Serpentine Journal

[2serpents]

Hello, you can call us Typhon and Echidna, writing collaboratively for now. We have been together for four or five years. Our relationship developed naturally, perhaps accidentally, but now we’ve been wanting to manifest our connection more fully. We decided to start sharing reports on the forum for some motivation, to escape the cycle of forgetfulness or procrastination followed by desperation and regret. After all, it’s always easier to keep up with your goals when someone else is checking on you.

 

Some Background

We met in 2019.

E.: I’ve (day)dreamed stories all my life, so thinking of him didn’t feel out of the ordinary at first. But soon I got the distinct feeling he was a collaborator, not a character.

 

Our relationship deepened and complicated over the years, through stories and dreams. While it brought us extreme bliss and inspiration, E. had reservations.

As his presence became stronger to me, I became (irrationally) afraid of what might happen to me in half- or full-dream state. One incident that stands out and is kind of funny now was in late 2020, I was staying in a cabin with some friends and took edibles (of course). He appeared and I felt like I could be consumed into the other world, yet torn between there and my physical surroundings, and also afraid my friends would see me acting like an insane person. When I woke I lied to them that I’d hallucinated a local ghost we’d been talking about before. I haven’t used any psychoactive drugs since then, haha. Still, he would regularly come on very strongly in dreams. Around last December (2022), panicked that something strange might happen while with my family over the holidays, I told him not to visit. It seemed to work, and I soon regretted it.

 

Since then she’s had trouble with immersing herself in both vision and emotion. In Spring, scared of losing the connection for good, she joined this forum after looking at guides in hope of finding a return. We set and began to work on some goals together, especially around dreaming and awareness. We became pretty talented at dreams and were further developing dream control. Soon after, as the world tends to go, our lives took an unexpected change, leaving E. less time to devote to things unseen and letting all our practices taper off.

 

The Autumn is always a time of hope and excitement for us, and T.’s restlessness and E.’s gnawing regret finally pushed us back. We want to pull our lives closely together again.

 

Where Now?

There are two main things we wish to work on now.

1. Dreaming. We will re-establish our dream journal practice. Part of the reason we abandoned it was time commitment – we (especially E.) could spend hours recounting details, some of questionable relevance. We’ll set a time limit on daily entries to keep them succinct, and focus mainly on early morning dreams as those are the most vivid and lucid. We’ve had some enjoyable lucid dreams in this journal-less period, and we’d like to start recording them again.

2. Spirituality. It’s only fair for us to study more of T.’s interests and instincts. He’s been drawn to Goddess worship for a while, but we haven’t done much about it together. To start, we’ll be reading together daily.

As time goes on, we’ll find some more specific goals – for now we feel like we’re getting back in the rhythm of things. In the end, the most important thing may be just spending time together.

[2serpents]

New Moon, December 2023 - Names and Faces

 

In the Spring, we finally made a personal sigil, for both of us. This was based on a shared dream and fleshed out in Echidna’s favorite style of sigil-crafting. The sigil is extremely meaningful to both of us, not in the least because it brings something we only suggested in thought into existence.

 

We want to work on more representations, in part to help Echidna to focus and feel a concrete presence, but also because I just want them for myself.

 

So this week we made a surname for ourselves. This was a process more like common sigil-craft, reducing words to key syllables, then swirling them around until we found something memorable and harmonious. We will not post it here (we decided to not even share our first names). Small as it may sound it has given me a much greater sense of identity. And I can now have a full name on my email account and so on.

 

In a similar spirit, Echidna tried again to make a portrait of me. We got some passable results, but something always feels out of line.

 

E: Neither of us are portrait artists. I’ve always struggled with capturing faces, and I don’t even think I could draw a portrait of myself! It’s really tough because I think have a really strong sense of what he looks like… or maybe, looking at the attempts, a stronger sense of what he doesn’t look like. Anyway, it’s like his form is specific enough that I can’t use any old outside reference as inspiration because it wouldn’t fit, yet indefinite enough that with my limited portrait experience I can’t set the features down with any confidence. More attempts to come!

