So.. What am I doing wrong?

[Guest]

Maybe it's a mix on expectations and contentment. Granted my visualization is good, but i've been practicing every day for years because it was the way i had fun when alone and bored. Also, my carrier requires it, and my hobbies require it. So i may have had enough talent naturally, but i can very clearly see an improvement in the last 8 months!

 

In April 2018, i could imagine an object qnd rotate it easily, i couldn't really immersively fly around and track flying objects, and people were very two dimensional. In fact, more or less could barely focus on parts of my tulpas for seconds at a time, and their hair and faces were static disjointed puzzle pieces. Frankly, i read guides that said something like, 'zoom out, or, hold an image.' I could literally only see puzzle peices no matter how far out i zoomed, also, i couldn't hold an image for more than 2 seconds.

 

Fast forward 2 months of daily practice, i could see expression on their faces, but like a photograph, and only if i concentrated. Then i could see movement like, 'hold up a sign' but weird stuff like, only if they were wearing a 50's style housedress or cheerleader outfit.

 

4 months in. I could finally see them snile clearly, still no lips moving when they talk or hair for that matter, like 60% of them at once. At the time i was so happy to have that, i figured i was fine.

 

6 months into it, i could fly with jet boots, chase them in the sky with our angel wings, more beautifully picture vistas, run through the forest in bear form, it was really satifying and i started to notice that my memories of wonderland were very close to real memories.

 

During this time i had lucid dreams, they were good, but short and still i think not perfect reality either, but damn close.

 

Now 8 months with tulpas, my wonderland experience is very similar to hypnagogic experiences, but like... parts that can be summed to a whole.

 

Take a walk in thr forest, focus on things, hear, smell, feel, taste, but not all at once. Two at a time, sure. Not i realize that my senses can overwhelm eachother. Like a good smell will form a memory but nothing else comes with that moment, just smell and a notion of what i smelled. In wonderland it's like typing in Japanese. You type out a full line of characters and 'pop' a single combined symbol forms. This is where my immersion is 50% but my memories are 100%. The pieces are combined into experiences.

 

It's similar to life really, you walk to the store, it takes 20 minutes, but you remember half of it or less and what you do remember could be condensed into a few moments of memory.

 

If you read a good book, just one word is pretty unimmersive, but a few paragraphs tell a scene. Then you think back to that paragraph and remember the scene, not the first word.

 

You can improve, but it takes effort and time.

 

You may be naturally gifted in not having hallucinations, i say it that way because i used to get spooked in the dark many times by intrusive imposition, aliens and ghosts mostly. Now it so happens they are always my tulpas out of the corner of my eye, or as a strange presence walking around me, without tulpamancy, i would have considered you lucky. I was afraid of the dark up to april of this year.

[Breloomancer]

This is getting a bit off topic, so this will be the last post that I make on the matter (unless I post something that is mostly on topic, but has an extra off topic paragraph).

 

When I impose, it doesn't look like the imposed images and sounds are overlayed, they look just like everything else, they look just like reality. I know what is behind them, but they are entirety opaque. I know that it is possible to interact with your tulpas as if they were real via imposition, because I am able to do exactly that. According to Bears visualisation test, I actually have worse visualisation than most people (I feel like I have pretty good visualisation, but I guess everyone else is secretly amazing), and yet I was still able to impose my tulpa in such a way. Sure it took hard work, but it did not dampen the accomplishment, it only made it all the sweeter in fact.

 

The one thing that is better about LDing than imposing as far as interacting with tulpas goes, is that imposed tulpas can't support your bodyweight

[Luminesce]

When I impose, it doesn't look like the imposed images and sounds are overlayed, they look just like everything else, they look just like reality.

 

Overlay wasn't quite meant that way - it's just the word I use for what your mind does to visual input, ie the eyes->brain->(imposition)->your awareness thing. As for the level of imposition... That's nice if your (tactile) imposition is lifelike, but that's very rare. I've heard of it twice, three times if counting you. Generally the levels people reach are great, enough to be worth doing (as with us), but certainly not lifelike. Note that "lifelike"/"perfect" wasn't intended to be the general end goal, I just wrote that because by that point I had a different idea in mind for that post, ie to link it when people ask about making their tulpas more "real" as they often do. Technically it was off topic, but I wrote a pretty good deal on-topic too, so it's probably fine.

 

At least as far as my posts are concerned, I can't really post "on-topic" until they've tried or responded to my post, so.. more discussion is always better than less.

