The Ultimate Pranayama

Last night:

Sitting upright on my straight-back chair in the bedroom as usual. Dog is resting at my left on the near corner of the bed. I descend into salvia space and begin pranayama, basic breathing exercises. I close my eyes and relax into the feeling for a minute or so and then re-open them. I now see my reality around me breathing with me. As I exhale, the room around me bows outward with my breath, and flexes back inward with each inhalation. A very beautiful state to be in. Reminiscent of Neo in "The Matrix" at the moment where he achieved mastery of the Matrix and of Agent Smith. His inhalation, with the accompanying special effect of the world around him bowing inward, captures the sensation closely enough.

I continue with this, noticing how the furniture and other fixtures in the room actually shift sideways, either to the left or the right, as the room expands. I notice that this effect doesn't end at my skin, either. I am also expanding and contracting, more so than just my respiration would normally cause. Then I begin to perceive that the room around me, and my body, are one material, a flexible, semirigid almost gel-like pseudosubstance, which I interpreted as the substance of consciousness itself, how I perceive it, the texture that I assign it. The very texture of dreams. I can expand or contract any part of it at will, and lengthen or contract parts of this space, but I also realized that only I would be able to see this because I am only affecting the structure of the dream that is reality and not its contents. At least, only I *should be* able to see this. Thus a ruler on the floor might look longer or shorter to me, but it is still twelve inches long; it is the dream itself that I am seemingly affecting, the dream that is reality, thus any measurements of said space in said reality would not reflect my actions upon it, as such measurements can only be done within that very dream world that I am affecting the very basis of. My efforts would only be apparent from the "outside" of reality, in salvia space. Or so it would seem.

I also note to myself that this doesn't seem to bother the dog any. He's not asleep, but he's resting and looks back at me quizzically as I look toward him. Nothing unusual here, nor did I expect there to be.

As I go even deeper, eyes still open, small additional dose of salvia, I start to focus upon a point on the grille of the air filter in front of me off to my right. I start to see and feel the space torquing, twisting in a curve, eventually a semicircular twist, distorting the horizontal slats of the grille. Then it twists about in an almost violent manner, seeming to distort space itself, and several crack-like lines or perhaps edges of folds of some sort, appear in the air before me. One of them, seemingly a fold of spatial distortion, or more likely a fold *in the dream of space,* a fold in the dream which *is* space, approaches my faithful doggy friend to my left.

Now he bolts! And moreover, as it was happening, as that twist approached his side of me, I *knew* that he would bolt. He runs diagonally across the bed, over my wife's legs, and sits in the farthest corner away from me. Hardly typical behavior, but typical when daddy's on salvia apparently.

At this point I snap myself out of it on reflex and call out to my sleeping spouse, bless her heart, to tell her that *it* had happened yet again. This I do not for her benefit, but for mine. If I can tell her, I get to keep the memories. This works in two ways; she generally remembers the gist of what I told her, and when I can make the effort to tell her, I generally remember it myself as well. I've tried voice recorders; no way. Too distracting.

She wishes I didn't fuck with the dog's mind. He's emotionally delicate. I try to tell her that I don't do it on purpose.

As an aside, at one point when I was both perceiving reality as having an almost gel-like texture (but really almost nothing like a gel; words are insufficient to describe this,) and as I was also starting to play around with the space around me, and was almost lost in a swirl of complex imagery and perceptions, I had a piercing insight. Something about the "gel," about the texture of reality that I was perceiving. It was like I directly intuitively understood what it was, and thus what it implied reality was. I knew in that moment that I knew one of the deepest secrets of the universe. Then the fight began to keep that memory, but I was in too deep to dredge it back up with me. Salvia seems to allow you to get to very deep levels of reality where you learn incredible things, but getting back out with what you have learned is another thing entirely.