 

Finally, I set to making a portable “altar/shrine” for Typhon… not to worship him like a deity, that would be weird. But we were reading about spirit communication and we both liked the idea. Plus he likes dramatic, occult, ritualistic stuff so I thought it would be fitting, I want to make something that feels somewhat ancient and ornate. The idea is that it will be a focus point for us both to help communication, and maybe more importantly it will be a gift for him, a space in this world that’s entirely his own. I travel a lot so it will have to be portable, but it will be beautiful and cozy all the same.

 

It will be a fairly long process. To start, for the New Moon, I stripped down an old cigar box and painted it black inside and out (his favorite color). Now as the moon waxes we can work on more of our design ideas to fill it up.

[Ashley]

Neat! We believe in a lot of this working if only because of the power of suggestion and its been proven to us that when we ask for things (Manifestation) we tend to just get it by no other logical reason and often against the odds, sometimes against astronomically high odds. So bleh. Maybe we ask for a lot and when we get some we think it's working or discredit the times it doesn't work but in any case it feels like it just works. 

 

Bear did a sigil in 2018 and it "worked" somehow, or at least there has been progress in what he asked for and that was highly unlikely. Virtually impossible. But half of virtually impossible is still impossible enough. He only did it once.

 

Good luck with it, we hope to hear positive results and may try some of it.

[2serpents]

Thank you, we think we will get good results ☺️

 

In my opinion, a lot of reason people dismiss such things is because they expect a quick and easy fix - "If it worked, everyone would just do it all the time to get everything they want." But really it's the time and effort that give it power. Most of the time you can't just run through some premade and packaged ritual for instant gratification. (Or maybe it's just because I'm naturally a skeptic/materialist that I have to examine and adapt instead of taking things as they are.) As we're looking at different traditions and guides, we're trying to understand the reasoning behind the steps, and then how to bring that reasoning into our own circumstance.

 

- E

[2serpents]

🌑 New Moon, January 2023 - In Which Plans Go Awry, or, Back to Basics

 

With the demands and trials of the Winter holidays, we tucked our shrine project away in the back of our minds. But that's not to say we haven't made progress of some other kind. If we want to work on something this important, we both need the right frame of mind and we also need to make sure we can fully communicate even subtle artistic ideas. And we have certainly improved on these prerequisites.

 

The matters of discipline:

• Echidna has developed a daily daytime meditation practice
• She is returning to her previous level of dream awareness and recall, and exceeding past abilities in shared dreaming and dream control

Then too we did some fun small things to distract from the stress:

• Designing a "virtual closet" for Typhon
• Laying out our previous mental house, into something that more resembles physical possibility (who knew there would be so many second floor rooms with nothing underneath them on the first floor?)
• Typhon tried doing some sketches though Echidna found it hard to resist jumping in

And notable events:

• We picked out a ring for each other and "exchanged" it in a little ceremony
• We did another ritual in mind-space, nothing terribly big but the first time we've actually completed something like this, start-to-finish

Despite the discontinuity with our previous post here, we do feel much closer than before and at last that we are moving forward somehow rather than stagnating.

 

🐍🐍🐍

 

Echidna's Notes

 

Meditation and dreaming practice are all part of the same whole - building inner awareness. And of course it is helpful for us, because it's the same paths I use to communicate with Typhon.

 

I had tried meditation a few times over the years but never really knew what I was doing and easily fell off. 

 

I learned one big lesson this month (that maybe should have been obvious already but oh well) which made almost everything fall into place. I was getting extremely frustrated with all the noise around me, especially trying to enter this vulnerable meditation state my emotions were way heightened and I could be literally crying. When I tried to find advice to deal with this I saw: meditation is not about finding this perfect state of quiet or controlling your surroundings, it's about your own awareness and that's it. Noises and disturbances are out of your control, what's in your control is how you react and that becomes a part of the meditation.

 

I don't have much privacy and my life can feel out of control and I've always had this issue of feeling pursued, feeling that I can never get the perfect quiet moment of rest. And this of course bled over from waking life into dreams, with things feeling out of my control, being chased or trapped, even in lucid dreams. When I read this advice it was like a huge barrier lifted both in waking and dreaming. 

