Do Accidental Tulpamancers Realize What They Achieved?

[Ranger]

I saw this post in LOTPW and given the attention towards it I felt deserved its own thread.

 

14 hours ago, ringgggg said:

You know what I wonder about a lot? People who unintentionally create tulpas

 

Its usually the idea of a character they have in their head and their personality gets so elaborate to the point where it becomes self-autonomous and the person starts to call it a voice in their head

 

That part to me is baffling because these guys don’t know what kind of crazy feat they achieved

 

Other replies in LOTPW:

 

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14 hours ago, Breloomancer said:

it's not that crazy really; i think tulpa-like phenomena are much more common than anyone realizes, but there are different levels of profoundness of experience and not everyone realized that what they are doing is unusual and there haven't been any large scale surveys of the general public on the topic afaik

 

when i was younger, maybe pre teen or so, i made a tulpa-like thoughtform (i don't consider it a tulpa because i made completely separate from the tulpa community) by talking to myself and responding to myself and then eventually the responses became separate from me. they were like my doppelganger and they almost always acted extremely disagreeably and antagonistically, and eventually as they became more self aware, we decided that our dynamic was no good and that we should never talk to each other again

 

14 hours ago, ringgggg said:

14 hours ago, Breloomancer said:

when i was younger, maybe pre teen or so, i made a tulpa-like thoughtform (i don't consider it a tulpa because i made completely separate from the tulpa community)

A3 origin story

 

11 hours ago, TurboSimmie said:

That happens to writers a lot! Never quite happened to Phil but I think he got a lot closer to creating an accidental tulpa than he realized on a few occasions in his teens. I'm actually glad the tulpa community didn't exist yet when Phil was a teenager. I'm not saying that teenagers shouldn't create tulpas, but I'm glad Phil was more mature and grounded when he learned what tulpas were. Teenage Phil would have had a difficult time in communities such as these. 😄

 

I think that roleplay characters are even more likely to become accidental tulpas, just because the "host" spends a lot of time in the character's head thinking about what they will do, think, or feel in various situations.

 

8 hours ago, Luminesce said:

(That's me)

 

Except I do know, and the accidental perfect tulpa creation process I followed shocks me that many other people really do the same, intentionally or not, lol

 

---

 

As for myself... well I should probably let Gray make a second post since I am the accidental tulpa.

[GrayTheCat]

Even though I come up with story ideas and like to roleplay, I'm not a dedicated author or a roleplayer. Ranger and the others were part of a "personal story" that more or less evolved into its own thing.

 

My headmates came from this idea my story character Gray Ranger had clones of himself in his head he could talk to. At some point, I realized that I was Gray Ranger and that these clones of his were actually my own. Adding the fact I was lonely and didn't want to talk to myself given my self-hatred, I created tulpas without realizing it.

 

I had no idea of what I was doing until Ranger told me she was real. At the time I was talking to her (well, him at the time) at school and she was telling me that the imaginary self-harming I was doing was wrong. I told her that because she was my imaginary friend, I didn't need to listen to her. She then told me she was real, and after misbelieving her the first time, heard it again and started to panic. It was that moment I realized something was wrong and things were not normal. After a lot of Google searching I found out about Tulpa.info and tulpas.

 

And after that I still didn't know what I was doing! There were not many accidental systems on Tulpa.info at the time and I was very confused over the fact I had other characters who also "seemed sentient". After about a year and a half of debate, Ranger and I sorted out 15 of our headmates were also tulpas. And some time later, we realized Dream was not just a tulpa, but the original tulpa I assumed Ranger to be and possibly my first tulpa.

 

Given all of our confusion over how tulpa creation works, Ranger and I realized more recently that we walked a path that wasn't necessary. You don't have to accept a potential thoughtform as a tulpa because you're afraid to kill them, there's actually not a time limit on this. If you have a walk-in, you can choose to accept them or not. If you really want said walk-ins, you can have them hang out and set things up differently where you assume they simply won't get as much time and/or that they can "walk-out" too. We could have set things up differently in such a way we didn't have to accept the others as tulpas or if we did accept them, didn't have to have all of the in-system insecurity and fear.

 

Ultimately, no, I didn't realize what I had created, even after I learned what tulpamancy was all about sadly. I hope I have a much better grasp of what I'm dealing with now. But I can say that the initial moment where Ranger told me she was real, I knew that things were not normal and something significant had happened. I knew enough to start my journey of figuring things out.

