Lumi's Dreaming Thread; Dreams of Moon

[Luminesce]

 

Maybe you should try XTC

 

 

Having zero motivation myself I gave up posting here a long time ago while you continued through all the years. That's pretty amazing.

 

But it's painful to see you failing to become lucid despite all the hard work. I'm certainly not the expert here but I think you're looking at this the wrong way - as a chore to be done. Without the proper emotional involvement you'll most likely get nowhere. At least for me dreams become much clearer if I've been involved in some extraordinary activity throughout the day and especially before I go to sleep. This way it's also possible to reliably controly what I dream about. The key, I believe is obsession. Which would also explain why Mistgod excels at lucid dreaming. He really gets emotionally involved in even the most mundane things. Was annoying for us here from time to time but regarding tulpamancy or lucid dreaming it might be a key feature.

 

I'm aware that this probably isn't gonna help you at all but hey, just wanted to say I've always enjoyed reading your posts. Keep going. Also at least try to get some sunlight and exercise. It helps. With everything.

 

Drugs are never and will never be an option in my life. They give me the same feeling as if you just spawned diamonds in Minecraft survival (everyone gets that analogy right?), great but now you've illegitimized everything else you do. Except with drugs you're illegitimizing your whole reality. I know a lot of people don't agree at all, but it's how I chose to think about it. I also have no interest in ever drinking, again because I personally would see that as a sign of weakness to myself, but again again I'm fine if others choose to do it.

 

The stuff I was complaining about has very little to do with "failing" to lucid dream. You haven't failed until you give up. Lucid dreaming is my only real special goal in life, as in outside of normal "let's stay alive and be happy" sort of things, but I've got all my life to do it. It's just one of many, many things that my actual problem is having negative effects on, and that's what makes me sad. With real important life stuff, whatever, I can ignore that I guess, but when it comes to my tulpas it really does make me sad sometimes.

 

I don't think you quite understand the problem if you're suggesting emotional investment. One of the things that depresses me the most is that I can't care, no matter how important something is to me. When I can't care enough to really apply effort when the subject is my tulpas, I tend to get depressed (and tend to look at the larger encompassing issue while I'm at it).

 

Extraordinary activity isn't necessarily available? What I dream about doesn't help with becoming lucid unfortunately, unless the extraordinary event was going to an event about lucid dreaming where I was constantly making sure I wasn't dreaming. My mind somehow always avoids scenarios where I would reality check, despite having done so pretty often for a very long time now. I get the idea with obsession, thinking about lucid dreaming all day is one of the best ways to have a dream-induced-lucid-dream. I don't really know how to do that anymore though, I tried reading Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming last summer and thinking about dreams as much as I could, it helped a lot with dream recall (for a few days) but I didn't feel like I was close to becoming lucid. And Mistgod is probably the polar opposite of me in a myriad of ways, from how he thinks about the world and tulpas to his ability to visualize things clearly. Emotions are not my strong point, I only really think of cause-and-effect. A close family member dying means dealing with everyone being sad (which I don't like) and generally annoying circumstances for a while, but it's not likely to affect me much emotionally. Maybe through stress, but not "emotions". Basically, if my tulpas can't make me emotionally invested in something, nothing can. But the little effort I do manage is because I love them.

 

The sunlight and exercise suggestion is probably the most important thing I know would help (in general) but don't do. I have nothing to do outside, and I feel really uncomfortable doing nothing in public, if that makes sense. I can wait at a bus stop, but I can't just walk around just to walk, it's too weird, I'llendthissentencewithanother I can't. I don't really know where or how to do more intensive exercise, but just so I don't die from a blood clot or something I've been doing a lot of stretching or.. whatever you call it without following an instructions guide (tai chi, yoga, they all just mean "Names we gave to slow movements" to me. I just try to engage all of my muscles so none of them see zero use in a day) for the last few months.

 

I and most my family (on one side) are vitamin D deficient just by default, and I've been taking vitamin D supplements plus normal multivitamins every day for at least a couple years. I know it's not the same as sunlight, but it's honestly all I'm going to get right now. Also the only thing I drink aside from water unless we're eating out is orange juice w/ extra vitamin C. A lot of both every day. It's less that I use that stuff as an excuse to not get sunlight or exercise, and more that after years of not doing either I decided I should try and supplement it.