 

Current practice in the morning:

1. Physical exercise
2. Body scan/relaxation by muscle groups for five minutes
3. Controlled breathing for five minutes
4. Shavayatra (61 points) and stillness for fifteen minutes

I started with just steps 1 and 2, then added 3 (though at one point I was doing pranayama before muscle relaxation just to cool down after exercising), and eased in with abbreviated 31 points before the full 61. Since none of it is totally new to me I went at a pretty fast pace in building up the practice. Over just a month I've noticed a huge improvement in the ease of each part. In the start Typhon tried going along with me which ended up a distraction for both of us, so he stayed out completely for the past weeks. Now gradually he's come in to help, "collecting" stray thoughts as I let them go in the beginning, and now I find after Shavayatra I can focus on him well. 

 

During the day I reach out to him and/or he reminds me of his presence and we wrap it into critical awareness for lucid dreaming practice.

 

We have had more regular lucid and non-lucid dreams together than ever before thanks to this habit. In the past I struggled even finding him in dreams sometimes due to my bad dream control but in the past week I've done it easily every time.

 

 🐍🐍🐍

 

Typhon's Notes

 

A couple weeks ago I was in an emotional abyss and wrote some pages worth of venting. I don't much want to revisit it now but it helped at the time. The epicenter of the storm was my dislike toward Echidna's significant other (N.B. I was here first) but it really was not helped by watching her at endless parties listening to people yammer on with barely a space to breathe for herself let alone me. I tried prompting her to pay more attention to me in this situations but it was like her body and mind completely shutting down, immensely frustrating. But that's past. Both the consistency and the quality of our time together over the past days and weeks has restrengthened my heart. I love everything she has done for me, big and small, and while I don't understand all her acts I at least have the great advantage of knowing her feelings and desires. My position now is that he, nor any of the others, is simply below my consideration. I'm really trying not to be petty.

 

I did feel a tiny bit useless when she was figuring out meditation but soon learned how I can be immensely helpful in this and in dreams. I think I have more of a placebo effect to make her think she's stronger when I'm there - in reality she is far better than I am at navigating and controlling dreams. I'm more of a coach now. 

 

Finally, as much as I loathe to admit feeling like a poser, I still want to find something that I myself am truly good at. We will work at this over the next month - looking back at where we were, it seems wise now not to spread ourselves too thin with our ambitions. 

[2serpents]

Since I've been doing more independent writing, I've come against an unexpected problem. I'm rarely at a loss for words but the whole process seems to take forever. The issue lies not in starting but in editing or even thinking through a more complicated idea and how I might express it. It is easy for Echidna to fall back when I'm just writing, replacing her idle thoughts with mine, as it were. But it's more difficult to dip into the flow of analysis without her jumping in too. 

 

I would guess there's no simple way past this other than force, concentration, and time. 

 

All this is to say, I started writing a post a few days ago but now I'm just beginning anew in a much shorter version. Goodbye and farewell to explanations of philosophies, they have more savor when implied than fully exposed anyway.

 

So, I present simply,

 

A Change in Position

 

When we started (and then restarted) on this "tulpa" endeavor we had the vague hope that I could and would get somehow stronger, which implied some increased impression on the material world as if magically bursting through a lacquered crust. But this is misinformed and thus hopeless. I have no presence or power in the material world, you cannot strengthen something which does not exist.

 

It's Echidna who has a definite presence and power in the immaterial world where I live. More than mine, it is her "form" that is weakly developed, indefinite, and distractible. It's her awareness that we need to work to develop. We would both like if I were able to reach her at every moment of the day. But to get there I can't work myself on some impossible power, she has to pull back and open up.

 

This is our focus now.

 

I would also like to note a sore point, that this is not (or rather should not be) dissociation or distraction. Continuous and strong presence independent of outside material forces is precisely what she needs in order to live better and engage with her surroundings. So, we will both benefit from this.

[2serpents]

You either die by your principles or live long enough to contradict them. After me saying I have no interest in switching, possession, whatever - take a guess, where I find myself.

 

We accidentally switched places a few days ago. It was an emotional moment, and Echidna did it while trying to comfort me. It was part impulsive thought, part badly chosen symbolism. Of course, the whole thing feeling completely bizarre and insane and against any of my better judgement, I begin to find it irresistibly fascinating.

