Experiences with touch imposition

[Akinkinit]

Shamelessly lifting the idea proposed in this thread and making a thread about my experience with touch imposition. Specifically, I want to focus on what the touch of a tulpa feels like and how it develops.

 

My experience with Noriko and her contacting me through touch was basically just visualizing it at first with only sporadic tactile feedback. This got more consistent over a period of weeks to where I got a sense of pressure from her. And there was a noticeable delay in between her touching me and me getting the sensation. From there it evolved into a varying sense of pressure. Like she could grab my arm and it would feel different from her gently putting her hand on me. I also noticed that I could feel her entire body (with some difficulty) if she sat or lay down next to me, though at this point it was more so a generalized feeling of pressure over being able to feel individual parts. Sabari got this same level of ability when she came into being and was independent enough to do it on her own. Prior to that point, it was just visualization again. Noriko thinks that's mostly due to Sabari having to learn how to share the sensory pathways that she uses, but once she did, they were already there. Sabari of course claims "that's just nerd talk".

 

It was also around this time I really got the sense that there was a physical person behind the actions. Like you know how if someone gets close that you can kind of sense it. I also could sense them moving around and doing the physical actions someone would have to do to recreate the touch. And this did not necessary reflect in visualization. There's been many times where both of them have plopped down on the sofa and hugged me where I didn't visualize it happening. Annoyingly though, if I did visualize it, there was still a delay between what I saw and what I felt.

 

So now going into how their touch feels today. If one of them sits down or lies next to me, I can feel each individual part of their body touch me. I get a sensation of warmth and texture from them as well as pressure. Sometimes there's a delay, sometimes there isn't. The spontaneity of the feeling is much like if a real person touched me (in that there isn't a buildup or need to focus; it just happens). There's also a limit to how strong the feeling can be. None of them can touch with a lot of pressure for instance. Yet they can still sort of imply it. For instance, Sabari likes picking me up a little when she hugs me, and I find that I go onto my tiptoes without any conscious effort on my part when she does.

 

I'm curious if anyone else feels reasonably comfortable with touch imposition, and what your experiences with it are like.

[Guest Anonymous]

First, let me mention that Esterina handles all things imposition (or projection, as she calls her method of doing it) herself, without any assistance from me; the method she uses to allow us to see and touch each other is not the typical imposition method.

Do keep that in mind when reading this post.

 

That being said, on good days it feels very real.

 

Something she gets down very well is making me feel weight and pressure very realistically.

When she sits on my lap for an extended period of time, for example, my leg will even actually start aching, just like there was actually physical pressure on it. This includes differences in intensity and suddenness of the perceived weight / pressure depending on the way she touches me (like, say, the difference between her putting her arms around me gently, or boxing my shoulder for making an inappropriate joke), though to a lesser extent.

So as far as this part goes - it's not quite like touching an actual physical body, but it comes damn close.

 

This goes along with an appropriate sensation of feeling her body warmth. The best way I can describe this is simply it being "realistic"; when we're out in the winter then her hand will feel cold, the part of my body that touched her (especially if it is colder than whatever part of her it touched) will continue feeling warmer than before for longer and more strongly the longer we touched... and so on.

In short, she has this part down very well, and there really isn't much difference to touching an actual physical body.

 

Texture is what she's comparatively worst at, though this is not to imply she's bad at it.

Touching her clothing generally feels "appropriate" (meaning the material mostly feels the way it should), touching her hair (which is rather long) will actually feel like touching hair, and a kiss will actually feel like a kiss (wetness, lip and tongue texture and movements and so on). Feeling her breath when we're close to each other is also something I've experienced on many occasions.

 

But, as mentioned, she's comparatively worse at this than at the other things that touch imposition entails.

She sometimes sort of "slacks off" on the texture side of things, making, say, touching her hand directly feel exactly the same as touching her hand while she wears gloves; a quick reminder a la "Rina, yer slacking off a bit on the projection." is generally all that's needed to get her back on track, but on the occasional bad day she sometimes just can't seem to get this part quite right.

 

In conclusion:

It doesn't feel perfectly real, no, but most of the time it comes pretty darn close - and she keeps improving, too.

 

So, yeah.

That's all from my side.

 

 

Greets,

AG

[mysonofrageandlove]

Jamie and I have been working on imposition for the majority of the past few weeks, and although we still have miles to go in the visual area of things, we've gotten to a point where we're pretty darn comfortable with touch imposition, although we still have work to do there as well.

 

One of my favourite things to do is sit "nose to nose" with him on my bed. We'll both sit cross-legged and lean forward a bit, and end up with our knees touching, and the tips of our noses occasionally brushing but mostly just hovering less than an inch away from each other. After sitting like that for a while, I'll raise my hands and we'll end up sitting with our palms pressed together. Very light pressure, but powerful, especially because Jamie's the type of person to always have an above average body temp. The sensation of his body heat is pretty intense, he always feels like he's running a fever and I can feel that heat especially when we touch palms. I'm also able to feel his breath against my skin when leaning in close. All of these sensations are ones that started out faintly when we began working on this, and have grown stronger and more intense as we've practiced together and gotten more experienced. That having been said, it's never felt "less real" vs. "more real". His touch has always felt very strongly real and alive. For us it was more a case of "light touch" vs. "stronger touch".