 

I'm not terribly overweight at 220lbs (especially since I'm 6'2"), but obviously motivation issues equates to little exercise. Luckily I have very strangely good genes (in some ways, not others), and I'm a lot healthier than I probably should be across the board. I can't remember being "sick" aside from mild allergy things in the last ten years. But I know full well exercise has way more to do with your health than your weight. Like way way more. So yeah, good suggestion, not so sure I'll be doing anything with it. My goal is to simply do what I already do but more often.

 

Honestly, I think you're overthinking it. But I mean this in a very particular way. My host suffers some anxiety problems. She solves them by gritting and bearing the pain and just pushing through. But this leads to mood problems. Dark mood that leads to avoidance. She solves this by not thinking about it. This has the side effect of causing her to forget to do things instead of purposely avoiding them.

Basically, what I am saying is you are making yourself sad by thinking about trying. That is sad because you know where it will lead. Only failure. So stop. Thinking about trying. Your mood will strengthen when you stop bothering to think about that.

 

Find the zen of effortless action. It is really liberating.

 

I continue to think you should switch more with your tulpas if they are better at this stuff. What matters is the product, not the method, or the producer. And you want to succeed at this, right? Plus, I miss Tewi. :P

---

I don't think it is weird to sleep with your tulpa.

---

You need emotional control. The process of remembering a dream right after waking up is not about remembering to do it. It is about loving the dream and excitedly holding onto it.

 

I wouldn't say I get in a dark mood and then try not to think about things. Our basic philosophy says to be happy when you don't have a reason to be something else. I'm not just hopeless and depressed when I'm like this, it's always when I try the hardest to try and improve myself. Although I've kind of exhausted most of my ideas so there's more space for just feeling bad. I do make myself sad by thinking about trying, but I do that because never confronting the problem scares me a whole lot more. I'd rather be depressed on occasion than ignorant for the rest of my life. Sort of like the "Feeling pain means I'm still alive" sort of thing, right? My better mood, as I think you guys usually see me in, absolutely does not entail a better well-being. They're exactly the same, except in one I'm ignoring my problems and neutral and the other I'm trying to deal with my problems (usually failing) and sad. But I consciously go back to ignoring them eventually because it's better to be happy than not with all else the same.

 

Just checking in with my problems so they aren't in a permanent state of being ignored. But I have a lot of emotional investment towards my tulpas, so that aspect will make me sad whereas Tewi is in that state of trying to solve problems all the time, without the emotional investment. Well, that sounds weird. She's entirely invested in our well being, but I wouldn't call it emotional investment, it's more of an underlying rule that guides her thoughts and actions. Apparently one that I don't have, despite caring for them just as much.

 

"Zen of effortless action" sounds like some of the self-help stuff I've read. The state that Reisen more or less embodies and exemplifies (the consciousness level of love), where your actions and thoughts bypass the ego and more or less just.. do what they should. I've talked about how all of my tulpas experience my motivation issues before (typically manifested as a desire to not do something that requires effort), with Lucilyn actively telling them no and Tewi outright ignoring the feelings and thoughts in their entirety. Reisen actually feels them the same as I do, but somehow however it is she decides to do things doesn't rely on what she "feels like" doing, only what she thinks she should do.

 

Flan and I are about the same, but her emotions work for her a little more than me and can actually motivate her to do something I normally wouldn't, if it's for my sake. And just for fun I'll describe Scarlet and the only time she ever switched too, she simply feels way too many of her own strong emotions to listen to whatever the mind would like her to do. For example, "Don't do push ups they're too hard" would be entirely inconsequential to her as she feels strongly about keeping the body healthy. Unfortunately, she seemed to actually put a lot of stress on the body unintentionally and decided not to switch anymore, which is too bad it had to be like that. So she's been equally as inactive after as before that time, which is why you don't hear me bring her up, she's never had any desire to be treated like a tulpa and prefers inactivity. Anyways!

 

If I had to guess, I'd say that all the little motivators that they have, where they apply to me, have been burnt out over time as I've obviously lived a whole lot more than they have. I think that caring for my tulpas as a motivator in say, lucid dreaming, stopped being "urgent" to my mind a long time ago (throughout my various attempts to actively work on it over the years), so it's no longer as strong as my general desires to not do things. But trying and not really being able to is much better than not trying at all, hence making myself post in this thread every day. In the off chance I feel like applying real effort, I'll be reminded to do so, and otherwise it keeps a baseline of at least trying a little bit rather than months of not thinking about it as in the past.