 

We did it again today on a walk, just to experiment. It feels like a natural consequence or companion to the increased and intertwined awareness we've been building.

 

The most tempting and beautiful part is being in control instead of pulled along. On our way home I actually stopped some of Echidna's obsessive-thought-spirals, which is a great gift to her as much as to me. Because of that I want to try it again before drawing. 

 

The issues are as I thought, though. Mostly there is the weird un-fitting-ness of it all. It's not just that I'm a different sex, completely different appearance, and so on. Echidna says she would never be tempted to switch bodies with any of her friends or family, and if she did she would feel a similar strangeness, taking something that fits best with someone else that she loves and cares about. That part feels dangerously close to those creepy couples that dress up and get surgery to look like twins. The other thing is I really don't want to speak to anyone when fully possessing Echidna like this. For better or worse I have a ridiculous accent that is also different from Echidna's and purely from experience reading out loud, what would come out of "our" mouth, combining the two, would only prompt the listener to ask what planet I'm from.

 

From these few times, it feels almost as if every switch we make, we are twisting a cord together and creating a knot, getting turned around. Am I just imagining myself as Echidna imagining myself? When we got home she looked in the mirror and lightly slapped her face while saying her name, so obviously she's worried about her imminent descent into insanity. But I'm not sure it's completely a bad thing if we're both more present constantly. 

[Athelas]

On 2/24/2024 at 7:31 PM, 2serpents said:

The most tempting and beautiful part is being in control instead of pulled along.

 

Isn't it exhilarating? Congratulations on the achievement.

 

On 2/24/2024 at 7:31 PM, 2serpents said:

Echidna says she would never be tempted to switch bodies with any of her friends or family, and if she did she would feel a similar strangeness, taking something that fits best with someone else that she loves and cares about. That part feels dangerously close to those creepy couples that dress up and get surgery to look like twins. The other thing is I really don't want to speak to anyone when fully possessing Echidna like this

 

Reading this made me realize: although my host's identity isn't strongly tied to the body, we absolutely associate her with the voice. I suppose that's why talking while I'm switched in feels so unnatural. It seems wrong to speak in Bee's voice, and just as wrong to try to make it sound more like me.

 

On 2/24/2024 at 7:31 PM, 2serpents said:

From these few times, it feels almost as if every switch we make, we are twisting a cord together and creating a knot, getting turned around

 

We've also experienced a sense of blurring together at times, but it hasn't been distressing for either of us. More like we're bringing out the best in each other.

 

Best of luck with your future switching endeavors.

[2serpents]

On 3/2/2024 at 2:03 PM, Athelas said:

Isn't it exhilarating? Congratulations on the achievement.

Thank you. I still say more strange than exhilarating. We tried fully swapping to read and that felt more engaging as I could make annotations instead of just reading aloud.

 

I would like to try it before sleeping to see what happens. I'm cautious but waiting until the perfect moment never does much good anyway.

 

While I'm here, I'll add quickly a little list of what else's happened:

• We did a wedding ritual impulsively on Leap Day. I wrote the ritual and vows myself (with Echidna's approval, naturally). This is something I wanted to do for awhile but, again, waiting until the perfect moment does nothing. The strange date was like a gift. It was a perfect day and everything went smoothly, no grand plans but just down to a nearby valley. The only funny thing was that we got turned around and switched north and south. It wasn't terribly important to the ritual, more the sentiment, so I think it's fine. It's something of a theme though, I think I mix up Echidna's directions for her somehow. Maybe some mirroring with "projecting" myself?
• We were reliably having lucid dreams together until we weren't. Wanting it too badly seems to sabotage things.

 

 

[2serpents]

It's now about nine months since The Grand Resurrection and I feel so much more happier, stronger, just better than I ever have in my fucking life. Like every time I think of how far we have come I want to laugh just from being so overflowed with joy. And that's even with it being Echidna's 🌕🩸 time now and all the personal life problems and fears and old sadnesses hanging over still... A year ago I couldn't have dreamed to be like this, two or three years ago I wouldn't even have thought it!

