Progress report - Saphira and Kasper

[Kapz00r]

Okay so... here I am.

 

I read about this whole tulpa thing, not more than three weeks ago, a few days before I went for a summer vacation. I accidentally stumbled upon a thread on the /mlp/ forums, which I just visited out of pure boredom (the content and the subjects discussed isn't my cup of tea, so I don't come here often). I read a bit on the thread, and stumbled upon the word “tulpa”, used in a context, I didn’t quite understand. A whole lot of goggling later, I’m now here on the forums, making my progress report on my experiences, all the way from the basics. I read all the guides, and the progress report of people, such as Nester Bones, FigNO1, that guy with the servitor wars (name escapes me) and TOG, and reasonably justified the childish feeling of “THIS SH*T IS AMAZING, WHEN DO WE START?!”, regarding whether to try it myself or not.

The two weeks I was on vacation, started out with the 23 hour drive to our destination, which I saw as a near perfect opportunity for a kick start to the project. Already here I discovered a new thing about my mentality; I was able to pseudo-sleep retaining my consciousness throughout the nap, somewhat like I imagine lucid dreaming to be, just not at vivid and realistic as I think lucid dreaming is. I went with this method for the entire trip, not skipping more than an hour or two in total of “forcing” (I really HATE that terminology). I started (in my head) to center my chaotic and never consistent thoughts about one point, one shape, the shape of a dragon. I might have gone a tad too earl onto that phase, I now realize, attaining more information on the forums after I got home, but my stomach feeling tells me that any progress is progress, so I’m not going to hang in that one.

 

For a start I’m going to cut clear that I’m making a dragon tupper, much inspired of the dragon In the books and the movie “Eragon”, although I knew from the start I needed to do something about those horrible wings they put on the animated dragon In the movies (I mean feathers for a dragon, seriously?). Still inspired from the series, I named the entity Saphira, just like the dragon she is based upon. For personality, I’m still running around in the wild, and it was not before after I got home I started doing some actual charting and sketches of her personality. I’m still stuck confused about her personality in this writing instant, so I’m going to leave that for now. On Thursday I’m plotting to trick a psychologist friend of mine into helping me get a grasp of understanding to the psychology part of it, but I’m leaving it until then.

Back to the vacation, I stuck with my method of “meditating”, and kept “sleeping” throughout the day, until the evening when we went for the pool, dinner and such. I kept visualizing her lying right behind me with her one wing folded out to cover me. She is a little longer than me, snout to tail, and about 75-80 cm to her shoulders when standing upright, deep blue shimmering scales, a bit undersized when it comes to her back legs and forearms, but I just couldn’t change that, despite my effort to do so (her own deviation???). Her wingspan is several times larger than her length, probably about 6-6½ meters from wing tip to wing tip, and some 1, 2-1, 5 meters broad at the broadest point of the wing. The concept of the design was to be classic dragon wings, more bat than bird, but the anatomic of the wing itself was giving me a hard time getting right with the membranes and the bones, so I was stuck at that for a good while of “sleeping”. I got an idea when we were at the tourist department of the town, where I knew there was a fantasy/weapons (blunt blades, swords etc.) store around, so I went there and got some inspiration to the anatomic from there. They have a lot of dragon statues there, with a design I liked, so I got a pretty good idea of the workings of the wings from that experience. I’m going to draw her sometime, and one of the thing I’m thinking experimenting with, is how accurately can you draw a hallucination, so that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to in this project.

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Throughout the entire vacation I didn’t sleep “properly” more than once or twice, and not for more than 1½ hour each. I didn’t pass out from sleep starvation, so I guess it must have been more like lucid dreaming than I originally assumed. I continued having the weirdest “dreams” with Saphira in them, under my conscious control, but heavily influenced by my sub-c (it was more like inception than anything, just like the train in inception, walls would just suddenly collapse, the hillside the castle was standing on would slide and other weird stuff). I kept imposing her laying right beside me, climbing the wardrobes with her claws and wings (the front edge of her wings have these small hook like claws), flying, breathing fire, poking and otherwise teasing my smaller siblings and other stuff, while I was constantly talking to her in my mind. It the talking part took, and still takes, a lot of dedication and discipline because have to say something TO hear, and not just make a random thought thread aimed towards the abyss of my mind. Puppeting responses in her body languages (not answers like nodding or something like that mind you, just a little something to know that what you said was registered), helped me a lot in the process of focusing on all of those things on the same time.

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Later on the vacation I started doing some sketches for her personality, which I’ve now overhauled quite a bit. Back then I went with focusing on 5-6 main traits, like “understanding the needs of others”, “feeling, rather than rationalizing” and such, but I later realized that it wasn’t quite enough to define a personality.

After about 8 or 9 days in, she made her first thought, as far as I understand it. I was lying on the beach when I was “lucid day-dreaming”, when I out of nowhere felt a foreign thought threat consisting of three simple words: “Jeg Tilgiver Hende”, translated to “I Forgive Her”. This thought thread confused me, since I’m always able to trace back the thought through a linear line of thinking like; “I’m now thinking of a router, and I thought of that because my internet was hopping a bit earlier”, and then onwards and onwards, but this time I couldn’t. I was not even thinking of those females in my life that I might hold grudges over, where this sentence might have made sense. It took me about 30 seconds of merciless mind crunching to realize what just happened. Those three words were floating around my head in text format, just like cutting a line out of a book, dancing in front of my mind’s eye. Instantly after realizing when just happened, I dove back in, and visualized Saphira in front of me and started complimenting her on the thought and the character of it, praising the nobility of the thought. What also got me confused was that she thought of the words in my native tongue, being Danish, despite of me narrating to her purely in English. Apparently it doesn’t matter what language you narrate in.