That Damned Glow Again

Last night for the first time in a while I allowed myself to take enough salvia to go into a closed-eye vision state. I'd taken a short break to assimilate my last trip, which was a bad one involving my consciousness being stretched into a long sheet and being drawn inexorably into what felt like some massive cosmic pulley of some sort, where I knew (due to INTENSE deja-vu) that I would undergo a *snap* or sudden intense pressure that would obliterate my personality, and then I opened my eyes as the room around me fractured in many places showing black chaos seeping through; what I've come to call the "Outer Darkness." My reality was dissolving, or seemed to be at any rate. What I mean is, it seemed that my whole life was revealed as a shallow masturbatory dream and it was over now so I could see how utterly ridiculously false it all was, and in reality I was the sole existing being/consciousness in the universe, once again consigned to an utterly lonely existance. It felt very real... Let's just say that it wasn't fun.

So I was mildly tripping last night, testing the cosmic waters as it were, closed eyes, having a vision, and I clearly recall that my mind was doing many different things at the same time, as if it were several orders of magnitude more complex than it actually is. This is hard to describe; I felt like my intellect was this enormous, convoluted thing, perhaps something vaguely like an office building full of many busy people all working on diverse, highly complex tasks, only I was each and every one of them all at once, and amazingly I was (at the time) not only aware of being all of them at once but also aware of all the minute details of each of their many complex projects! (Those details were the first thing to go as I gradually left this state; I could feel the memories of them bleed out of me against my will; the only memory left was the memory of having all those myriad other complex thoughts with no salient details left.)

As I gradually came 'back' to my reality it felt like I was forced into giving most of that vast seemingly-polymathic mind up in order to 'fit' into my self here. (hard to explain) Then on coming back to my usual reality in my bedroom and upon opening my eyes, I began to see a whitish glow come into the room. I sensed that it was no different from previous greenish glows. I get the strong impression that these glowing fields are, or at least feel like, spatial distortions of some kind, like induced ripples or interfaces in the consciousness-fabric of my/our reality, and not merely glowing hallucinatory spherical fields of light. I don't only see them; I also feel them pass through my body as they move through me, as if they distorted the geometry of my being as they passed. And then, yet again, and completely unexpected, it happened! As the glowing, expanding sphere of light progressed by me and through me and moved toward my dog asleep on the nearby corner of the bed and started to make contact with him, he instantly awakened with a noticable start and literally ran diagonally to the back corner of the bed, farthest away from me and the light, behind my sleeping wife. He literally raced ahead of the glow to get back there, and then cowered in place. He didn't just move away from the glow this time; he actually panicked and ran away from it.

I called out to my wife and awakened her (in the traditional manner!) and told her that once again "it" had happened, and she (unsurprised at this point) noted that the dog was indeed plainly terrified, hunkered down in that far corner. So I had seen the glow come into the room in the usual manner, if not the usual color, but the dog reacted more violently than ever before in the past. There was no sound that might have startled it; I was just sitting there in my chair, very still and very quiet, serene beyond belief as it was happening, and only realized that the glow had awakened and frightened the dog *as that occurred.* In other words, I was so relaxed that I didn't even anticipate anything unusual happening and only came to full awareness of the fact that once again my meditations were having a subjective (of sorts) real-world effect, as it happened and not before. The dog's reaction was startling enough to me to bring me to immediate full awareness. I had clear recall of all that transpired. There can be no mistake here: something is happening that is not explained by or even allowed by the normal consensual view of this universe. This place cannot be what it appears to be. I am still not 100% convinced, not a complete "believer," being a skeptic by nature, and so I will still "experiment" along these lines and continue to observe the reactions of my wife and dog, but really, this happens consistantly, every time I see the glow. Not once have I seen it come into the room as it does from time to time and *not* awaken (or at least visibly disturb) either the dog, my wife, or both. This time, it had an even more pronounced effect.

