Retroactive manipulation of dreams and intrusive thoughts for tulpamancy

[Ido]

You've most likely been there - you have woken up from a nightmare in distress, felt powerless being hunted down by some monsters. Or an intrusive thought has harmed your tulpa during forcing and you could not prevent it.

Here we'll explore not only how to fix such mishaps but also how to exploit them to strenghten both your and your tulpa's forcing abilities, dream control and self-esteem.

 

The concept itself is really simple. Whenever something bad happens in your imagination, be it in a dream or during forcing, do not dwell on it, especially do not worry about it. Do not feed it attention. Instead immediately replay the scene with your tulpa and change it to a positive outcome. You have protected your tulpa from an intrusive thought, no harm was done, they are perfectly fine. Your tulpa has easily beaten the monster which chased you in your dream and saved you. Be creative, any unpleasant situation happening in your imagination can be reverted and resolved. Adding a bit of humor may also not be the worst idea.

 

You can even take this another step further. Woke up from a nice dream and feel bad your tulpas were not in it? Immediately try to replay the dream with them. The hypnopompic twilight state after waking up at least for us generally allows for more control than the swirling nonsense in the hypnagogic phase right before falling asleep. But also this state is worth inserting your tulpas and trying to exploit the extremely vivid visuals at least a little bit.

 

There's no guarantee this will make your tulpas appear in dreams more often or help you to get better control over nightmares or intrusive thoughts but it's one of your best bets. The brain is generally lazy. It picks up whatever is convenienty there and tries to fabricate something out of the available chunks of memories. The more your tulpas are present in your mind before you fall asleep and the more both you and them are used to 'fix' unpleaant situations the greater the chance it may work out. At least it is definitely worth a try and also a fun activity to do with your tulpas.

 

An afterword of caution
Manipulating memories is a powerful techique and should strictly be limited to dreams and intrusive thoughts.

DO NOT try to overwrite actual memories you have experienced, no matter how bad, create fake memories and treat them as real or replace the memories of other persons with your tulpas!

If anything this should be done under the guidance of a professional to heal trauma but do yourself a favor and leave reality alone.

 

Btw, this s not a guide, don't have the time to write up something detailed like that atm. But maybe someone else *coughlumicough* will. Let's brainstorm ideas here.

 

[Glaurung26]

I have done that with dreams before. Haven't brought it into tulpamancy yet.

[ruleofthumb]

4 hours ago, Ido said:

Instead immediately replay the scene with your tulpa and change it to a positive outcome.

 

Stone: This is a method used in ERRT (Exposure, Relaxation, & Rescripting Therapy) for people with trauma-related nightmares. Individuals may write out or replay a nightmare exactly as they remember it or as they remember it plus a new ending.

Edited December 7, 2021 by ruleofthumb

[Luminesce]

Sorry, wanted to try it out a couple times first before I tried to write about it. Unfortunately, like basically all lucid dreaming techniques that require borderline consciousness, my brain refuses to let me think even slightly without instantly fully waking up. So practicing this in the hypnagogic/hypnopompic state is something I won't be able to explore. And outside of the falling asleep/waking up states, this only seems lightly more effective for having your tulpas appear in dreams than just normal visualization. As just a form of nightmare therapy though, it should work fine either way.

 

---

 

The nightmare part goes without saying as great, both in a waking-life therapy sense and in an eventually-your-tulpa-helping-you-in-nightmares sense. For the more expounded concept of simply using the method to promote your tulpas appearing in dreams, though:

 

First off, at absolute least where this does nothing more than simply visualizing your tulpa would (which is still something), this method has a couple of pros. First is that it provides impetus to actually spend this time thinking of/visualizing your tulpa, being rather hard to forget as habits go since it's automatically prompted each morning (or mid-night), which should be very useful for most tulpamancers. And second is that it provides a scenario, for the less imaginative or creatively inclined like myself, always offering a subject with which to think of or visualize your tulpa in, when you otherwise may have no ideas. I will note here that by no means are all dreams really fit for inserting your tulpas into, and if you aren't comfortable with the idea, you don't have to. The most ambitious would think of their tulpa in EVERY dream that they have and remember, but personally when I tried it with Tewi only some of the dreams really had a place to put her in, while others felt like too much of a stretch.

 

That's the baseline, worst-case, that it's simply visualization-with-perks. The real potential power of the method though is actual association of your tulpas with dream content and habits. Closely re-associating your tulpa with the contents of dreams you've just had (or have recurring) should theoretically influence your brain to include them in dreams more powerfully than simply thinking of them in waking life does. And I feel that if you can do this in hypnagogic/hypnopompic states (the dreamy state on the border of consciousness, while falling asleep and while waking up respectively) that the effect will be significantly stronger, to the point I truly believe it will have a noticeable effect if practiced often enough, no doubt. Not everyone really gets a chance to do anything on purpose in this state (sigh), but you can always try to stick as close to it as possible.

