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Do these 'switching' experiences sound normal?


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We can't still fully switch since host is front stuck, but we've had some experiences that we assumed were us getting close to finally switching. Someone told us that those experiences weren't normal at all, that they didn't even sound normal in the context of tulpamancy. But we're pretty sure they are? host dissociating to let tulpa switch in, and that. Then they argued that when people talk about dissociation for switching, it's more of a symbolic thing, 'host symbologically dissociates from front and tulpa associates to front'. Our experiences are:

 

  • Dizziness and headaches, feeling 'off', almost feeling like being erased from existence or ripped apart, or feeling like you don't know where your face is while trying to switch.
  • Sometimes my host gets so detached that I do stuff 'outside her awareness'. The most vivid experience we have is me walking with our father, and Miri being shocked I had a conversation with him that she didn't remember happening at all 'wait, when did you even do that?', she knew it had happened, but didn't remember experiencing it.
  • She often dissociates randomly from me and gets scared that it's me the one moving the body and not her, like she forgets. Usually it is accompanied by other things like seeing things smoother or far away or light nauseas and goes away pretty quickly.

 

We always used those as 'hey maybe we're switching' signals, especially the second one, but then we're told they're not common. Also been told that there's not such thing as 'host not being aware of surroundings while tulpa is' since that'd imply parallel processing. But we always experienced that? it's what we always assumed most switched out hosts/tulpas experienced.

 

Do any of those sound remotely familar or at least not -not normal- in the context of switching? what do people even experience, physically?

 

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That's definitely "dissociation" in the normal sense, but I've personally never associated "dissociation" in that sense with switching. Dissociation in the sense that a host can be immersed in the wonderland completely ignoring any real world senses is more what I think of. Though in that case, the brain's consciousness is still focused on the wonderland/visualization, whereas for a switched out host the consciousness should be wherever it normally is, with the tulpa in the host's place. Host would just feel like a tulpa normally does.

 

Experiences are too varied, weird and personal for me to say much more than that, but no, none of that is something we experience. We don't have any classic "dissociation" going on, it's just de-association with the fronting position, as opposed to association with it.


I feel like a lot of that stuff comes from working with possession and muddying the ideas of what switching would be like, personally, but some people disagree with me on that

Edited by Luminesce

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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Switching was weird in the beginning. I remember Bear being afraid and confused and even falling into lucid dreams in the back with no one in front, which only ever happened like that very early on. Disociation can be scary too, so that's normal. We didn't experience discomfort but it doesn't mean it's not 'normal'. We know that at least one of our configurations (watcher position) matches how Tewi described it, but every time Lumi or Lucilyn describes it, it sounds different so don't get too hung up.

 

I think your normal 'switching' is valid, we think you're switching Miri into active tulpa position. You could call me a 'front stuck host' when Bear is fronting and I'm co-fronting. It feels just like you describe either way with me fronting or Bear if we're co-fronting or if eiher of us are in active tulpa position. Passive position would be watcher, then there's way back and dormancy. You don't need either of those for a successful switch. If Bear's in watcher, he doesn't do anything or say anything, and I can keep him there, otherwise playing space engineers would just be watching Bear do it 'cause he's such a meddler.

Edited by Ashley
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16 hours ago, Luminesce said:

Dissociation in the sense that a host can be immersed in the wonderland completely ignoring any real world senses is more what I think of. Though in that case, the brain's consciousness is still focused on the wonderland/visualization, whereas for a switched out host the consciousness should be wherever it normally is, with the tulpa in the host's place. Host would just feel like a tulpa normally does.

 

Oh I was talking more about hosts not being aware of what the tulpa is doing while fronting (if they're 'gone'), and only knowing what they did when they become active again, no wonderland at all, just lack of existence/perception I guess. Been told that this would be parallel processing but I am sure many people here have this experience with switching, so I don't know if we missed something or didn't understand from the beginning.

 

13 hours ago, Ashley said:

 Passive position would be watcher, then there's way back and dormancy. You don't need either of those for a successful switch.