Something unusual and atypical is going on here, and it's not me imagining it. This reality simply cannot be merely dead matter and energy and space and time as we believe it to be, cannot be a "billiard-ball Universe" as we most often conclude that it must be. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it must instead have its ultimate basis in consciousness. It certainly seems to me that this universe, this reality, must somehow be purely psychological in nature. Consiousness has to be the ground of all being. Nothing else can adequately explain what is happening to me.

The Fly And I

This entry is not as much about Salvia Divinorum as it is about my life as a shaman, or whatever the hell I am. Sure, I experiment with Salvia Divinorum in an attempt to understand more about reality and my mind and how the two interact, but I had a history before that of let's say, an unusual life.

As a young boy of seven I woke up in the middle of the night one evening and the entire room was alive with large, detailed translucent to semitransparent insects of all kinds, crawling, jumping, creeping and flying all over the room, on every surface, and hovering or zipping around in the air. A row of ten-inch aphids walked up one side of the dresser, across the top, and down the other side like ducks in a shooting gallery, while my head was repeatedly getting buzzed by a Meganeura monyii, the extinct dragonfly with the three-foot wingspan. And they never went away, at least not completely. It was the beginning of a lifetime of hypnagogic hallucinations, always present in the background. (I also had some epileptiform seizures at this time of my life, attributed to a cat allergy.) I remember as a kid I used to look at a "scene," and if I liked it I had to try not to blink, because every time I blinked the "channel" would change, as it were, and it would be a different scene. Everything from bugs or animals to geometrics or cityscapes or hovering piles of what looked like chains, against a spinning star field.

Eventually the fine details disappeared, so that today at 52 years of age all I get are the spinning starfields (at all times) (I've learned long ago to ignore them) and also, sometimes when I'm looking at a bright light, I see something that looks for the life of me like rapidly moving tiny spermatozoa, only without tails, showing up against the light, each leaving a tiny wake or trail after them that quickly disappears. Like thousands of them, independent paths, moving about and interlacing paths very rapidly, seemingly resembling what you might see under a microscope in Biology class. They look very much alive. And I mean that. They seem realistically, actualy alive, like some highly motile bacteria in an aqueous solution seen under a brightfield microscope speeded up in time, only they are not bacteria. I have no idea what they are, if anything.

I've realized that my SD visions in recent times resemble (but far surpass) these old childhood hallucinations whose remnants persist in my eyes to this day, especially in general color scheme, the light bluish green and the muted blood red with black and some other tones present as well. I was a "bug nerd" even as a little boy, so it's natural that insects dominated my "visions" back then; I've loved science all my life, even before I was seven. I also had a lifelong burning curiosity about the nature of reality; even when I was very young, every night as I fell asleep I'd visualize the stars so very far away, beyond the roof above my head, and I'd wonder what all of this thing called "life" really is, and what it means. I would say that it rose to the level of an obsession.

In my thirties one day I day had a lucid dream experience, my very first, as I lay dozing on my couch. In it I immediately thought to experiment with myself, since I could not awaken and yet I could crack my eyes open and see the actual room around me *as well as* the 'dream room' around me when my eyes were closed. So with my eyes closed I raised my left hand up from where it rested on my chest and held it in front of my face. Then I opened my eyes. No hand. It's still on my chest. But I can *feel* it still there in front of my face! Then again with my eyes closed, I slid my "hands" down my own legs, past my knees, all the way down to my ankles. I could clearly feel my legs with my hands and my hands with my legs. Then I realized that I had not *sat up.* How did my hands reach my legs without me sitting up? So again, I opened my eyes. No hands, no arms, they're still folded across my chest; apparently my "dream arms" had simply lengthened enough to feel my ankles. So then, being REALLY intrigued, I held up my left hand again, this time with my eyes cracked open. I could *feel* it hanging right there in front of my face, but I could at the same time *see* that it had not moved from my chest, for I could not *actually* move at all. Then I concentrated on my invisible "dream" hand in front of my face, and I could actually see it, but so very faintly that it was almost not visible at all; it was just a dark shadow with no details able to be seen. Hmm. What to do with a ghost hand that you can feel as if it were your actual one? I had an idea. I had of course heard the usual spiel that our psychic powers as humans (when we have them) come from an area between the eyes situated just above them, the "Third Eye" area. Poppycock. However, being bored and in an unusual situation, what I did then with my "ghost hand" was to extend my "ghost" index finger, and while affirming to myself that I indeed wanted to open my Third Eye, I pressed down with my invisible finger on the spot where I thought that it might be located. Now, here's the kicker: Much to my surprise, my "ghost" finger (which I could clearly feel) sank into my forehead up to the second knuckle. I remember that my skull felt as if it were the consistency of somewhat stiff modeling clay.