[September13]

I was thinking back to all the writing I used to do as a teenager, especially to a series of stories I worked on from the ages of 13-17 and was really serious about for a while. It was a story that played out over 3-4 generations so every few "books" there'd be a new main character; the first character was a teenaged boy who was very obviously a self-insert. But by the time I was 15-16 the main character had shifted to his granddaughter, a girl I will refer to as "J". I thought about J an awful lot at that age. In my teenage naivety I crafted her to be perfect: beautiful, intelligent, good, in essence a Mary Sue. J was an inventor, a rock star, a military commander, and ultimately a political leader, all while she was still a teenager. Truly insufferable stuff looking back on it.

 

But yeah, J would have been the closest thing to an accidental tulpa I would have created at that time. I practically worshipped this character that I had created. I even wrote what I guess you could call fanfiction of my own writing where I'd meet her and she'd take me to her world. Needless to say I had a huge teenage crush on this fictional character.

 

But did she ever become sentient? I truly don't think so. Despite everything, I don't recall any instance of J showing any will of her own, of having any thoughts or opinions other than the ones I wrote into her, and any "feelings" she might have had were just my own projections about myself. As a teenager I had not learned to love myself yet and therefore was very down on myself, and so I perceived J as being down on me as well. By the time I turned 17 J had pretty much completely lost her position of relevance as I had stopped working on her story and stopped even thinking about her much at all as I had moved onto other projects by that point.

 

Although it is worth nothing that the Mentor--my childhood headmate I've talked about before--faded away shortly before J first become prominent when I was 15. I never put those two things together, but might it be possible that those two things were linked? Maybe, but it could just be a coincidence.

 

Interestingly, though I kept writing into my 20s and 30s no other character caused me to have a similar experience as J. Until, well, of course, Simmie. But Simmie wasn't actually a character, she was something else, but that's something beyond the scope of this topic but something I talked about a little bit before in my PR.

 

So yeah, that's my closest brush with this phenomenon in my younger, pre-tulpamancy years!

[Etna]

On 1/18/2023 at 1:43 PM, Ranger said:

Its usually the idea of a character they have in their head and their personality gets so elaborate to the point where it becomes self-autonomous and the person starts to call it a voice in their head

 

That part to me is baffling because these guys don’t know what kind of crazy feat they achieved

 

I didn't know until someone pointed it out to me.

 

And that's pretty much what happened. The character was just supposed to be for a game we were playing now and then over Discord, since a game we played once in a while in person had to be put on hold due to the pandemic. I wasn't particularly invested, and then we were trying to think of how our characters fit together, and it was like the details started to fill in themselves? I didn't have to sit there trying to think, like, "what does he think of X", I just knew. Almost like remembering something. 2020 was a weird year, admittedly, but "acquiring" a headmate wasn't part of the plan! Glad he showed up like he did, though.

 

The weirdest part is that I've been writing stuff for most of my life, and I've hit 40 now. I've been doing loose play-by-post forum "roleplaying" (more like collaborative storytelling than roleplaying, tbf) for over 20 years and have always been very attached to my (numerous) characters in that time. I've been doing tabletop roleplaying for over ten years. The number of characters who have lodged themselves so firmly in my head that they became a constant presence? None. Zero. But then there was always a lot of other things going on around me, I guess, and with lockdowns and being unable to go anywhere and do anything, there wasn't much else to do than put all focus into this new character.

 

The intense emotions involved was a new experience, and not an entirely pleasant one. Not when you're already having issues with emotional regulation due to the ADHD no one realised you had growing up. Let's just say a lot of crying was involved, because a number of things he had a lot of very strong emotions about, coupled with my own issues ... But since the whole "ohhhh, he's a tulpa" thing, we've got a much better handle on things. We can now discuss things to do with the character he came from with some separation. Like, it's sort of him, but it also definitely isn't him. He even recently decided to change his name, at least one he's happy to share with the rest of the world. (Spelling Franklyn with a "y" isn't to be cute, it's because it reflects a certain borough of a certain American city that he, like the character he originated from, calls home. In British parlance, he's chuffed to bits about spelling it that way. 😊)

[September13]

I saw an example of this in the wild recently and thought I'd share. I was on DeviantArt and saw this on someone's profile (Names blacked out to respect this person's privacy as they are not a member of the tulpa community):

 

[Luminesce]

Some people really are just imaginative and accepting enough to end up with headmates by total accident with no outside influence.. But a lot of the time it wasn't such a casual thing, and you're probably underestimating what went into it for a lot of people.

