Each story on this page is built around one theme that recurs in published salvia reports and in what volunteers told researchers. They are composites: written to show a pattern, not to retell one person's trip. No names, ages or places have been invented. Where a detail comes straight from research, the themes page gives the source.
The stories are deliberately different in tone. Salvia reports range from slapstick to unsettling within the same few minutes, and a collection that only showed one side would be misleading.
The conveyor
Composite account. Theme: being pulled. 10X, sitting on a bed, sitter present.
The first thing was a hand that was not a hand, flat against the left shoulder blade, pushing. Then the bed was no longer a bed but a belt, moving to the right at walking pace, and everything in the room was on it too: the lamp, the window, the sitter, all travelling in the same direction at the same speed, which meant nothing appeared to move at all.
Only the pull gave it away. The belt was going somewhere, and it was important to keep up. Every attempt to stand still made the pressure stronger. Giving in made it soft.
At some point the belt reached its end and folded under, and the room folded under with it, and then came back up on the other side, the right way round. The sitter said this took four minutes. It felt like being moved house.
Two halves
Composite account. Theme: splitting. 5X, lying on a sofa, sitter present.
A seam opened from the top of the head to the floor. The left side stayed on the sofa and could feel the cushion. The right side went somewhere with better light and a lot of space, and could feel nothing at all.
The odd part was that both halves were completely convinced they were the real one. The left half wanted to tell the sitter what was happening. The right half thought that was a charming idea, but far too slow.
When the seam closed, it closed from the bottom up, like a zipper on a jacket. The first sentence afterwards was: "I was on both sides of the room." It took a while to accept that the room only had one.
Becoming the bookcase
Composite account. Theme: becoming an object. 20X, small amount, sitting on the floor of a living room, sitter present.
There was a bookcase against the wall, and then there was being the bookcase: the third shelf, with the weight of the books pressing down in a way that felt right and useful.
The shelf had opinions. It found the books on the left too heavy and the ones on the right pleasantly light. It knew it had always been a shelf, and that the life before this had been a short, confused interruption.
When it ended, the person was sitting with one hand pressed flat on the floor, quite hard. They said the floor had "felt like a colleague". It was ten minutes later before they found that funny, and then they found it extremely funny.
The cartoon street
Composite account. Theme: childhood and familiar places. 10X, lying down in a dim room, sitter present.
A street, drawn in flat colours with black outlines, like a picture book. Houses with round windows. A swing set at the end of the street that moved even though nobody was on it.
Everything was familiar in a deep and slightly sad way, as if this had been the street of every childhood ever. One of the houses was clearly home. The door was open, and it would have been easy to go in, except that something about the drawing kept sliding sideways, out of reach, and coming back.
The return was gradual and kind. The colours drained back into the room one by one, the black outlines last. For a while afterwards ordinary objects seemed to have a faint outline too.
The waiting room
Composite account. Theme: presences. 20X, lying on a mattress, experienced user, sitter present.
A large, quiet space with nothing in it except attention. Then the attention turned out to belong to something, or several somethings, that had been busy and were now looking up.
They were not hostile and not especially welcoming. They gave the impression of staff before opening time, surprised that someone had come in through the wrong door, and patiently waiting for them to leave by the right one.
One of them said a name. It was the right name, which was the most unsettling moment of the trip. Afterwards the person kept returning to that: not that something spoke, but that it knew what to call them.
The laughing fit
Composite account. Theme: laughter. 5X, two people taking turns with one sober sitter, sitting on a sofa.
The trip itself was brief and fuzzy: some sliding, some pressure, the sense of the sofa tilting. Then, at about minute seven, the laughing started and did not stop for three minutes.
There was no joke. Or rather, the joke was that a chair was a chair again, and a lamp a lamp, and that everybody in the room seemed to accept this without comment. Every attempt to explain made it funnier.
The second person, waiting for their turn, began laughing too, without having taken anything. The sitter wrote down the times and kept the lighter. The second turn was postponed to another evening, which in hindsight everybody agreed was a good decision.
Accordion time
Composite account. Theme: time. 10X, lying on a bed, sitter present with a watch.
The trip did not feel long; it felt like several trips stacked on top of each other, each one complete. In the first, the room rotated slowly. In the second, there was no room. In the third, the person was sitting on the bed again, but as an earlier version of themselves, before they had decided to smoke.
That third layer was confusing. It felt like the trip had not happened yet and was about to. Then it happened again, briefly, and folded into the others.
The sitter's notes said nine minutes. The person's estimate, given straight afterwards, was "about a day, maybe three times". Researchers recorded a similar image from a volunteer: time "creased like an accordion".
The return that took effort
Composite account. Theme: coming back. 20X, lying down, sitter present.
The trip itself left only scraps: a surface, a pull, somewhere bright. What stayed sharp was the way back.
It felt like climbing into clothes that were slightly too small. The body was there, but it had to be put on piece by piece, and the pieces did not quite fit at first. Hands were easiest. The face took longest. For a minute or two the person knew they were in a room without knowing what a room was for.
The sitter just kept saying the time and that everything was fine. That, according to the person afterwards, was the rope. By twenty minutes they were drinking water and asking to hear what they had said, because they could not remember saying anything.
For how these themes line up with the clock, see minute by minute; for the same patterns ordered by strength, see reports by strength.
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