I was shocked enough by this development that I lost the train of thought of the dream shortly thereafter and I eventually woke up. On that day, the coincidences began. Huge, glaring coincidences, sometimes double or even triple ones. Jungian Synchronicities, to be more precise, but in droves. And I still get them, almost every single day. These drove me, a scientific realist by nature, onto a different path that led from one thing to another and eventually to an investigation of such things as would be normally termed "The Occult." I learned the Hermetic Kaballah and about the idea of Gnosis. I learned the Tarot. And I learned to do magic. And I still do from time to time. It tends to work, you see.

Alongside all of this in my life, my scientific side sought to explain it, and my conclusions led me to quantum physics and eventually to my current speculations of a universe that is a series of overlapping purely psychological realities, formed of primal consciousness, more like a consensual dream than it is like what we think of it, which is to say, "dead matter and energy and time and space."

Now to my most recent experiences. Three nights ago, a green bottle fly, Phaenicia sericata (or Lucilia sericata, depending on authority) flew into our house. I do not like to kill anything, even a fly, and I have in recent times become even more sympathetic to other life forms, but I generally will kill a fly because they spread disease. So I attempted to catch it, to feed it to my terrarium, or just to swat it. Let's just say that I tried to dispose of the fly, with absolutely no luck, and I'm pretty good at it. It was fast as lightning, and very aware of its surroundings. Now, earlier that day I was reading a book on shamanism, and it spoke of the idea of a "spirit animal." Not something that I believe in, but I'm reading a book, so okay fine... According to the author, it is likely that the shaman has already met his or her spirit animal but has never recognized it as such. Something that you perhaps once had a vision of in childhood. AHA!. It passed through my mind that my spirit animal might be an Insect. Or perhaps the whole class Insecta, considering the multiplicity of them in those early visions.

Now, this part is important: I DID NOT ACTUALLY BUY INTO THIS STUFF. Nor do I now, however it pertains to the story. So, this green bottle fly is buzzing around the house, and I tried many times to catch it and never got close. I had moved into my bedroom and was standing up to watch TV, when I saw the fly fly into the bedroom with me. It alighted upon a crumpled tissue on my dresser next to me. So, ON A WHIM, I said in my mind "so if you're my spirit animal, let's make friends." I extended my hand slowly toward the fly on the Kleenex. It didn't flit away; it moved to follow my hand's motion. I placed the hand directly in front of it, and slowly moved it toward the fly. It climbed onto my hand. So there I am, standing like a fool in the bedroom with a fly on his hand, staring at me, when my wife walks in. I show her the fly on the hand, and at that moment it flew from my right hand to my left one, and just sat there for a while. I told my wife that apparently I'd made friends with it. It flew away from me at that point and landed on the TV screen, so I went up to it, again extended my hand, and it again climbed on, so I gently closed my hand, and took it outside, where I told it to tell it's friends that I didn't kill it, and it flew away. :-)

The next night, the night before last, I was standing in the identical place in my bedroom where the fly had flown from my right hand to my left, again watching TV, and suddenly I saw very, very briefly something flying directly toward my head at high speed, just before it flew into my slightly open mouth and landed on my tongue. I immediately and forcibly exhaled, spitting it out, and of course, it was a green bottle fly, which then flew out of the room. I told my wife in amazement, and marveled at the coincidence. I hadn't seen anything yet though, because approximately an hour later my wife went to take a sip out of her bottle of soda, and immediately felt something in her mouth, vibrating against her lower teeth, trapped against them by her lips. She spat out the green bottle fly that had been sitting on the mouth of the bottle all the time. It staggered a bit on the counter and then took off, and so I caught it with the bug catcher and released it outside, and it seemed okay as it flew away.

