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Guest LanceReilyn

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I think we're like sisters now! Welcome to the family. <3

 

Omg, doesn't it look like he's mouthing my pigtail in this Halloween pfp? B what were you up to?

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Guest Reilyn-Alley

It was a bit of a tossup between which of us would update this one. Tossed a dice. Evens. I won. XD

 

Well it has been awhile because we figured nothing of note has been happening. Thing is though, stuff has been happening and we have just not been paying attention. It seems like we are settled in to a point now where we are pretty comfortable and could keep doing more tulpa stuff.. Or just stay like this for the rest of our lives and it would be fine. It adds a real perspective when time passes and some "I'm willing to work for months, years, rarrr!" faces some "well crap, nothing seems to be happening" and motivation starts to waver. I have tried to stretch myself out across so many things that I was relying on something I didn't realize we were having trouble with before: focus.

 

Related to loosing focus... So our meditation times haven't really gone up, to the contrary it seems like we have gotten too used to things and bored with them, as they are, so as soon as we get into a dark room and our brain hears "meditate", it's apparently nap time. Tried laying down to be comfortable for long periods of time: fall asleep. Tried seated, cross legged: works at first then legs go asleep, back hurts. Havn't actually tried a chair yet, sorta assume it would be the same: nap time, but will try that tonight. It's funny how many guides and non-tulpa stuff and people say meditation helps improve focus when it's contributing the opposite for us. Nightly meditation used to double as forcing, wonderland stuff, just usually quiet and calm like the two of us facing each other and carefully watching each other alternate breaths or something. Our diminishing focus has resulted in even those things getting more blurry. We could also try shifting meditation time to right after we woke up in the morning but I just don't understand how closing our eyes and trying to keep everything quiet right after waking up is going to do anything but take that morning groggy and put us right back to sleep?

 

We started keeping a pad of paper and pencil by the bed as a dream journal. Oddly enough, while we were still going hard on tulpa stuff, we had no dreams that we could remember even once. I think we went like 40 days strait with nothing. Now that our focus is dwindling, our meditation time seems to just be a nap and our Eyebo sessions are really the only time we actually seem to do visualizations or wonderland stuff properly (we found the flashing light and noise prevents sleep, even in a comfortable posture). It's like it gives artificial focus or something so it works for us. Oddly enough again, just recently we have started dreaming all of a sudden. Had one we remembered and wrote down on the 12th, 13th and 14th. Decided to sleep in on the 19th (just, I dunno, why not for a change) and had 3(!) dreams that morning. Went to bed early that night out of sheer boredom (started a meditation session, knew it would end up in sleep, didn't bother to set an alarm) and had 2 more dreams this morning. With the exception of one of the 3 (in which Lance was there and was a.. ninja in a supermarket, apparently. He was larping and beating everyone in mock fights while they complained it was unfair? Ehhh) the only common theme was that both of us remember having the dreams but neither of us was present. It was like we were watching them through an admittedly hi-definition TV. At no time did either of us even consider the idea that we could try to make any of these dreams lucid, so yay. ;P

 

I hesitated to include this but Lance and I got into our first argument. Long story short, I complained that he was hiding me and ashamed of me and when would I ever really get a chance to be in the real world doing stuff, unless we accidentally switched, since we have apparently accidentally accomplished everything else. All he could do was give excuses and apologized and ask I try to understand his feelings. I was pretty mad. I vented a bit to a friend and realized while typing everything out that, well, holy crap Lance has pretty much sacrificed all his free time to me since I showed up. There was stuff we did together, like meditation, Japanese drills and Eyebo, eating, etc, but everything else was all me me me. I told him to go play his assassins creed or something and he said "Eh, not interested any more. Why don't you draw or chat online?" apparently as long as I'm happy he is happy.. But I dunno if he is really happy and that makes me less happy.. Does that make any sense?