 

For those who it comes naturally to and can visualize just fine in this imagination-enhanced state, awesome. For those who can't though, I recommend practicing and trying to remember to keep your eyes closed after you wake up. Even for me, who unfortunately leaves the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states instantly upon conscious thought, my visualization is still stronger (and awareness of the waking world weaker) once I'm ""conscious"" (or so it seems) but before I've opened my eyes and started thinking of the world. This tail-end of the hypnopompic state is still closer to dreaming and more powerful than pure waking visualization*, even if it feels like you're already awake as it does for me, and it's still easier to remember dreams in. So this method should still be practicable for those who don't experience much of a dreamy-waking-up state, if you can learn to wake up but not open your eyes and start thinking about the world. I'm not totally sure if you literally cannot open your eyes even for a brief moment or not - it seems pretty instantaneous to me, but I think it's the consciousness of the world around you that really breaks the state and fully wakes you up, more than the physical act of opening your eyes.

 

 

*Random waking visualization. It's well known that all mental acts can be enhanced through meditation, like visualization, so I would say if you don't care for or can't do the latter intention of this method, that practicing the baseline concept of simply visualizing your tulpa (and optionally still inserting them into dreams you recalled for a possibly stronger effect on dream occurrence) is still viable. However I do feel that connection to the dreamy state enhances this effect a lot, so for this specific method and intention, mid-day meditation is not best. Meditation->Visualization is still an extremely potent tulpamancy practice in general though and I strongly recommend it, unrelated. Simply spending time with or thinking of your tulpa is no special trick or shortcut when it comes to having them appear in dreams, but it's still the basis of making it possible in the first place.

[GrayTheCat]

The weird thing is not too long ago I had a dream where I didn't like the dream (there was a snot picking on some kids) and I said f this I'm making a better ending. I have no idea if I was dreaming or not, and after waking up later I realized it was possible I accidentally became lucid. I don't normally keep dreaming when I try to re-write how the dream goes, and even then, I don't usually get the chance to rewrite bad dreams. It definitely makes me feel better to do this.

 

Otherwise, we actually re-imagine bad intrusive thought scenes all the time. One of my headmates gets hurt? Nope, we're not okay with that, there were pillows they landed on. Scary symbolism of something scary? Nope, that didn't happen, I edit out the scary symbolism. It helps to think that if we intentionally want something, we would have kept it that way, but 99.99% of the time we don't so it gets rewritten and the intrusive thought is rejected.

 

On 12/6/2021 at 5:56 PM, Ido said:

You can even take this another step further. Woke up from a nice dream and feel bad your tulpas were not in it? Immediately try to replay the dream with them. The hypnopompic twilight state after waking up at least for us generally allows for more control than the swirling nonsense in the hypnagogic phase right before falling asleep. But also this state is worth inserting your tulpas and trying to exploit the extremely vivid visuals at least a little bit.

 

I didn't think to try this, I'll have to give it a shot

 

On 12/6/2021 at 5:56 PM, Ido said:

Manipulating memories is a powerful techique and should strictly be limited to dreams and intrusive thoughts.

 

Or integration?

 

I agree here. I accidentally misread the next sentence and thought only editing real memories is bad but fake memories are okay and I was very confused until I reread it.

[Yakumo]

I have little to add other than we'll be trying dream re-entering regularly from now on.

Associating tulpas with recurring dream content is another neat idea I had not thought about. Unfortunately my dream recall rate is abysmal, maybe this will also improve. I usually find it hard to open my eyes upon waking up rather than keeping them closed but especially in the hypnopompic phase I'm often extremely tired so actively interfering is hard. Meditating or at least not thinking of anything seems to work though. We'll see how this turns out.

 

Also I'd like to highlight the importance of manipulating/fixing harmful intrusive thoughts, especially for beginner tulpamancers who understandably worry about hurting their tulpas with stray imagination. Re-enacting such scenes with a positive outcome should be an extremely helpful procedure.

[Yakumo]

Another expansion to this idea, this time for the hypnagogic phase before falling asleep:

 

By holding a heavy object which drops to the floor as you fall asleep you can wake yourself up exactly as you pass from early nonrem to deeper sleep states. This allows for multiple re-entry of the hypnagogic phase with your tulpa. If you have the nerves for getting woken up by loud noise that is...

 

 

[TB]

So far this idea seems to be working really well for me. After doing it for maybe half a dozenish dreams, I finally had Rena dream a long and epic dream when she very very rarely appeared in dreams prior, and never dreamed herself before. The dream was great and she was really strong and amazing, even despite my fears of it going wrong for her. Hopefully it continues to work out like this in the future

[Yakumo]

Excellent!

I'm glad our method is of help.

 

I've been too tired to succesfully re-enter dreams with tupper most of the time. Or I chose to get up to write them down if they were good. Still keep trying.

[glitchthe3rd]

We have a bit of experience with memory manipulation, whether it's directly altering the memories of a tulpa or fabricating a new memory for myself through the use of imaginal exposure. Needless to say it is always a last resort, and our results have been mixed at best. As for nightmares, I'm not sure when Luna first started intervening in mine, but I'm told she frequently attempts to visit me in my dreams. More than half the time we don't end up finding each other or the dream world keeps us separated, but it's always interesting when we do cross paths.