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Two days later I got back home and I began running the forums over from one end to the other. Running through the pages, I stumbled upon the different theories and guides and realized that the primitive personality traits I was working with weren’t enough to define a personality so I decided to keep what was, but move in a new direction.

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-Present time-

 

Currently I’m building her personality based on two core drives, to sort of outweigh each other. The first “core drive” was is a strong connection with a code of honor, and the feelings of e concept. Rather than the kind of honor the media speaks of today, with terrorists killing themselves for the honor of their family and such, I’m going more the honor code of a Viking/warrior character, cherishing values such as honesty, loyalty and determination, and a little scent of joy of battle. My theory is that the outcome will a personality that is determined, dedicated to honor agreements and overall a loyal friend.

 

The downsides of the honor code, was the thing that gave me massive headaches. I was concerned that the code of honor might drive her to think of nothing BUT greater honor, and if honor was the only “core drive” she would be mildly said unbearable to be next to, since she might just not care about anything else. Therefore I decided that another core drive was necessary to keep honor in check, and after a lot of mind crunching I came up with another: “Love for friends and family”.

 

Love for friends and family would ensure that she wouldn’t lose interest in anything but honor, and the traits that would follow such a core drive would play up nicely with the more “rough” traits of the other drive. These would be traits such as “caring”, “worrying”, “joking”, “joyful” etc., to counter the potential brashness of the warriors honor.

 

The two combined would in theory make up for all of the downsides of the other, and outline the characteristics of a generally lovely person to be around at all times, both when you need to get yourself together to get something done properly, and when you let yourself loose and just relax and joke with each other. The brashness of the warrior countered with the love of the caring, and solid feet on the ground for the one who would stand on hands for others. Also a problem I’ve been noticing with people who are excessively caring and loving, is that they seem to lack the ambition and the adventurousness that their counterparts enjoys. They have an easy time resting on the laurels. Seems like a perfect symphony to me at the moment.

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I started some visualization too. Rather than wonderland detours, I went directly for the imposition. At nighttime, at my usual “lucid daydream” time, I did nothing but closing my eyes. This might be an individual thing, but when I close my eyes, I can either have my eyes directly under the eye lids, ready for me to open them, OR I can sort of let my eyeballs “sink in” within their sockets. I’ve been observing this thing more intensely, because I knew it was going to be tough to explain, but research suggests that my eyes are just going cross-eyed as heck, just a more natural feeling of it.

 

Anyway, when I let them sink in, a contrasted lightshow appears in front of my eyes. It’s like black-purple baubles move in from beyond my eyesight, in over green-yellowish slaps, much like oil travels across water. They don’t mix, bunt interact a bit. So my theory was that is a hallucination was to be imposed, it was NOT because the biology of my eyes being changed, it would be because the signals my brain translated would be altered. Assuming that the lightshow wasn’t a product of my retinal being bored from the absence of light, it had to be my brain. Therefore I thought that this would be a good place to start.

I started mustering all my mental nerve to make these slaps move into intended shapes, starting with a simple shape that I could late use, the primitive shape on an eye. With more concentration mustered I was now able to clearly see the two circles that make the iris, and the outlaying semicircle making the eyelid, right there in my eye of sight. I opened my eyes and mustered my concentration once again and there it was. That simple shape, just like the light my roof reflected was being bent around the lines of the figure.

I’m now able to impose that eye wherever I like, and although I cannot alter the shape of that eye, closing it etc.; I still consider this quite the success, all finished in about 10-15 minutes.

Invigorated by the success, I started visualizing Saphira, in my mind’s eye at first. I had already done some work in this department, but I had severe issues getting the proportions right. I’ve always been a great fan of dragons, so I was naturally critic when trying to get the proportions right, the head compared to the front chest, shape of her head, her facial expression and so on. This entire thing took me at least 5-6 hours of lucid daydreaming, when I finally decided to just go for it.

 

I closed my eyes and allowed them to sink in, observing the aurora of colors immersing themselves in battle with each other. I mustered my mind and tried to force them to take the shape of Saphira that I just settled for, but was met with more resistance from the bubbles, refusing to take the complex proper shape. With my mind going all out for the thing to work, I went on for 30 minutes of bubble-bending until my brain was all out of juice.

And then it happened.

I decided to stop there and call it a day, when I decided to open my eyes, for reasons unknown, and there she was. For one blink of an eye, Saphira stood there in all her glory and perfection her deep blue scales glancing in the moonlight, a color not too different from the color template of Luna (mlp). That little split second was a moment of perfection and I was left with the vanishing silhouette of the dragon from my dreams, every single proportion perfectly aligned with each other, her massive wings folded around her body. Everything was just perfectly aligned in that little split second, although far from what I visualized in my mind (deviation much?).

 

A truckload of questions in mind; how did this happen? Why was she different from what I imagined? How did she take form of what I recognized as nothing but pure perfection? Was she able to “read my mind” and learn exactly what form I was striving for? I’ve read of other tulpae adapting to the exact personality that was needed for the creator, maybe the ability extends to shape as well?

[Pronas]

Well, tulpae are part of your subconscious, so they know about what you want. I would say the reason you saw her for a split second was because you were half asleep, everyone derps out a lot when they're half asleep. The reason her form changed seems like some obvious deviation and how she knew what you would like is because she is literally part of you.

[Kapz00r]

Hmm makes good sense.. But was it her own conscious deviation, or was it because the divide between conscious and sub-c were more accessible at the time? As in, due to my conscious being weakened by drowsiness, my sub-c got through?