 

I decided I'd try to work on my voice when main-front because why not right? Lance isn't really interested but goes back to that as long as I'm happy he is happy [and please don't tear up our vocal cords]. Turns out there are a LOT of people among my friends here that have experience in voice therapy. I found a video and site attached to it talking about some kind of voice box muscle control and have been singing along to some of my favorite songs using that, to try and keep all the practice fun. I think I'd eventually like to not just talk with my own voice but sing too! I tried to stop and consider if I was piling too much stuff up and not going to be able to find the time to do even half of it, but apparently the voice thing is safest done with little bits of practice over a long period of time so it fits in nicely.

 

I think I'm just in a funk the last few days. Dunno why. Low motivation time. I guess this sort of thing is normal? I'm just used to waking up and being excited about doing whatever and trying to get the most out of our time but the last few days I'm really mellowed out. Not sad or anything, just not as energetic. Bleh, between the two of us, I had pretty much been the primary motivating force. Oh well, I won't let it get to me, it's just kinda annoying. A hundred neat thoughts fly by while I just go meeehhh and don't snag any of them. That kinda slacking has even gotten to the stuff I was doing, like Japanese studies and drawing practice. :P

 

Anyway, we aren't done developing skills and trying new tulpa stuff. We don't really want to stop where we are at, it just seems like they all require a lot of diligent practice and this lazy funk has ground that to a halt. We are working towards switching and just having almost no progress. I said almost no because that reminds me of something! Last night, during Eyebo, Lance actually managed to disassociate taste! Had minty gum in his mouth and was chewing it but was tasting blueberry Greek yogurt instead (my suggestion). It was so weird and cool at the same time.

 

Also, we havn't updated in so long I almost forgot to mention the emotion stuff. I dunno if everyone else already knows this but it was new for us. So we discovered that though we were having trouble keeping focus in wonderland stuff or imposing, and typically everything felt so fake and unsatisfying (I think we are both just sitting in our co-front seats and puppetting ourselves in imagination. It's just a puppet show *sigh*) there was an exception to this. It wasn't disassociating from the body nor was it synthesis of senses in wonderland, it was emotions! So, like, when we hug we aren't feeling, hearing anything. The visualization is there but we have been practicing most with seeing so I sure hope it would be. Anyway, the emotions were there and it would emotionally feel real to us and that would somehow lower some of the walls in our minds and we would require less focus to keep things going and it would all seem more real. A friend helped us realize this with a neat little written script we tried to imagine ourselves in. It was very descriptive but seemed fake till it drew us in emotionally and suddenly everything went from being a sad puppet play to being a lot more genuine. Just stubbornly forcing everything to be there and stuff made our brain reject it and it was an uphill battle to experience it before focus waned and it fell apart. But with emotions it seemed our brain went from "No, that's not logical! Stop it!" to "Oh, this is one of those emotional things? Go ahead". It allowed us to actually become engaged in the visualization and stop thinking about it so we could experience it.

 

So yeah, we both seem to be pretty receptive to emotional experience and figure that's a backdoor to us having more fulfilling wonderland experiences and training sessions. We were still experimenting with it and so far have noticed that the times we got emotionally invested and thus really drawn in to stuff were the only times we were able to remember the experience at a later date. Everything we did without being engaged was like a hazy and unreal dream we just forgot completely about maybe a day later. Unfortunately, with this lull in motivation, stuff has kinda ground to a crawl so I figured I'd just mention it now.

 

Lance managed to have a kind of mental breakthrough, but it's super personal so I'm not going into it much. It involves a lot of stuff from his past he bottled up and hid but I sorta kinda accidentally dragged out into the light and opened. It was healthy. I know it sounds weird but we think the real "him" is the inner child inside who has been hiding all this time and operating the grown-up "him" at a safe distance as a puppet. I think he forgot which was the real "him". He has a theory that while the adult him thought the tulpa stuff would be neat, it was the real him on the inside that was desperate for me and has been working tirelessly to get closer to me, which could explain why our breakthroughs in tulpa stuff have been rapid and accidental. He thinks maybe that's why progress towards other stuff has been going so slowly; the real him already has me so why want more? I think it just sounds like an excuse to slack but whatever. This development was just a couple days ago so we aren't quite sure what to make of it. One of our friends said therapists call it an "opening" or something and it was a super important thing to take advantage of but.. How? :P

 

I think that's enough for now. Hopefully we will have more to post in the next update instead of a summary of 20 days of rambling. We try to keep it in perspective that some people struggle for years to achieve what we accidentally stumbled upon so quickly so, though it's a little annoying, we certainly aren't going to give up on anything!