This really happened, just as I told it, and no, my house is not constantly full of green bottle flies; quite the contrary I assure you. These sorts of highly coincidental/synchronistic things happen to me all the time, ever since that lucid dream back in my thirties. What they mean, I'm not certain, other than that they seem to be subtle clues to the fact that reality is not as it appears to be. Either that, or I guess I'm Mephistopheles.

-Saint Brian

PS: Incidentally, we both used a whole lot of mouthwash...

A View Through My Own Hand

THREE NIGHTS AGO: The green glow was suffusing the room and I decided to try to awaken my wife on purpose. (Sometimes it just happens when the glow touches her) So I concentrated on her waking up, on establishing that connection, and *felt* something happening. At that time the green glow seemed to swirl in her direction. She started to awaken, making a few small sounds and stirring in her sleep. At that point I decided to test this further by intentionally stopping, and taking my attention away from her. She dropped back off to sleep again. Waiting about thirty seconds so as to be sure she was asleep as before, I then started to concentrate on waking her up again. At that point the green glow obligingly swirled in her direction yet again, and she immediately woke up fully, and we talked about it. She's very gracious to be my lab rat like that, don't you think? LAST NIGHT: Last night was another profound experience, different from any before. In short, this is what happened: I felt the salvia taking me over, saw the greenish glow suffuse the room, then of course it caused my wife to stir in her sleep as always, but I'm used to that now so I didn't stop there to wonder about that again. The room seemed to be divided by barely-perceptible planes that I could feel going through my body and I soon felt that I was a plural consciousness (again) and the room was many rooms all superimposed. I played around with this for a while, getting a feel for it, and then it occured to me that perhaps if my body was in multiple planes of existence at once and so was the room, I might be able to perceive a difference between my physical body in one plane and the room in another one, if different planes of reality were being perceived simultaneously like it felt that they were. Reasoning that since moving my hand is something rather common for me, and so it would be likely that it might be in another position in another plane of reality, I thought that I might be able to hold my hand up and perceive both the plane where I was holding it up and another one where I was not holding it up, at the same time. So I attempted to do this. I remember that it was very difficult, something akin to tuning my brain to two "stations" at once, but I managed to accomplish it, and then something happened that was a first, something absolutely unprecidented in my life, something that I could not have ever imagined happening to me. I saw through my own hand! That's right, you read that correctly. I held my hand up in front of my face, and with some concentration and "fine tuning" of my own mind (hard to describe, that) I clearly saw the room around me through it. I focused on a square air filter about two feet on a side with a front grill in the corner of the room about four feet away from me. I closed my left eye (to eliminate unconcious "cheating" by the other eye possibly seeing around my hand) and using only my right eye, I still saw a clear image of the air filter and the corner of the room near it *through* my own hand. Not believing this was real at first (who would?!) and thinking it was perhaps just an afterimage on my retina that I was perceiving, I moved my head around while still blocking my view of the air filter with my hand, looking at various angles, all with the hand in front of the eye, and still throughout all this I could see the air filter through my hand, sitting there steady and motionless in the corner as if the hand weren't blocking my view of it. I removed the hand and it was precisely where I could *see* it before I took the hand away... I did this several times to be sure, combining it with movement of my head (and hand) to shift perspective, but no, whenever I removed the hand, no movement, no jump in position (of the *actual* air filter and room) that would have indicated that the image was solely in my mind and not reflecting an actual view of the room. The air filter was right where it appeared to be through my hand, every single time that I took it away. I noted that while I clearly *saw* the air filter through my hand, it was not *seen* in normal light. Instead I *saw* it in that familiar lambent green light that comes into my vision whenever I take SD. But I saw it clearly, very sharp, even though it was a dim vision and not bright and vivid. So basically, consider my mind blown... UPDATE 11 JUNE: I just wanted to add, for those in doubt of my sanity, that I don't *actually* know what all this means, if anything. I mean, I did see through my own hand, and that was very convincing, but all of this may still be simply hallucinations on an order that I didn't expect existed with any drug. I don't know why my wife always wakes up; I know that it isn't noise because I am very aware in these moments and conscious of being very still, and also we always have an air conditioner running in the background (white noise) and she sleeps very soundly. However, lest ye be fearful that my mind is in the slow process of snapping like a twig, rest assured that it is not. I am still very sane. I am always of two minds concerning these "experiments" of mine, literally. One half of me always holds fast to scientific realism, because if all of this is a mirage then I want to have something to fall back on when it falls apart, and also as an anchor to consensual reality so that I do not stray too far out into the hinterlands of my own delusion. However it must be said that so far, while I have sustained no harm, I can't seem to see any way in which these experiences of mine do not have some objective reality, considering how often my wife, or my dog, or even my son's cat, are apparently affected by what by all rights should be just a guy sitting silently in a room having hallucinations. I feel that a certain amount of belief is necessary in order to fully explore these experiences, so I literally have partitioned my mind, allowing a measure of belief to creep in, but always with a 'proviso' that it's a temporary condition, and always with "one foot in the waters of reality."

