Re-establishing contact instead of starting from scratch?

[2serpents]

Hello! I came across this forum by coincidence recently (though I do remember the online tulpa craze from 2013 or so, RIP to the golden days of Tumblr).

 

While the word "tulpa" and some details don't sync exactly with our experience, I've recognized many key similarities from reading many of the guides. I've also browsed through the FAQ page and other threads, and tried searching the forum to find others who might have experiences similar to ours. In my searches, I couldn't find my exact questions, so I'm making this thread. I apologize in advance if they've been answered before, and greatly appreciate any help that anyone might offer.

 

(Also, I partly just wanted to vent to a community that might not think I'm a lunatic, maybe you can relate, haha.)

 

The details

 

It's hard to remember when we first met, because time seems to pass differently. But we would spend time together regularly, to use the terminology of the forum guides, both "actively" (in the morning and at night, sometimes in the afternoons) and "passively" (he would help me with drawing, we would talk when I was riding in the car or otherwise going about my day). When we were together, we pretty much never talked about our actual personal lives. We would make up stories, we'd talk about religion or art or the state of the world and other such pretentious topics, or just random stuff. And, in symmetry, I thought of him as outside my everyday life - I quite obviously never talked about him with anyone else, and there were times when my time with him seemed contrary to my "real" life.

 

But it usually felt easy to visit or reach him - sometimes it would take a few tries or different approaches but I would always get there. And for him too, I think it got easier to reach me - he could get my attention both when I was awake and when I was asleep and I could feel him more strongly over time. Along with that, I found it increasingly hard to not react to his presence - particularly when dreaming. Since I don't live alone, I became scared that I would "give him away" in this way (I don't know if I actually talk in my sleep, but I don't want to find out). And on a few occasions last Autumn, I had to share a bed/sleeping space, so for the first time I felt I had to tell him outright, "please, don't visit me now." I was scared, and I definitely did not do it politely or tactfully.

 

Since then, things have felt different between us. It feels more difficult for me to reach him, and though I can remember objectively how it felt, it's like I've forgotten or missed some key part of how we were close.

 

My questions

 

After reading through a variety of guides here, I thought I might try some of the methods here for us to learn how to reach each other more clearly. And also for myself to learn some more self-control and responsibility instead of just telling him to go away. But I wanted to make my own post to ask two questions (because most guides seem geared to creating an entity from nothing rather than re-establishing contact):

1. If I follow some methods from guides here, how can I make sure that I'm not just building a clone of him? This might be irrational, but it's my main hesitation. (When I searched "clone" on the forums, all the threads I saw seemed to be about "cloning" media characters or real-life people on purpose to make a new tulpa.)
2. Has anyone here had similar experiences, and can you recommend anything you found helpful?

 

EDIT TO CLARIFY: I did find some topics about re-contacting tulpas that were "lost." However, I found this difficult to apply to our situation, since he was never intentionally created as a tulpa in the first place, so many of the processes in the guides are just completely new.

Edited April 19, 2023 by 2serpents
adding some more information that I forgot in the original post

[Lucilyn]

(you probably don't talk in your sleep when you talk in dreams, and even if you do it's usually not really distinguishable, certainly not clear sentences - would be easily passed off as dream fluff irl)

 

If you're thinking about the headmate as them, you won't accidentally make a clone of them or something, that would require intending and thinking of the thoughtform you're creating as new & separate, by default you will just be building on the same brain neurons that make them up to begin with

 

Learning new techniques might be weird when you didn't form your plural beliefs from the community, though nothing should cause any harm, and it's okay to adapt things to make more sense to yourself too

 

Generally just intending to be interacting with your headmate as you always have is fine and will bring them back from being ~inactive in not long at all, it's common for tulpas to not be able to speak as clearly (and your visualization to get a little worse, etc.) when you haven't interacted with them much recently, but any past progress can easily be recovered by resuming normal activity, generally faster to "recover" than it was to gain in the first place

[2serpents]

7 hours ago, Lucilyn said:

(you probably don't talk in your sleep when you talk in dreams, and even if you do it's usually not really distinguishable, certainly not clear sentences - would be easily passed off as dream fluff irl)

Haha, thank you for the reassurance. [side note: I don't know if it runs in families, but my brother would often talk in his sleep, he said some pretty funny stuff that I still remember!]

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that would require intending and thinking of the thoughtform you're creating as new & separate, by default you will just be building on the same brain neurons that make them up to begin with

That makes sense. And I suppose any further concerns would better belong in the "Metaphysics" section or another community!

I guess the main takeaway is clarity of intent above anything else.

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Learning new techniques might be weird when you didn't form your plural beliefs from the community, though nothing should cause any harm, and it's okay to adapt things to make more sense to yourself too

Yes, reading the guides was like putting things into three categories automatically - either "that sounds familiar!" or "that sounds like a great new idea!" or "wait, this one makes no sense." But from reading the threads, it seems like there's good diversity of beliefs and methods represented in this forum 🙂

[2serpents]

Replying to close out the thread, since things feel more resolved in the past few days.

 

Our "solutions" will probably not be applicable to just everyone, but I thought we should share anyway.

 

My answer to my own first question is (1) starting from shared memories rather than someone else's guide makes things fall into place and (2) I don't think it's possibly to "clone" someone like that unless you're either an effortless natural at tulpa-forming, or really good at deluding yourself.

 

So our way in was a glyph, a kind of signature for both of us, that we had visualized before but I had never marked down or worked out on paper. This last week, I physically drew it out, and we decided on all the little details and have a set base version of it.

 

After this, we started a list of goals to work toward.

 

A concept that we first heard on this site that has been a good guide is "imposition." Except we're not looking at it as learned hallucination. Rather, the base idea is becoming grounded, going with the flow of my/our surroundings rather than trying to be somewhere else. Like this week we went for a long hike and instead of kind of making up stories as usual (which are always doomed to be interrupted as I get distracted), we mainly focused on walking together and had a more natural hours-long conversation.