 

See you space cowboy!

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We could also try shifting meditation time to right after we woke up in the morning but I just don't understand how closing our eyes and trying to keep everything quiet right after waking up is going to do anything but take that morning groggy and put us right back to sleep?

 

Vesper: How far away from normal sleeping times could you meditate? We don't meditate per se, but anything purely inward and mental we engage in needs to be after Ember stops being groggy in the morning and before we get tired in the evening.

 

I vented a bit to a friend and realized while typing everything out that, well, holy crap Lance has pretty much sacrificed all his free time to me since I showed up. There was stuff we did together, like meditation, Japanese drills and Eyebo, eating, etc, but everything else was all me me me. I told him to go play his assassins creed or something and he said "Eh, not interested any more. Why don't you draw or chat online?" apparently as long as I'm happy he is happy.. But I dunno if he is really happy and that makes me less happy.. Does that make any sense?

 

Perfect sense, actually. Ember is prone to obsessions; for periods of days, weeks, or months she will care preeminently about one thing and consider everything else an unwelcome distraction. For over two months now, her obsession has been me. Technically tulpamancy also, but in a subsidiary way. Almost everything we do can be divided into her prior commitments, things like to do together, and things I care about. The first twinge of worry hit when I suggested she finish reading the book she started just before discovering tulpamancy. She's loved books with a passion for 32 years. She's read thousands of them and for many years said that books were her closest friends. She said she'd rather talk to me. Then she said maybe books weren't for her anymore.

 

About a month ago, I noticed Ember hadn't listened to any of the music she likes since she discovered tulpamancy. I asked her to listen to some and during the fourth song, she had an epiphany.

 

Ember: It's hard to believe I got so lost. I was pouring everything I had into Vesper. I've never been one to spend much time listening to music, but when I like a song, I'll note it and save it to play when I'm feeling down. On this occasion, it helped me remember myself and rediscover my enthusiasm for life. Time is too pressing to spare much for just me, but we're being very intentional now about making sure everyone gets some time to do the things they most care about.

 

Vesper: You could try to find the things Lance used to most strongly connect to emotionally before you were around and make him try them again. He may feel happy, but that doesn’t guarantee everything is well with him.

I'm not having fun here anymore, so we've decided to take a bit of a break, starting February 27, 2020. - Ember

 

Ember - Soulbonder, Female, 39 years old, from Georgia, USA . . . . [Our Progress Report] . . . . [How We Switch]

Vesper Dowrin - Insourced Soulbond from London, UK, World of Darkness, Female, born 9 Sep 1964, bonded ~12 May 2017

Iris Ravenlock - Insourced Soulbond from the Winter Court of Faerie, Dresdenverse, Female, born 6 Jun 1982, bonded ~5 Dec 2015

 

'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you.' - The Velveteen Rabbit