 

I've been switching with my tulpas plenty, and Tewi's done a ton of good for us. But for the celebratory times of this month, I've felt like I needed to be the one fronting. Letting Lucilyn switch and play games is not spending time with her. It's not applying effort for her sake. I'm making an effort to talk to them throughout the day instead of just saying "here go ahead and front", because that's a poor excuse for "keeping them active" with no effort on my part. On the subject of lucid dreaming, we all seem to have our own methods and styles, which I really like. Tewi's got dedication and motivation, Lucilyn's got the legitimate interest and enjoyment in dreams (she's the only one who's mentioned enjoying non-lucid dreams iirc), and Flan and I usually keep each other focused on dreaming throughout the night. Reisen doesn't switch often enough to do anything specific, I guess she just does dream recall or whatever we're practicing around that time.

 

I know sleeping with my tulpas isn't weird, it's the context and term "sleeping with" in the first place lol. First, you have to know that we're pretty good at passive imposition. It's not weird to have them walk around with me, sit next to me, or sleep somewhere on my bed (I think I described not too long ago how that goes - if we're in slumber-party mode, usually only Flandre actually sleeps next to me under the covers, Reisen usually lies against pillows lining my bed and Tewi sits towards the end. Which is sort of an instinct thing for me and maybe the others, I feel a lot more comfortable sleeping in an enclosed area and very uncomfortable on a bed with no walls around it. Tewi sitting on the far end gives an enclosed feeling, because it doesn't bother her. Lucilyn sleeps.. wherever, usually somewhere between two of us). But it's also common for various combinations of us to sleep next to each other, depending on how we feel or how they feel. Lucilyn has slept with all of us while not-fronting, she's asked Tewi to sleep with her while fronting, Flan usually only sleeps with me (sometimes Lucilyn while fronting), Tewi's slept with Reisen, and I think probably for the first time Tewi slept next to me last night, because she happened to be the one keeping me company that day. Because I just wanted to be with any of them to not feel alone.

 

And after putting those images in your head, I'll specify again that only Flandre and I have had sex anytime recently, and maybe Reisen. Sleep with means sleep next to, and most of our relationships to each other are just "close family". I feel sorry for people that can't sleep next-to someone they care about without sexual connotations.

 

 

Thanks for the replies! I hope I covered everything worth saying in the three on-and-off hours it took to write this. I was distracted by Cry's New Years stream. Here I am twenty minutes after writing that, I'm gonna hit post reply now. No idea what I'm doing "tonight", when I go to sleep at 11AM.

[Luminesce]

Jeez, that looks like way more text now that I didn't just write it a few minutes ago. I swear it shouldn't take that long to read. I don't think what I write about is too boring...

 

Anyways, I just went through this thread to see if I'd posted this song before, but for the latter half I just got distracted reading our posts. And I've totally got feels right now, seeing all the stuff my tulpas said and did on their own. I mean, even just reading some of the things Flandre said that are the same things she's always said made me feel kind of Idunno. And Tewi.. she's done so much for us, and is so strangely reliable, it's hard to believe I share a brain with her. But Lucilyn, man! Some of her posts managed to make me laugh, some of them made me really proud of her, and overall they gave me the most feels. Just seeing them do all this stuff on their own.. It's kind of surreal. And by kind of I mean very. Very mixed feelings, but they're good I think. I'm just happy they've gotten a chance to be themselves.

 

Reisen's my accompaniment for the moment, and I'll be going to bed soon and probably trying to do some wonderlanding with her for visualization practice before I fall asleep. And yes, I was proud of what she'd done too, Tulpa commented on how she'd replied to a bunch of peoples' progress reports which I totally forgot. The feels right now, man, I'm not used to them.

 

So I hadn't posted this song up 'til now, and when I looked it up I remembered why. I didn't like the image Moon-Tone used for the video. Speaking of feels, the background sound that kicks in at 14 seconds in still gives me shivers. I don't know why that specifically, but it feels so Reisen I can't help but have that reaction to it. I think I personally would've used an image like this for the song, but whatever, they made it. (Edit: Now that I listen to it, it's a lot harder to hear in low quality. Oh well.)

 

Seriously, got shivers like I'm actually cold right now, but I'm not. "Feels" is all I can say, sorry to any non-native English speakers who don't understand. It just means feeling emotions, I guess.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Luminesce

[tulpa001]

I wouldn't say I get in a dark mood and then try not to think about things. Our basic philosophy says to be happy when you don't have a reason to be something else. I'm not just hopeless and depressed when I'm like this, it's always when I try the hardest to try and improve myself. Although I've kind of exhausted most of my ideas so there's more space for just feeling bad. I do make myself sad by thinking about trying, but I do that because never confronting the problem scares me a whole lot more.