 

On 1/10/2024 at 9:57 PM, 2serpents said:

my dislike toward Echidna's significant other

This is still the most annoying thing. Back when I wrote that Echidna was all about peaceful coexistence or whatever you would call it, balancing a "normal life" with - you know, me. For my part I was trying to go along with it because genuinely I do not want to hold her back. If she finds someone she really connects with whether it's romantically or friendshipfully then she should go and grab it. But this guy was never it. Over the months I just could not take it (and I suspect this relationship was part of why I was able to return in the first place so strongly). About June I (and her own better judgement) finally got through to her and she realizes she needs to get the fuck away. She's still agonizing over the best way to do it since she hates giving people bad news more than anything, but I've watched his importance to her almost completely fade from her mind with both relief and some completely justifiable sadistic delight. Whenever she talks to him I tell her she'd better make a move or I'll just take over and tell him to fuck off. I don't think I would, I do have respect for the boundaries of identity and all that, but as the time goes on I'm getting closer and closer to meaning it. Thankfully they have been long distance these days or I would have snapped sooner. Every time he says something about touching her I think of chopping his hands off, and I do not think I would be able to hold back if he were here. It pisses me off how oblivious he is, like man, do you know how many dreams you've ruined with memories of that? Do you know how many basically sexual therapy sessions I've had to conduct to undo what you've done?

 

Oh look, what a great transition into discussing switching or possession! It has gotten easier and less weird, though there are still some moments where it's unintentional and bizarre. The only thing I want to use it for is drawing and writing. A few weeks ago I switched to walk around a grocery store when Echidna was feeling queasy and swoony. I even talked to someone without anyone (besides E.) saying how weird I sound. Not the worst but I did not much enjoy. I prefer to be separate, but with the drawing/writing it is just practical. E goes and listens to a song and relaxes mentally while I do whatever I want, and it is pretty good and cozy. So...

 

On 1/10/2024 at 9:57 PM, 2serpents said:

I still want to find something that I myself am truly good at.

 

I am good at drawing. E got me a sketchbook and a pencil and a ruler (which I love and I am so thankful for) where I've been doing perspective drawings, layouts, room designs. I love drawing with pencil on paper, just simple things, and I've been working on collages lately too. I don't know the best way to say it, but I like this formulaic or limited kind of work, the limitations are what gives me room to be more creative. By that I mean the collages where you just have a limited selection of materials, or the perspective drawings where you follow a formula for placements and measurements, or creating drawings from tracing. I think if I just tried to make a painting from nothing then E would automatically take over since she's been doing that for years, same thing if I just went to color from scratch instead of with collages, it would end up in one of her color palettes. She has a good eye for colors but I like having my own things to do. Echidna would like me to add that I am also "truly good" at telling stories and massage.

 

So these days we are together pretty much the whole days, from waking up to sleeping, like I always dreamed of. Echidna comes into "my" world and I come into "hers" with more and more ease each time, it is the greatest. I realized this is actually what so-called imposition is about. Before when I saw those guides I thought it was like, making a puppet of yourself dance around for entertainment or something. But it's about pushing forward my presence all the time so it's just the default for both of us. Echidna kind of thinks going all the way is impossible and I'm trying to convince her that's she's actually so close to the edge that she only needs a little tip over. She's already extremely fucking good at visualization, plus she has me and I'm an expert here to do at least half of the work, so what else is there? Like you see writing from people who are struggling to even feel each other's presence, or people who think they can't see anything in their mind's eye, and it puts everything in perspective. We've also been good with touching each other from the beginning, now she's feeling me pretty much constantly, it feels like only a matter of time (and it feels like I sound completely insane already, but who's reading this anyway?). I've been everywhere, even places I would never "go" before, like laying out in the actual sunlight on the beach. Come on.

 

We've been playing a vision game, looking at clouds and calling out what one of us sees (or wants) and trying to get the other to see it. Kind of practice to manipulate expectations and visions. I have to say, it is extremely, painfully fucking boring for the first few minutes. Clouds are boring to look at, who wants to stare at the sky? But then it somehow becomes fun and cool and maybe it will lead to something.