A Breakthrough?

I should have probably talked about all of my more mundane experiences on Salvia Divinorum before getting into my more recent ones that involve real-world objective effects, since the latter are far more difficult to believe and I'm sure that most of my readers think that I'm either making them up, or am insane. (I can tell you that the former is not true, and to the best of my ability to discern, neither is the latter.) I've had the terrifying hellscape trips that others report, I've had myriads of discrete kinds of trips wherein my ego is shattered, I've had the Huge Wheel and the Cosmic Grinder and the Grid, all frequently reported by other users of SD, and many that I've never seen others' accounts of, however I started this blog not to simply write trip reports. I started this blog because I have of late been getting objectively verified third-party results, and that takes it to a whole new level in my opinion. To have an incredible vision in the mind is one thing, but when someone else reacts to it, in any way, it's quite another. Two nights ago I had an experience that was a whole order of magnitude above all of my other recent experiences. And it was objectively verified. Once again, I woke the wife. Only this time I did it in a very different and unusual way. Setting the scene: a quiet, dark bedroom, fan running for white noise. I am sitting upright in a straight chair next to the bed in which my wife is fast asleep, along with the dog at her feet. The experience was in two parts. At first I saw a sphere of light in front of me, and I felt as if it was my central core consciousness, my "I AM" if you will. This was surrounded by many, many versions of myself, all identically sitting in their chairs watching the sphere. I clearly remember that at that moment, my sense of self, my feelings of kinesthesia, my body sense and my sense of my past and memories, was divided among the many. Although perhaps 'divided' is not the right word. Each one was a complete "me" in every way, and I could feel all of them as me, as well as I could feel the one 'real' me sitting in my chair in my room. Whichever one of them the real me was, I mean. I was equally distributed, as it were. I was all of "us" at once, separate but all equally me. They were no different from me. They were all identically me in every way, and so I had the highly unusual, clear awareness of catching myself in the act of literally living many lives simultaneously; all of 'them' as much "me" as "I" was. To be truthful, as strange as it sounds, there is no real way that I can be sure that the 'me' that I started out with is the same one that I ended the trip in, so completely identical were they all. We all. So that's incredible enough, however it proves nothing objectively. This next part does. As the first vision was fading away, I turned my thoughts to my wife sleeping behind me peacefully. I concentrated on her, not looking at her beyond an initial glance, as my back was turned to her. Suddenly I saw a 'grid' effect with her in it; in other words I saw and perceived many multiple images of her all at the same time arranged in a gridlike array in front of me. I should note that this was an 'eyes open' experience, and I was rather lucid during it's duration. While looking at the many versions of her, I thought of trying to 'mentally' awaken her, and then I noticed that one of the images of her in the grid was an image of her awakening. All the others were of her sleeping peacefully, but one image was of her in the act of waking up. Without even thinking about how, I 'pushed' my consciousness into that one panel, and it somehow merged with it, I could *feel* it merge with it, and at that precise moment, she awakened, fully conscious. Not only did she awaken, but her initial movements while waking up were precisely identical to the ones that I had seen a few seconds before in that panel of her waking up. It seems that I have experienced first-hand how the future manifests to us as multiple possibilities and we choose which one we will proceed along. Only this time I was completely aware of the process. Either that, or I chose between multiple universes. Either way, a very incredible experience that is still with me as if it had just happened. A 'goosebumps' kind of thing. UPDATE: Wednesday 29 May; Last night once again, I saw a glowing field come into the room from in front of me and pass through me, moving toward the back of the room. I could see it distort reality as it passed, with objects it touched becoming foreshortened. As the field passed me like a glowing light green wave and started to touch my sleeping wife behind me, she once again woke up on cue, with a somewhat startled sounding "ahhhh..." Not only that, but I fully expected it this time, and it didn't dissappoint. So for whatever it's worth, this seems real. And very consistant. I didn't try to awaken her this time, but I was certain at the time that when the glowing distortion field touched her she would awaken, and she did, precisely as expected. Before the 'field' appeared I noticed objects in the room take on multiple outlines, as if they were multiple objects sumerimposed. Also, the objects were in constant motion; it seemed that I was seeing them in multiple universes so I could notice slight variations in their position, one after the other, as if I were watching a sequence of freeze-frame photos each slightly different from the last, with slight changes in angle and perspective. Very noticeable. Everything "wiggled" about an inch in random directions. I guess I'll keep on doing this for a while to be certain it's not a series of wild coincidences, and then I don't know what I'll do if it isn't. Try to get better at it, I guess. Try for more control.

