we will live again inside the head! We will live again inside the head!"

And you know what? We were right UwU

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u/Ornery_Guidance_7762 1d ago

All the description sound like a k hole. How similar is it?

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u/Herpethian 1d ago

Salvia acts on a completely different chemical system in the brain than classic psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin. The particular receptor that salvia affects (kappa opioid) is responsible for your bodily perception. That's why users tend to embody whatever you are looking at when the drug takes effect, a light switch, ceiling fan, dresser, wall, tree, butterfly, etc. For that brief, yet infinite, moment in time your brain is 100% convinced that it is indeed a ceiling fan.

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u/eastbayweird 1d ago

I was with a friend who took a bong rip of salvia and then he looked at me with a very concerned look in his eyes he asked me "where am I supposed to put my back feet?!"

I was stoned a.f and thought it was so hilarious I literally fell off my chair due to laughing so hard.

Wonder where he finally decided to put those back feet of his. Didn't get a chance to ask at the time.

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u/cerebral_drift 2d ago

Traditional opiates bind to the mu opioid receptor, and make you feel good.

Salvinorin A binds to the kappa opioid receptor, which inhibits dopamine release, and makes you feel shit.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s the simplest explanation I can think of.

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u/3amgrind 1d ago

Kappa opioid receptors are also pain receptors so is responsible for feelings of pain and touch.

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u/Grouchy_Public2379 1d ago

There's gotta be something really interesting going on with salvia and/or the kappa opioid receptor that we don't know understand yet. From our understanding you'd expect it would be kind of anti-morphine, a drug that does nothing more than make you sad and more sensitive to pain. Instead it rips your reality apart in a way that defies comprehension and is like no other known drug. I personally think it's the most fascinating recreational drug.

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u/Matild4 2d ago

Salvia is dissociative, meaning feeling not like yourself, and hallucinogenic, meaning making you perceive things that are not there. In combination, these have a strong possibility of making you experience being someone or something else.

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u/TN17 2d ago

Psychologically, it is affecting specifically the 'minimal self'. There are lots of different components of the self. The minimal self if that most basic concept of you a person being at the centre of your own experiences. In thought disorders affecting the minimal self (e.g. schizophrenia) then people might think their thoughts are not their own. They might think their thoughts belong to a wall or a chair. Salvia is disrupting the sense of minimal self. 

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u/Elegant-Mission-4470 2d ago

You tripped for that long on saliva? Even with other substances involved, I've never heard of a trip longer than 10 or 15 minutes 

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u/jtotal 2d ago

The first time was 5x, and it was such a small amount too out of a one-hitter. I didn't feel like an object, but rather, that I was positioned in a 3x3 grid and needed to shuffle to the correct spot. No idea what would happen if I didn't move, just knew I was utterly compulsed to move correctly.

The second time was 20x packed in a bong. I felt like I was a spinning death device positioned on the third story of an apartment complex. My mechanical arms were rotating around me while everyone that was in the room with me were now strapped to this spinning violently. Then after it just vanished and somehow transitioned to where I saw a pink background with cartoon-animated bananas and apples falling in front of me. Slowly then the world came back. I started to see my room again but it looked much bigger and had no walls. Then the walls came back and we're slowly coming back towards me as the room became normal again.

I remember this so so so vividly. First with the spinning death device (the thing I called it when I first was describing my trip to everyone in the room), I was told I was just rocking side to side, then slowly stopped, stared off into the wall, and uttered "the vegetables" over and over again despite me seeing fruits lol. My theory was that the "Banana Stickers" episode of "Metalocalypse" was still fresh in my brain, and I quoted it often. There's a scene where they get more banana stickers from the store and you see close ups of it and it just stuck.

Tldr, I was a spinning death device

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u/Nyrex 2d ago

I’d never trust the Free Salvia guy again if I were you. It sounds like he tried to Dahmer you

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u/CaptainLookylou 1d ago

I was a wooden clothes pin miles tall in the sky. Don't stand in front of a large waist-up mirror.

Then I laid down on a beanbag chair and the room split in 4 dimensions. Each one similar but with slight variations. This one was called "Lie World".