 

If a switch is the host being able to experience all the tulpa experienced before, then it's not a switch unless the host can, which ours can't lel, no matter how switchy our stuff might sound. Your switch is an example of what it should be for us.

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I mean, the host should be as-aware of what a tulpa did while switched as a tulpa would've been in any other scenario. And yes the host is supposed to be able to experience the equivalent of being a tulpa, but I don't consider switching an exact experience that everyone will experience the same way, so I don't want to say that means you're not switching, you know.

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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In our experience, dissociation feels more like a symptom of switching rather than a cause for switching. Aside from the meditative/trance state we frequently enter before switching, most of our feelings of dizziness, confusion, lack of awareness, etc. are unpredictable and do not always occur. Sometimes the trance state makes us feel dissociated, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I feel like everything is weird and new when I switch in, and sometimes I don't.

 

Ultimately, if you're in a trance state, then you have met the dissociation requirement. Whether that's through some kind of mediation or just forgetting about reality while you're talking in wonderland, that in of itself is enough to lead to switching.

 

Front-stuckness, non-intuitively, does not always require a significant amount of "force" to get the situation resolved. Methods that use force- such as Ember.Vesper's guide or using multiple headmates to force the host out of the front- can be effective, but they don't always work. Even though we believed Gray was front-stuck for a long time, Gray seemed to not have any trouble switching out or in once we figured things out. That helped me conclude that the accuracy of the method is more important than the brute force these methods could offer. This lead me to believe that switching is more like getting in the right combination- you can sometimes force open a combination lock, but sometimes the only way to open it is to figure out what the actual combination is.

 

Overall, the best advice I can give you is these might lead to switching, or they might not. The only other thing is if you feel like these extreme episodes are not taking you anywhere, that's okay, and you shouldn't push yourself to have an even more extreme episode of dissociation. I don't want you guys to hurt yourselves trying this.

 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:25 PM, Mirichu said:

We always used those as 'hey maybe we're switching' signals, especially the second one, but then we're told they're not common. Also been told that there's not such thing as 'host not being aware of surroundings while tulpa is' since that'd imply parallel processing. But we always experienced that? it's what we always assumed most switched out hosts/tulpas experienced.

 

Do any of those sound remotely familar or at least not -not normal- in the context of switching?

 

After breaking down each case one-by-one, we realized we had experiences that may be related to what you are describing. Overall I wouldn't describe these experiences as normal. The exception is that dissociation in of itself can unpredictably vary in intensity from not noticeable at all to causing an extreme experience.

 


 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:25 PM, Mirichu said:

Dizziness and headaches, feeling 'off', almost feeling like being erased from existence or ripped apart, or feeling like you don't know where your face is while trying to switch.

 

[Gray] This reminded me of one of our switching attempts. It was at night, I was really tired, and at one point I felt like my head wasn't on my body or I didn't know where my head was. It was a surprising experience that was very brief.

 

I don't believe the experience translated to us switching though. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but it probably happened either the summer and before Ranger figured out how to switch.

 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:25 PM, Mirichu said:

Sometimes my host gets so detached that I do stuff 'outside her awareness'. The most vivid experience we have is me walking with our father, and Miri being shocked I had a conversation with him that she didn't remember happening at all 'wait, when did you even do that?', she knew it had happened, but didn't remember experiencing it.

 

[Ranger] At first I was a little confused because I first read this as you have a parallel processing experience, but after re-reading this I realized our headmates have experienced something like this. Since they are rarely active, things that are processed by working memory don't feel like it was a part of them to begin with. As a result, things that go on feel like news to them. They have access to the memory, but there's that feeling of partial amnesia because it wasn't just not them, it had nothing to do with them.

 

Gray may have also experienced this to a degree. When I'm switched-in, I keep the front to myself and Gray usually spends several hours being dormant. Even though Gray is usually up to speed with whatever I am experiencing, sometimes he is a little slow to wrap his head around the details of what is happening. He has not been switched-out long enough to experience significant feelings of lost time.