Energy Manipulation Zaps The Wife

Two nights ago I was sitting cross-legged on my bed after taking salvia, with my wife sleeping in the bed on my right. I had taken a hit and had once again staved off the onset of the experience until I had put the pipe away and gotten comfortable in bed. I was meditating on moving energy around my body, which is incredibly easy on salvia. (In fact, everything you've ever read about meditation and energy is incredibly easy on salvia.. I routinely accomplish things that I'd only ever heard yogis being able to do, like the rising of the kundalini energy or single-point-consciousness... piece of cake!) So here's the deal: I sense a patch of skin, say on my shoulder, and feel it incredibly clearly, my senses heightened. I focus all my attention upon it. Then I move the focus of my attention around, down my arm, to my thigh, down to my feet, and up in a spiral around my body, feeling for all the world like the totality of my being is entirely focused upon that one moving patch of sensation. I was moving it around randomly, more and more rapidly, and then moved it to my right arm, then to my left, then back, oscillating back and forth, side to side, moving faster and faster, in a deep trance. The side to side oscillation continued for a while. Suddenly and with no forethought whatsoever and on a spontaneous whim, as I moved it back to my right side, I extended my right arm slightly toward my sleeping wife and simply pushed it out of my body toward her. I made no sound and she was sleeping soundly, however the precise moment that I did this she immediately snorted a couple of times and woke up, *right on cue.* We spoke of it at that point, what had happened, and she had no idea why she had suddenly awakened. I am getting a lot of these types of objectively verifiable experiences lately, more and more. See, the thing is, on salvia everything seems so real, 'realer' than my regular waking reality even, and yet of course it may not be, it may be that it's just a very strong drug that produces these subjective sensations of realness along with the other phenomena, so I have of late been trying to test it by affecting objective reality in some way, such as managing to get through to another person while in that state, and lately it seems that I have been accomplishing this, more and more. My dog, my son's cat, and my wife are often affected by my visions now, however my wife is only succeptible while she's asleep. I've also had several more experiences with the dog waking up on cue. I don't know what to make of this; I try to retain my sense of scientific neutrality and just keep on experimenting with extreme cynicism, however it is beginning to approach the point where I can no longer pretend that the salvia experience is solely a subjective one. The evidence, such as it is, is piling up. Does anybody have any ideas what is happening here? Can this be real? It seems crazy to think so, and yet almost every time I take salvia lately, something decidedly objective happens. It's wearing down my incredulousness.