[Guest LanceReilyn]

I greatly appreciate everyone's input and differing views. These are exactly the sort of real experiences I needed to collect since often the guides seem more matter-of-fact and less matter-of-discovery. Every new guide that didn't seem to produce anything felt like another failure on my part and the discouragement was building up, even knowing in my mind that I should be trying everything including self-discovery.

 

I haven't been forthcoming in reply because I am supposed to be writing a self-evaluation at work and this determines my raise so there is a delicate game to play of talking myself up but only to the point I am able to substantiate it. Well that and last night was a.. Erm.. Interesting night where Reilyn needed to get some things out of her system about color text. I can't remain unbiased about it so I have just let her do her thing.

 

I don't mean to say I have heard all I need, just that I'm definitely listening and trying to figure out how to best utilize the information. I have a feeling this is one of those things I'll look back on in months and with a broader perspective really be able to appreciate our progress.

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Done with work things. So to go over some of the advice here (which again, I appreciate greatly) and how I think it relates to me.. I guess I already knew imposition wouldn't be quick and easy for me. I've spent very little time in my life just living in my head or producing visual models. I remember reading books but never using them to create vivid worlds or imaginary friends. I did construct things out of Legos a lot but that was usually taking bricks and building them up by feeling or whim and not specific intent, into something that seemed interesting. Bit by bit, it would begin to resemble something of greater interest and I would really often decide what it could become near the completion. If I just said "I'm going to make an ", the process was the same but an end goal influenced the process.

 

That I am aware of, I have never hallucinated in my life, the closest thing to it perhaps being what we have mentioned before of briefly having conversations with "someone" in my head a while back that may or may not have been Reilyn or what would eventually become her. I'm not exactly sitting at a zero, since I can vaguely make out her form, but part of my frustration seems to be she keeps changing her clothes and hair to throw me off (She says "We don't dress the same on the outside everyday, why should we wear the same things on the inside?"). For example, I try to be mindful of and build an impression of her someplace, a humanoid female form shorter than our body, perhaps walking beside me or sitting next to me while I'm typing, and she takes care of sharpening the visuals and adding clothes, details and puppetting the form how she pleases.

 

It really is a team effort for us to visualize anything. It's actually never occurred to us to try and shrink her down or grow her up, it was always just about if she had a physical body in the physical world, what she would look like and what she would do. I find when she is the one in primary control, it seems harder for me to do the same thing she does and I chalk it up to a a lack of imagination or unwillingness/inability to disassociate away from the body, so I have been spending my mostly mental times focusing on trying to figure out how to switch.

 

I suspect what's happening is that this has all just been open-eyed visualization and my mind just 100% refuses to acknowledge it as anything more. There just seems to be far too great a part of our brain which says "pretend what you want, it's fake and you will get no more from me". I'm not trying to add undue negativity and doubt in, I think I may just be voicing what has always been there, hidden below the surface. Her sharing a brain with me, I have had it proven time and time again, 100% real. Nothing quite like feeling yourself getting dressed and having your own mouth nagging yourself to get up earlier so we have time for breakfast, without willfully doing any of it, to dispel doubt.

 

I agree that I need visualization practice and pretty much every activity we I have been doing lately, except posting on these forums, at least in some way had been working towards that. I especially appreciate your comment J+C, practical and personally applicable. Anyway, I was operating under the assumption that imposition was two different skills, the visualization and the hallucinating and I needed to cultivate both. Together if possible, but separate is need be. Though Reilyn says she already experiences physical reality perfectly well enough, being unable to disassociate away from the body herself, especially into a form she also knows isn't real. She is in the same boat I am, I guess.

 

The tip about her running up and "glomping" me is a pretty good one. She has been doing that from basically the moment she figured out she could. She is definitely the physical, hugging, cuddling, hand-holding, relax by laying-on-top-of-me type, and like I said, we may not be able to physically feel anything but the closeness and comfort and belonging is there. The love and trust. It's one of the reasons we want to figure out lucid dreaming, and/or how to synthesize senses in the mindscape/imposition, because while this is fine for now, we would like it to be more real.

 

It kind of blows me away how proficient many of you are in your various favourite areas. Right now, since we both share the body's senses and feeling of "being" the body, the closest we can really get is for one of us to just physically hug ourselves. Body hugs are shared hugs and it's not quite the same thing but it's something.