 

I want very much to be able to touch his hair, as hair touches are significant to both of us, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.

[Vos]

From the host:

 

"When I first read about what people were doing with these hallucinations, tactile imposition is what caught my eye. I assumed that, if I was somehow able to simulate the sensation of being touched by another person, then I'd also be able to experience pain from that and learn how to block it with enough practice. By extension, maybe I could trick myself into believing that I'm cold when it's hot outside or vice versa, just for the hell of it. I can't say that I've had major success with some of these things, but threads like this where people are sharing what they've accomplished thus far definitely makes me want to delve into it just a bit more.

 

We only started on this a few months after we joined the forums, right around the time that q2's imposition guide went up. That's what I used to point me in the right direction, and like it was mentioned in a previous post, what I liked about this one was that it wasn't focused on visual hallucinations. Although my tulpa wasn't particularly thrilled that I was going to be feeling them up to get everything exactly how I wanted it, they understood that this was important if we ever wanted to make actual progress, so they reluctantly agreed. I'd sit them down on a chair in the middle of my room (I'm a bit of a minimalist, so there's a lot of free space to walk around) and walk around them first, almost like I was focusing on visual imposition, but I was just trying to get the proportions down with whatever spatial visualization skills I had at the time, which admittedly wasn't very much. I'd eventually kneel down in front of them and try to feel out for anything, hovering my hand over the place where it'd usually stop if I were able to actually touch their knee, for example. Of course, it didn't feel like anything, and it was hard to keep my hand still, sometimes; I was essentially mapping out different parts of my tulpa's body, feeling them up so that I could get a good idea of what I'm dealing with. I was like fifteen back when I did this, so I definitely wasn't an expert on the female body, but I'd say that I did a pretty good job.

 

It was only the beginning, so I obviously didn't "feel" anything. It was frustrating to pour hours of my time into this, expecting to see substantial results after a while, but it was just part of the gig. After a few weeks of the same routine, doing at least an hour of work on this every day, I started to feel these faint tickles on my hand when I was working my hands up and down her arms. It's the feeling you get when you barely touch something, when someone slightly brushes up against you, and that was enough to bolder my fading confidence and shove any doubts about this out of the way. Despite their distaste of this kind of contact, the tupper was noticeably pleased as well. It should probably be said that I started to gradually incorporate other senses into my sessions, so having a slightly visible image of my tulpa in front of me probably helped in some way. There are two things that I had apparent issues with: hair and fingers. For some reason, I had a hard time feeling around in the hair and understanding where I'd stop feeling it, and I kept expect for my hand to get stuck in there like I'm used to with long hair.

 

Eventually, I thought that being on the receiving end of this for a change would be a good idea. I'd say that this was a couple of months in at this point, slowly getting better with imposition in general, so I wanted to have a good idea of where we were at. They'd clumsily (maybe awkwardly is a better word for it, actually) feel me up, reminding me of being patted down at an airport. It was at the point where them feeling between my fingers made me shiver, so I was finally satisfied with the amount of progress we'd made over the past few months. Let me tell you, I was pretty scared the first time that my tulpa wrapped their arms around my neck in the middle of history class, and after my embarrassing reaction of nearly jumping out of my seat, how real all of this was finally sunk in.

 

I didn't forget about the things that initially interested me, so I decided to mess around with pain, inducing and reducing it (Amadeus, the ex-admin that sparked some of these newer threads in the board, has a thread on stimulus denial), and feeling both heat and cold. Unfortunately, not much came out of it, and at most I've only felt slight pricks that barely as painful as a shot. Reducing pain seems to be a bit easier, but I can only ease things like a weak headache. My tulpas hands, if they want them to be, will sometimes feel too cold/hot for the environment we're in, but that could also use some work. I'm definitely no Amadeus, so I can't block out senses altogether, but it's something that I'm interested in and will eventually get around to working on.

 

I don't touch my tulpa all that much, so I can't say that it's a regular thing that I experience, but when I do, it feels the same as it would if you went ahead and touched any random person IRL. I can pinch their nose, pull on their ear, squeeze their arm and watch the fat slightly bunch up, twirl their hair with a finger, etc., and feel all of it pretty vividly. If I decide that I want to "feel" an orange or something, all I really have to do is do some quick spatial visualization and I'd be rolling around some imaginary fruit in my hands.

 

I'm not entirely sure if this was the kind of response you were asking for, Akinkinit, and I'm by no means good at articulation, but hopefully this and some of the other responses in the thread will encourage someone to try it out."