 

I can't say if this is related to being switched-out, simply not being connected to the front, or both. Working memory is directly tied to the front, I am more connected to it than my headmates because I spend a lot of time possessing the body. However, I would assume not being connected to working memory is a symptom of dormancy, that Miri has been inactive for periods of time. In our system at least, I need to not possess or really interact with Gray much for roughly 48 hours and I will start to feel detached and experience significant time loss.

 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:25 PM, Mirichu said:

She often dissociates randomly from me and gets scared that it's me the one moving the body and not her, like she forgets. Usually it is accompanied by other things like seeing things smoother or far away or light nauseas and goes away pretty quickly.

 

[Ranger] Gray had had a few weird moments where he dissociated significantly to the point he got spooked I was typing on our keyboard. I wonder if that's just dissociation in of itself and not much else, but who knows.

 

As for nausea, Gray has felt nauseous before we switched and then again after switching out, as if the nausea was associated with him rather than anything else? However, this was an exception and not the norm.

 

[Gray] I have felt nauseous during meditation sessions, but only if I do mantra meditation for too long. I used to have a lot of trouble with derealization, but that made me feel like I was living in the matrix and the world was foggy in a weird sense not nauseous.

 


 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:25 PM, Mirichu said:

what do people even experience, physically?

 

When we switch, we usually experience the most dissociation during the earlier part of the switch and then try to associate to undo the dissociation. Dissociating sometimes feels like talking to your headmate in wonderland and that's really it. Other times we may feel confused, slightly dizzy, distracted, fuzzy, or even have tingling sensations. Sometimes when I or Gray switch in there's that feeling of waking up from a dream where you start to pay more attention to your surroundings and feel alert, but there's still this element of tiredness you haven't finished getting over.

 

I'm sorry if those descriptions are vague, I felt like I needed to use metaphors to better illustrate our experiences.

 


 

On 8/25/2020 at 5:46 PM, Luminesce said:

I feel like a lot of that stuff comes from working with possession and muddying the ideas of what switching would be like, personally, but some people disagree with me on that

 

I'm not sure if you're saying systems that practice possession get confused by this, some systems that switch are actually possessing, or if you are suggesting we are muddying the definition of switching because we tend to view switching differently because of our possession-centric ideas.

 

On 8/25/2020 at 8:53 PM, Ashley said:

I think your normal 'switching' is valid, we think you're switching Miri into active tulpa position.

 

While I agree that Mirichu's experience is closer to switching than possession, there's still that missing piece I can't quite put my finger on. I went a little off track writing this post being fixated by what the core issue is, but I realized I was saying the same things over and over again, which were not super helpful.

 

I'm behind on Mirichu's latest thread, but in her PR I read that Miri got a chance to experience being a singlet in the front, even if it was a dream/memory/etc. I don't know if the next thread adds more context to this, but I saw this as a step towards progress. Being reminded of what previous experiences are like is really important for figuring out how your system works and it can alleviate some anxieties over how well you know your system.

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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22 minutes ago, Ranger said:

I'm not sure if you're saying systems that practice possession get confused by this, ...

 

My system personally believes that people who lean heavily into advanced possession before switching are more likely to make switching harder for them by developing preconceptions about what the experience might be like and generally making it "harder" to "figure out". Or basically, that advanced possession gets close enough to what switching is like that it's no longer easy to develop the entirely new experience of switching because they're so familiar with advanced possession.

 

Again, many people don't agree, but I'm kind of just going off of what I've seen..

Hi! I'm Lumi, host of Reisen, Tewi, Flandre and Lucilyn.

Everyone deserves to love and be loved. It's human nature.

My tulpas and I have a Q&A thread, which was the first (and largest) of its kind. Feel free to ask us about tulpamancy stuff there.

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26 minutes ago, Luminesce said:

My system personally believes that people who lean heavily into advanced possession before switching are more likely to make switching harder for them by developing preconceptions about what the experience might be like and generally making it "harder" to "figure out". Or basically, that advanced possession gets close enough to what switching is like that it's no longer easy to develop the entirely new experience of switching because they're so familiar with advanced possession.