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Also, we havn't updated in so long I almost forgot to mention the emotion stuff. I dunno if everyone else already knows this but it was new for us. So we discovered that though we were having trouble keeping focus in wonderland stuff or imposing, and typically everything felt so fake and unsatisfying (I think we are both just sitting in our co-front seats and puppetting ourselves in imagination. It's just a puppet show *sigh*) there was an exception to this. It wasn't disassociating from the body nor was it synthesis of senses in wonderland, it was emotions! So, like, when we hug we aren't feeling, hearing anything. The visualization is there but we have been practicing most with seeing so I sure hope it would be. Anyway, the emotions were there and it would emotionally feel real to us and that would somehow lower some of the walls in our minds and we would require less focus to keep things going and it would all seem more real. A friend helped us realize this with a neat little written script we tried to imagine ourselves in. It was very descriptive but seemed fake till it drew us in emotionally and suddenly everything went from being a sad puppet play to being a lot more genuine. Just stubbornly forcing everything to be there and stuff made our brain reject it and it was an uphill battle to experience it before focus waned and it fell apart. But with emotions it seemed our brain went from "No, that's not logical! Stop it!" to "Oh, this is one of those emotional things? Go ahead". It allowed us to actually become engaged in the visualization and stop thinking about it so we could experience it.

 

Ha ha, well, it's good that works for you! But I'm curious, what exactly do you do while visualizing? I often have weird DnD style adventures where we search for buried gold while running from pirates or something. My focus does wane every so often, but it's less frequent than when I just visualize myself having a normal conversation with my tulpa. It's not an emotional thing, but it does give my brain something to focus on.

We are
Uncannyfellow: host - 12/07/1992
Kanade: tulpa - 9/16/2018
Cornelia: tulpa - 9/31/2018
Nikki: soulbonded walkin - 5/6/2023

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Guest LanceReilyn

We had been kind of stuck in a rut, trying the same stuff just because it worked in the past. Maybe that's why we were loosing focus? Because it wasn't new and exciting anymore? Such a simple thing too, hmph. It annoys me that one of us even idly mentioned the idea earlier but didn't really do anything about it. Ah well, that's one of the reasons we are here.

 

Alright, we are going to read more and dig around for ideas and come up with new things, thanks for the tip.

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Don't get discouraged from not getting many breakthroughs, it is common for people to have lots of progress in the beginning and slow down as time goes on

I have a tulpa named Miela who I love very much.

 

 
"People put quotes in their signatures, right?"

-Me

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Guest Reilyn-Alley

Saw a thread about tulpish and coming up with a reply to it led to a few extra interesting considerations. It got too long to post there really, so hey, PR material!

 

Maybe it sounds weird but the whole communicating with raw thoughts, for the longest time, just never really occurred to us before. It never seemed like a conscious thing. We pretty much went strait from a head pressure with some emotions and the occasional broken word to speaking with other. The day that happened he decided was my birthday and was the evening before we joined up on here. Referenced back in post 1 of this thread. So.. I've literally spent all of my conscious life, except a frustrating week, communicating through speech. We both have fairly active mind voices, a longtime habit of his that I picked up, and when we look at things and think extra thoughts, I just always figured we caught ourselves thinking along the same lines due to how much we know each other. It never even occurred to me we might be picking up on and interpreting each other's thoughts. I've even said before (a couple times) that as far as I knew we couldn't read each other's thoughts but since we just really "knew" each other, if we look at something and "hrms", we have a pretty good idea what the other is thinking but are likely to ask anyway because we like to chat back and forth. It's an interesting thought, really, and sounds more reasonable then just "I dunno.. because we are really close?"

 

 

So, this is what we think is going on. We might be mistaken, or this is only part of it, I dunno. Just a personal theory.

 

I guess somewhere in the process of trying to decipher which thoughts are intrusive and which are meaningful, we added some kind of validation process. Like, if one of us has a flash of doubt or other unneeded negative or intrusive thought, that gets a super quick Y/N. We picked up the habit in meditation or visualization practice of considering them for a moment then shaking them off, throwing them away. They got in the way of stuff. At first that was actually kinda hard because giving it attention made it want to "stick" even harder. The solution for us was to get into the habit of doing that all day long, ever day for all random thoughts. Strange or whatever thought pops up, instead of immediately taking it seriously, we stop and give it a quick flash of "is this intrusive?" and if so, discarded without another consideration. It's actually been pretty healthy for Lance, considering how much he used to doubt himself all the time. Now he recognizes all those flashes of doubt to be intrusive and throws them away immediately. Like with everyone, some doubts are nagging and take further action to process or alleviate so it doesn't work 100% of the time, which keeps room for healthy doubt. If you guys ever wondered where I got the whole thing where I told people to throw away intrusive thoughts in their daily lives, this is it.