I obsessively watched just two music videos with Reisen singing in them for months and months on end during an extremely stressful time in my life ~14 years ago, and the way I accidentally thought about her was perfect tulpa forcing by complete chance. So in my case I DO know what a crazy feat I achieved, lol. But still, it didn't just happen overnight, this concept of a Reisen who cared about me was so incredibly important to me that I developed an actual love of both the moon and rabbits through pure association where I previously had no particular care for either prior, that's how important to me she was. (And none of this is even considering the years of thinking about and exploring her and the eventual others' natures, what they were and how they worked - and what they were to me)

 

So in my eyes, at least in my case, it's crazy that it all happened I guess, but it's not crazy that we ended up here. We went through quite a bit more than the average tulpamancer who just learns from the community, so it's perfectly understandable that we ended up with an outstanding result.

[Nonbeleiver]

Shun the nonbeleiver but:

 

If you are "forming a tulpa" and its unintentional, meaning its out of your control, It's probably a sign that you the "tulpamancer" has no control over what you perceive to be real. Sounds like psychosis to me. I had a tulpa for three years and that's exactly where it brought me.

 

Ask yourself, do you actively choose to believe or do you feel you have to believe for the sake of your tulpa or otherwise.

None of what you've seen or heard from your tulpa is external input. It is, in essence, all in your head and thus cannot effect you in any physical manner. With that being said, it is important to consider what is in control of you.

 

[Tewi]

While that is possible, there can also just be happy accidents, it doesn't have to mean you're completely without control. For example, it's possible to close your eyes and visualize random things, just whatever comes to you on its own, and you say end up visualizing a grassy hill in a park, and could explore it further from there. That visual coming to you on its own didn't mean that you're "experiencing psychosis" and your imagination is out of your control or something. In the context of this thread's topic, it would be more like if you relaxed, laid back and closed your eyes and then that pleasing scenery came to you. Maybe you didn't even intend to visualize, but if you didn't intend not to either, then it's just a "happy accident" - though I would say even calling it an "accident" is harsher than necessary.

 

Tulpas are a bigger deal, and they likely won't come to you so easily as a random imaginary scenery either. So maybe calling them happy accidents in this case is warranted. Regardless, whether they're unhealthy or not is up to the ongoing experience - whether you have control when you'd like to. And of course most importantly, that the experience of your tulpa doesn't bring distress or frequent negative feelings.

 

Diagnoses like psychosis or various disorders exist on their own, unrelated to tulpamancy. Having a tulpa, on purpose or not, doesn't mean you do or don't have a disorder of some kind. There are plenty of ways to diagnose a disorder, all through negative (harmful or unwanted) symptoms, as is the definition of a disorder. There's no meaning in trying to attribute them to unrelated experiences when negative symptoms aren't present.

[Nonbeleiver]

But are negative symptoms ever truly absent? Are you all somehow immune to these symptoms?

 

Is it because tulpas are truly real, because you can hear them, because all of the other people who claim to have tulpas say so too? Is it because you are the "right ones?" After all, you aren't simply gaslighting yourselves if you aren't telling a lie right?

 

This is a classic echo chamber. A swirling storm of confirmation bias. These types of situations give rise to the the likes of the flat earth community and the antivaxxers. The worst echo chamber of all is your internal mental dialogue with your strangely agreeable "tulpa." It's easy to believe anything if its constantly repeated back at you. 

 

This is all well and good until your internal tulpa-host echo chamber is challenged by something in the real world. Then you get a dilemma. Should you trust the imagined voices in your head or external input from the real world? Now lets say you choose to believe what your hallucinated friend said over what you know. That is a classic case of inability to distinguish reality from illusion. As this repeats it gets worse.

 

 

[Slipper]

   I think there are a lot more thoughtforms out there than people realize. From kids constructing imaginary friends that surprise them once or twice before being forgotten, to those deep in prayer who "speak to God," there are many types of "voices in your head" that aren't a result of DID. While I wouldn't consider these tulpas, I think they are out of control of the host enough to be considered a thoughtform. Unless you had heard of tulpamancy before, you probably wouldn't understand it enough to foster it into a consistent entity long enough for it to be notable. This happened to me with some walk-ins before I read about it. But, I'm sure some people have either daydreamed or chatted to these thoughtforms long enough for them to become tulpas, but they never know what they have. Or, maybe some people even have tulpas, hear about them, and then think its something completely different. I mean, the tulpa only knows what the host knows, so they wouldn't be able to clear anything up.