 

Again, many people don't agree, but I'm kind of just going off of what I've seen..

 

I think it's more of a coin toss. Some people who practice possession make it easier for themselves and end up learning switching very easily. On the other hand, you have systems like mine who take almost a year or in other cases several years before they can figure out switching. However, I would also argue that the people who spend a long time learning possession are the same people who don't benefit from learning switching first. I don't believe our progress would have changed if we tried to learn switching first, in fact we have attempted switching before and went no where with it long before I became comfortable with possession. Therefore, I don't want to blame possession in of itself as the main problem for systems looking to extreme experiences as the possible magic key to switching.

 

I think it boils down to a need to find the "missing thing" that makes it switching and not possession. Possession can't be switching, so it must be something else, right? Strange dissociation experiences, stream of consciousness or "body OS" stuff, how your brain processing the thoughts of your headmates, and so on all become targets for the, "AH HA! I found the missing piece!" moments because there's an assumption that something is missing therefore it must be something that was never tried/experienced before. In our case, we had everything we needed sorted out already for months, we just didn't know how to put the pieces together and achieve switching.

 

And then there's the possibility that these are in fact the missing pieces a system needs in order to switch. Trinity is not what I think of as the average possessing system looking to learn how to switch. They have other stuff going on, and I'm not exactly sure what. Perhaps they need some extreme experience so they can complete their switch. There's also the possibility they need something else, like the re-evaluation of what "I" means. However, I'm not sure if this is necessary and I'm worried about telling them stuff they already know.

Edited by Ranger

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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11 hours ago, Ranger said:

Front-stuckness, non-intuitively, does not always require a significant amount of "force" to get the situation resolved. Methods that use force- such as Ember.Vesper's guide or using multiple headmates to force the host out of the front- can be effective, but they don't always work. Even though we believed Gray was front-stuck for a long time, Gray seemed to not have any trouble switching out or in once we figured things out. That helped me conclude that the accuracy of the method is more important than the brute force these methods could offer. This lead me to believe that switching is more like getting in the right combination- you can sometimes force open a combination lock, but sometimes the only way to open it is to figure out what the actual combination is.

 

Yeah this is what we feel too. Once we find out the right method, then we assume we won't have that much trouble. Or at least something will change in the brain, 'see? you guys can switch after all' and that will make things easier, knowing how a switch feels like and all. Most switching methods boil down to either 'just do it' or symbolism, even Ember.Vesper's, so rip. It seems like belief simply doesn't apply to certain systems.

 

11 hours ago, Ranger said:

And then there's the possibility that these are in fact the missing pieces a system needs in order to switch. Trinity is not what I think of as the average possessing system looking to learn how to switch. They have other stuff going on, and I'm not exactly sure what. Perhaps they need some extreme experience so they can complete their switch. There's also the possibility they need something else, like the re-evaluation of what "I" means. However, I'm not sure if this is necessary and I'm worried about telling them stuff they already know.

 

Yeah, extreme experiences is kinda what we were looking for, hence spending 3 hours in trance hoping for it to give us some heavy experience lol. But we seem to dissociate at the same time when we try it, like, we both feel the same thing most of the time, but since it never escalated into a full switch, we don't know if we both experience it because we're co fronting, and when the switch finally occurs, only 1 will 'go out' and the other one will remain in the front. We can only dissociate separately when I am paying attention to something and Miri kind of drifts away. Do you guys feel the dissociation together when you switch?

 

I don't know many systems who learned possession first then got stuck at switching, besides Ranger's, the Felights and us. It feels like the systems who have no trouble switching are more belief inclined, 'just do it' works for them so their issues come after switching (tulpa getting tired, host coming back, etc..), but when we read about Ranger's and Felights, they were more 'experience inclined', belief simply doesn't work that well. When reading about their experiences, they seem to experience plenty of things while trying to switch that 'just do it' systems don't (from what we've read at least, idk if we missed it), like foggy states or heavy dissociation.

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