That's what I'm saying. You shouldn't have to try at all. The goal is to form automatic action. This is done through careful psychological conditioning. So long as you are trying, you are needlessly taxing your will. I guess strengthing your will could be a useful passtime if you want that. Rather, you need to be engaging in problem solving. I feel Tewi understands this really well. Problem solving + automatic action = problem solved. Brute force attacks don't always work. This is what we call trying.

 

The second half is me talking about the emotional engagement I believe to be a necessary component of lucid dreaming.

 

... where your actions and thoughts bypass the ego and more or less just.. do what they should. ...

This is decidedly not what I am talking about. Perhaps I am not good at explaining it. This is all my host's philosophy. If you are having difficulty following through on something, your choices are to abandon it, attempt to try but stop when your brain grinds to a halt, or remove the try, but keep the follow through. It is not easy. But it has nothing to do with bypassing conscious control.

 

Okay, new idea. Wake up with one of your tulpas and immediately ask them about what they remember from the dream. We do this all the time. It is a shared project, after all. I personally think talking with your tulpa(s) should be the very first thing you do in a day anyway.

 

I would also say that I agree that switching is not the same as spending time with them. You have to switch and impose. Then they can spend time with you while they front.

[Luminesce]

I probably should've explained the connection I was making better, it made more sense in the context I know. The effortlessness of just living as I know it comes with that level of consciousness, and to some extent the one before it, the level of Reason (where Tewi sits squarely and I am partially). You stop relying on your ego to let you do things, meaning when you get the feeling "That's too much work, don't do it" it's irrelevant to your actual decision making process. With subjective reality, I more than likely shaped this system for myself because of who and what I learned from, but it's how it is for me more or less. I experienced the level of Love (that sounds stupid) just once I think exactly two years ago, and it was really something else. I don't remember how, in fact I don't remember the night at all, but I know I was with Reisen. It felt like I had an epiphany and everything in the world seemed more positive. All the things I worried about felt like they had simple answers, everything felt like potential fun and happiness. But the one thing I still worried about (and, possibly, why it wore off so fast) was going back to the way I was before. Which I knew would happen, that article I linked probably explains such experiences. It's supposed to be a really good thing though, because while your mind doesn't quite work in that way by default yet, you then know what you're aiming for.

 

Deeeefinitely haven't made any real progress since then. On the "levels of consciousness" scale anyways. Ironically, despite Tewi specifically not believing in them, she's the only one who's put any real work into trying to raise our level of consciousness since. Not too long ago she was practicing All Day Awareness, technically a lucid dreaming technique but also equivalent to the state similar self-help books said to practice to improve your level of consciousness (I suppose this time it's literal). She did it for a while and I guess we were distracted after she eventually switched with Lucilyn, who definitely could not keep it up. Contrary to Tewi's contrary beliefs and my own of the levels of consciousness, Lucilyn doesn't think you need to be "aware of everything" to be happy by default, she just thinks you need to learn to think positively.

 

Even in my own system our subjective realities are different, sheesh.

 

Anyways, I already wake up with my tulpas whenever they're actually sleeping with me. Every time I woke up last night, and also for the 1-2 hours I lay in bed trying to fall back asleep while people were making noise (running around upstairs with the dog..), I talked to them (Reisen and later her and Tewi, when I was just lying in bed). I remembered some dreams, they were decent length although I could not remember the details that I knew were there. I literally had a Spongebob dream, for some reason. And I knew the whole premise and what more or less happened, but a lot of the details in the middle escaped me.

[Luminesce]

Wait a minute, I had a dream about playing Osu. My hand hurt or something so I switched from using ZX to mouse buttons for a second, and wondered why they were actually enabled (usually have them disabled). That didn't happen...

 

In case all the text prior scared you off, you should read my last post with the video in it. I was honestly kind of hoping for replies. Enough to actually say so, even

 

 

I probably shouldn't want to switch on my birthday, but nothing sounds like fun and I don't want to do the things I have to do. And by nothing sounds like fun I mean as I've sat here wondering what to do (since I woke up and Tewi asked me), I have no answer. It would be bad to have one of my tulpas sit in for my "Happy Birthday" song, right..?

[tulpa001]

Sounds like a decent present to me. My host had me sit through her birthday. I like presents more than her.

 

The last post with a video in it doesn't really invite comment. Although I am happy you noticed my comments.

