This is A WORLD OUT OF MIND, my Online Journal where I explore Consciousness and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by the intentional alteration of my own belief structures, using Salvia Divinorum and additional self-altering meditational techniques drawn from Western Ceremonial Magic.

I always attempt to adhere to the scientific method as much as possible in my explorations, and while I often speak of these experiences as if I knew they were Truth, I always consider the alternative, that it is merely self-deception on my part, and think accordingly. Thus I maintain two parallel world views at once, one aspirational and one a safe fallback into standard materialism.

The more I journey into salviaspace, the more I think the former worldview is the correct one, but there is no objective way to prove that to the world, so I'll let you, the reader, decide for yourselves.

-Saint Brian the Godless

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Friday, October 3, 2014

Two Nights, Two Visions

Night before last, several small doses and then one larger dose, 100X:

I am sitting on my bed cross-legged. The room is almost totally dark, something unusual for me.

As I sit there breathing deeply and regularly, the room around me seems to darken further. Shadows begin to move and lengthen, producing an exceedingly creepy atmosphere. Suddenly I hear noises, the mewling of a child, other children joining in, faint wails of fear perhaps. The room keeps getting darker and eventually begins to distort, walls changing shape, the room no longer a normal rectangular box shape.

This continued and I began to feel a rising panic; something about the auditory hallucinations is more frightening than the normal visual ones. Eerily realistic, I later learned that actual (real) sounds had come from another room where my wife was at the time, but they were apparently distorted during my experience to the eerie cries and moans.

This vision reminded me of the last scene of the movie "Ghost" where the bad guy gets hauled off by demons; the creepy sounds, the weird shadows moving and growing longer, and so forth. A fairly scary experience.

At the point where I had had enough I willed myself to get up out of bed and shakily walked to the light on the bureau and turned it on, and then the overhead light as well. Vision gone.

I think that maybe it's not such a good idea to use salvia divinorum in the dark anymore. I think it tends to bring on darker visions, more frightening ones.

***

Last night, again several smaller doses and then one larger one, 100X:

This was an interesting but short experience, one I think bears reporting. Initially I had been in the depths of a dreamlike state of which I can recall no detail. It happens. However as I was coming out of it, I clearly and distinctly recall going through a stage of waking up. And waking up again. And again. And again. To be clear, this was not me waking up repeatedly and then going back into my sleep-like state. I would awaken, feel myself waking up, see the room around me, my wife and dog asleep on the bed beside me, and then I would realize that this wasn't it yet. What I mean to say is, I'd awaken in my room, realize that I was still "in vision," then wake up again still in my room, once again realize it wasn't real, and do it over again, and again. Each time the room seemed or "felt" a bit "realer" although it certainly looked the same, until finally I awakened one last time to the "real" room. Or was it? No way to tell, really.

The interesting thing is, I can find no difference between any of the previous "false" ones and the final one. They were all equally realistic but in the earlier cases I just sensed somehow that it wasn't the realest one and continued to awaken over and over until it was real enough. Only then did I stop.

I wonder if I could have awakened yet again. I wonder if all the rooms that I saw were as real as the last one I chose. Each awakening felt much as it does when one normally awakens from a dream, and each room certainly seemed completely real... however then I'd awaken yet again and be in another totally realistic "dream" of my room that I again needed to awaken from.

It felt like all versions of my room including the last one, were dreams, and yet, I'm still in that last one, aren't I?

LATE ADDITION EDIT: I realize that I neglected to make something clear, something very important about the above experience. All those times I awakened, I opened my eyes, ***but I had never closed them.*** I opened my eyes, then opened them again, and then again, and again, over and over, never having once ***closed them.*** This is what made the whole thing so incredible in the first place. Important point.