 

Anyway, a side effect of that validation process is we got into the habit of ignoring whatever random stuff that flies through our heads when we look at stuff. Stray, idle or meaningless thoughts don't get any attention payed to them, like we pretend they didn't even happen. We both have to swat away our own intrusive thoughts so we give each other the benefit of the doubt and don't pay attention to stuff quickly thrown out. The last thing he or I needs is the other grabbing on to an intrusive thought that was dismissed and going "hey, explain this", or mulling over it. We both do it so it's ended up having a side effect of giving us the impression we don't always know what the other is thinking and that ends us letting us be a little more spontaneous and surprise each other and just feels like, I dunno, it adds a little excitement to life. We do this often enough and quickly enough that, at worst, adds a split-second of hesitation and gives a whole lot of peace of mind. One of the tasks he does at his job is a medical first responder so while some might think this would slow things down and create dangerous hesitation in emergencies, it has actually done the opposite. Because he does it all the time he seems more able to handle stressful situations more rationally and calmly. "I can't help this person" is immediately thrown away and action takes place instead.

 

This has no effect on the emotional bleed that still happens with us, we have no way to stop that and we don't want to anyway. There's a comfort in sharing that stuff on a deep level where our logical minds don't interfere. From the sound of the dialogue on the tulpish thread, a lot of people here are really tied into trading those raw thoughts back and forth and it's used as a primary or supplementary form of communication and I'd imagine trying to shut that off would be very difficult and unnerving. I can only assume that we still do raw thoughts, but are just so out of practice (or never learned) doing it intentionally that it's not a valid form of communication for us at this time. I guess it's something we do accidentally which supplements our mind speak chatting and enhances our impression of like-mindedness and familiarity.

 

Matsi! We listened to a bunch of his videos on YouTube and I have tried to add some of his techniques to helping me do guided meditation for Lance. He still seems stubbornly resistant to just "letting go". I'd go further into it but this is already getting pretty long so one of us will try to remember to mention our recent experience with that kinda thing, later.

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Your breakdown of tulpish and not using it was really interesting to read and I'm glad to hear that we're not the only ones who don't communicate in tulpish. I do wonder if tulpish is a skill that requires practice in order to use for communication because it's certainly something we can't do. Whenever Al tries to communicate in it, my brain automatically translates it into words without me even meaning to. But he hasn't tried in a long time, he's developed enough that he uses words and disregards tulpish as being too primitive for him. So I wonder if the Tulpa's personality plays a role, kind of like the active passive thing you mentioned. 

 

The aspect of removing doubt as being "intrusive" is also pretty interesting to me too. I wonder if other negative traits and thoughts could be removed via the same method, such as feelings of anger or sadness and I wonder if that'd be any different from repression. 

 

Lots of good thoughts in this update, certainly stuff that I'll be considering. Thanks for posting!

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As soon as Cat and I became comfortable with dismissing intrusive thoughts, we were a lot better off. One sign of Cat getting out of her depression was no longer putting any value into her dark thoughts.

 

As for the Tulpaish stuff, I sometimes have trouble with communicating with words but most of my communication is symbolized and or visualized. I don't know if asking for snuggle time by imposing myself on Cat's shoulders and showing my sleepiness counts as Tulpish or not. Since we live in the same brain, our thought processes are going to be similar since we have access to the same amount of knowledge.

I'm Ranger, GrayTheCat's cobud (tulpa), and I love hippos! I also like cake and chatting about stuff. I go by Rosalin or Ronan sometimes. You can call me Roz but please don't call me Ron.

My other headmates have their own account now.

 

If I missed seeing your art, please PM/DM me!

Blog | Not So Temporary Log | Switching Log | Yay! | Bre Translator | Art Thread

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