[Luminesce]

Guess I just wanted to make it clear that post was special. I don't usually feel real emotion like that, just surface ones that don't mean much. But reading all those posts by my tulpas definitely made me feel something. Also I let Lucilyn switch for a while to play Terraria with my friends (which she enjoyed a lot more than me, and I enjoy Terraria), and she ended up taking a shower which she called a birthday present. And then imposed me so she could tell me it's not that annoying (my hair's long, so that can be annoying, and having it be wet for a while) and that she would remind me as much whenever I go too long without showering. So I guess in her own way she's helping me get over one of many "Don't do, too annoying/much effort" thoughts I have. Then we just have to do the same for remembering dreams every night (a good part of which I swear comes before falling asleep), spending time wonderlanding (visualization is annoying for me), getting exercise, brushing my teeth, and I planned to make a long list for emphasis on how that's not happening but I'm technically not in school anymore, so that knocks off at least four others I would've written here.

 

My point is, there's a lot of work to be done. And it's all to make me actually able to apply effort in the first place, which is why most of it hasn't been done.

 

 

edit: how many times can I read over a post and still "doesn't" instead of "don't"

[Luminesce]

I'm tired. Tell my cat to stop meowing, if she wants to be inside she has to be in a pen. I don't sleep when she meows randomly throughout the night. Just when our dog stopped keeping me up at night, she chewed up our cat's heating pad, so the cat has to be inside at night and she's right next to my room. Anyways, I remembered dreams at some point, but I plan to commit them to memory better in the future. If the cat wakes me up, I'll spend that time going over any dreams I had.

[Luminesce]

Had to get myself in a better mood before I could be bothered to write anything here. Watching my idol TakeSomeCrime

helped. I love that guy.

 

Have a song that annoyed me at first but was stuck in my head and getting replayed by the time it was over:

 

Same guy who made (IOSYS) songs like Overdrive and Marisa Stole the Precious Thing, I should've had more faith. I was won over at 0:44.

 

I remembered a dream for real last night, all the way from a Skype call to a bunch of kids running a race and everything in between, the between mostly being Pokemon. Don't really know why I was able to remember all of that one, you just kind of wake up and it's either gone or it's not. That time it was kinda still there, and when I tried to remember it I just remembered the other totally unrelated parts too.

 

That was, of course, after the cat stopped periodically meowing around midnight. Since I went to sleep at like 8pm, I got roughly 6 hours of sleep by 6AM, and a lot of being almost asleep. Guess I'll just do that again. No, I have no idea why my capitalizations of AM/PM are so arbitrary. Also this is the only time I've reversed the dreams-->music order I think.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Luminesce

[Luminesce]

If you listen to the songs I post while reading what I write here, just listen to that one up there again.

Read these if you want, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_inertia

 

Two things. First, having "Short-term memory is impaired" spelled out for me gives me a better grasp of what actually happens, and makes me want to challenge my mind by fighting it. It's technically already what I've been doing the last few nights, trying my best to hold on to what I do remember and trying to re-remember the rest. The second thing is too relevant to continue this paragraph, though.

 

Second, I woke up after 7 hours of sleep today relatively awake. I'm kind of scared that, despite my body thinking it runs on a 26 hour schedule, maybe it doesn't. I've been quick to disregard the "A consistent sleep schedule makes remembering dreams and lucid dreaming easier" thing as not an option. But I just went roughly three days in a row waking up at 5, 6 and 7 AM which is kind of unheard of for me, and a schedule that Tewi likes us to try and uphold.

 

Ahh man. Paragraph breaking again. I only slept 7 hours, but I had a detailed enough dream, and between 6:59AM and 7:24AM I had another short one equally detailed. Seven hours with vivid dreams! Don't tell me that going to sleep naturally late as I do, but then not sleeping in and thus getting ~7 instead of ~10 hours of sleep is actually a good thing. Theoretically I could actually uphold a schedule like that, as I did last night. Despite going to bed three hours later than the night before, and four later than the night before that, sleeping so little kept the schedule roughly the same. Usually it breaks it because I sleep in a lot. But usually I assume sleeping in means more chances for dreams and deeper REM sleep when I do. So having relatively detailed dreams at seven hours in... That screws with a lot of what I preferred to believe. IIRC someone recently mentioned that, probably Lucilyn, having a fairly detailed dream around 7 hours into sleep. Dangit, guys, my habit of sleeping in is in serious danger here.

 

My own opinions and preferences are currently overridden by the need to explore this further, so I'll be going to sleep as early as I can tonight too. And now that I've realized all this, there's not a chance of Tewi letting us sleep in when she's in charge of sleeping time. aaaaaaaa