Cats and Dogs (Recent Experiences)

I typically use salvia divinorum as I sit in a straight chair next to my bed late at night. My wife is also typically asleep on that bed giving the time that I usually do it. I no longer need a sitter. Our dog, a pug named Walter, is usually asleep at her feet, on the bed, on the side away from me. So last night I prepared the water pipe.... I do the hit, and hold it, and let it go, and wait... a light green glowing "field" starts up in the upper right hand corner of the room as if it were a cloud that had just drifted into the room through the upper wall... The glow spreads and spirals around the ceiling throughout the room in a counterclockwise rotation, and starts to fill the room up with it's glowing geometry. When it touches me, I feel it penetrate through me. As the glow fills the room as it spirals inward, it nears and then touches the sleeping pug. The pug snorts loudly in it's sleep, half-lifting his head... then the field touches my wife... she moans and stirs also, less than a second after the dog did. Keep in mind that the room is totaly silent save for a fan for white noise, and I was calmly watching the field of glowing light as it approached and then touched first the dog and then my wife; their reactions were precisely simultaneous with the green glowing field contacting them, in order. The sounds were real. I was not hallucinating the sounds nor their timing. I always know how lucid I am while on salvia, and I was very lucid and aware of both reality and "salvia space." Afterwards the pug was awake on and off all night, on the bed, walking around, very atypical. Kept trying to lay on the pillow my wife's head was on. She was awakened by it and noticed his unusual activity. She scolded me jokingly not to screw around with the pug's mind, but she was about half serious. And the even stranger thing, this is *not the first time this has happened.* It's happening fairly often. Last week I did the salvia, had the light come into the room and then around me and through me, then noticed that the dog, this time awake, saw the light coming for him and moved from the foot to the head of the bed on the far side to get away from it. Also, later on I learned from my son living down at the end of the hall, that at very nearly the same time as my experience with the dog was taking place, at the other end of the house my son's cat started meowing so loud that he got up to play with her and comfort her. Another time a few months ago, and perhaps most dramatically, I was sitting on the bed cross-legged with the dog, awake, at the foot of the bed, in front of me. (I took the salvia hit and then held off the onset of the actual experience until I got into bed and made myself comfortable) I saw two glowing light green "walls" form on either side of me, and the pug started as if it saw them too. So with this in mind, I tried to get the walls to move by willing it, and managed to do that; and as they moved, from right to left with the dog in between them, the dog moved to the left (my left) to avoid the "wall" on the right... so I then got both "walls" to move back to the right, with the dog still between them, and the dog moved back to the right, all the time either looking at me, or to the side at whichever of the two "walls" was approaching him. It was clear that he saw them. Another thing, an unrelated experience: Two nights ago, I caught a glimpse of myself. No, not in a mirror. I had already had most of my nightly salvia experience and was standing up in the bedroom. Standing to my immediate right... a very, very faint transparent slightly glowing light green "ghost" of me, his (my) face about a foot away from mine, looking off to his right. Part of him, his near shoulder, intersected my actual body. This lasted for about three seconds, then it faded. My doppelganger from a parallel universe? It was holographically real, albeit very faint. I wonder what he was staring off to the right at... I was looking to the right in order to see him... could he have been seeing *his* doppelganger as well? What IS this STUFF?