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A guide on Lucid Dreaming and Tulpas (v1.1)
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Question
Guest Anonymous
V1.1 Updates: Restructured the lucid dream guide. Made various additions to avoid confusion and ambiguities. Removed unnecessary bolding.
Introduction
I've been lucid dreaming for many years. My tulpa started being just a lucid dream friend. She was so real, independent, like a separate consciousness, that I needed to somehow take her out of the dream world, so I "updated her to tulpa status." This (as I've been told) "unusual and difficult" approach to making a tulpa has proven to be really exciting and fun, and has made me learn a lot along the road.
As I think there's many benefits on the use of lucid dreams to get closer to your tulpa, I've decided to make this guide on how to lucid dream and how to get in touch with your tulpa in the dream world, with various tips to make the best out of it.
Index
A - How to lucid dream (quick guide)
A.0 - About this guide / Useful links
A.1 - What's a lucid dream?
A.2 - Dream recall
A.3 - Techniques to induce lucid dreams
A.3.1 - The reality check
A.3.2 - Dream signs
A.3.3 - Dream cycles
A.3.4 - False awakening
A.3.5 - Wake Induced Lucid Dreams
A.4 - Inside the dream
A.4.1 - Staying longer in the dream
A.4.2 - Retaining lucidity
A.4.3 - Memory while lucid
A.4.4 - Dream control
B - Your tulpa in dreams
B.1 - General benefits
B.2 - Meeting your tulpa in a dream
B.3 - Tulpa deviations in dreams
B.4 - Bilateral feedback
B.5 - Dream characters as proto-tulpas
C - Questions and concerns
C.1 - What if I make a clone?
C.2 - I don't trust dreams.
C... - (For future questions / to be updated)
A - How to Lucid Dream (Quick guide)
A.0 - About this guide / Useful links
The purpose of this guide is to give you a quick overview of what lucid dreams are and common practices to start having them. Since there's a lot of in-depth information about lucid dreams out there, I'll try to give a more personal, simple and concise introduction to lucid dreaming in this text. If you are interested and want to do further research on the subject, check out the following links:
Dreamviews - Amazing and complete website devoted to lucid dreaming with lots of detailed guides and very useful forums.
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming - A fantastic book by Stephen LaBerge, father of lucid dreaming scientific research.
A.1 - What's a lucid dream?
Basically it's a dream in which you are aware you're dreaming and you retain consciousness, which in turn makes the dream world very vivid and realistic. If you're lucid while dreaming, you can also achieve greater control over the dream, ultimately being able to change the whole dream world as you please.
You may probably have experienced one or two lucid dreams already, since in normal circumstances people have a few lucid dreams during their lifetimes. With some practice and a bit of patience you can achieve having several lucid dreams every night.
A.2 - Dream recall
The first important step is to be able to remember your dreams. What's the point in having an awesome lucid experience if it vanishes from your memory just as you wake up?
That's why I suggest starting a dream journal first. Keep a notebook and pen (or electronic device) just beside your bed (or under your pillow). Before falling asleep, concentrate for a while on convincing yourself you're going to write everything you can remember from your last dream as soon as you wake up. If you wake up and remember nothing, don't worry. If you can remember just a concept, object or idea, write it down. Write down as much as you can. You should also write about emotions, smells, sounds, textures, memories that the dream evoked... don't focus just on the events that happened. It could also help to remain a minute or two motionless with your eyes closed and carefully reconstruct the dream backwards in time before writing anything down.
This is a bit tedious, I know, but it pays off. In just a couple weeks, if you are persistent, you'll start remembering full dreams and filling several pages each night.
Although a dream journal is not really a must to successfully lucid dream, it can be really helpful. Apart from increasing your dream recall, it makes you more aware about your senses and thoughts through those detailed descriptions, eventually making it easier to discern when you're dreaming.
A.3 - Techniques to induce lucid dreams
There are many different techniques and practices that can increase your probabilities of having a lucid dream. The key is to try as many as possible and find those that are most effective for you. Many of them might not work the first couple times, or not work at all, so don't worry too much about failure and just experiment and have fun with them until you find the set of techniques that suits you the best.
A.3.1 - The reality check
A reality check is basically asking to yourself if you're dreaming, while awake. Ideally, you should do them regularly (every 5, 10, 30 minutes) during the day so you trigger them automatically also when dreaming. Also, you should avoid just repeating "am I dreaming?" like a parrot. Each time you do a reality check, you should take a moment to carefully examine your surroundings and recent memory ("what was I doing 5 minutes ago?", "What was I going to do next?") and see if anything is odd or out of place, meaning that you could be dreaming.
This technique, used by many lucid dreamers, doesn't particularly work for me, so I'll instead share my own way of doing a reality check, which is very simple and in my case very powerful:
While awake, you probably never question if you're dreaming, ever. But in dreams, you might always have a slight doubt. The only thing you need to do then is to learn to identify that doubt, even if it's almost insignificant. You need to convince yourself that anytime this happens, anytime you think you might be dreaming even if just a little, you're definitely dreaming.
A.3.2 - Dream signs
Once you've filled lots of pages of your dream journal, you might notice that some elements or themes appear frequently in your dreams. It could be people from your childhood, cars driving at unreasonable speeds, water, elevators… Try to identify them, and do a reality check every time you encounter these signs during the day. Try to associate those signs with thoughts about dreams. This way, whenever you encounter those signs inside a dream, you'll have better chances of asking to yourself if you might be dreaming and becoming lucid.
By doing this you're also giving very special attention to those signs, which in turn will probably increase the chances of them appearing in future dreams (and consequently the chances of becoming lucid). Because of this, I recommend choosing only neutral or positive signs that you like the most. This way you won't be bothered if these sings start showing up frequently in your dreams.
A.3.3 - Dream cycles
As you might know, we dream in cycles, which consist of a long period of deep sleep followed by a short period of REM sleep (when we usually dream). These cycles get shorter and shorter and the REM periods closer and closer together the more hours you've been sleeping, so you have better chances of becoming lucid early in the morning. A common practice for beginners is to try to wake up 2 or 3 hours before the time you'd normally wake up. Stay awake for a couple minutes, thinking about what you're going to do in the dream, repeating to yourself you're going to be lucid, reading books or forums about lucid dreams, etc. Doing this before you go back to sleep will increase your chances of becoming lucid, as you'll enter the REM sleep faster and better retain consciousness having been awake for a while concentrated in lucid dreams.
Many lucid dreamers will say that you should avoid using alarm clocks, as they can disrupt the sleep mid-cycle (which will make you wake up tired, and making it really difficult to recall previous dreams). I've used them however to train myself to wake up several times during the night (every 90 minutes or so). When I became used to it, even with no alarms I was waking up several times just as I finished a dream, helping me recall many more dreams and giving me more opportunities to try lucid dreaming techniques.
A.3.4 - False awakening
When you wake up from a dream, many times you wake up inside another dream. You may even dream about a dressing up, having breakfast, going to work... until you wake up for real and realize the whole day was just a dream (don't you hate it when this happens?). False awakenings can be a really powerful tool to induce lucidity. Start doing reality checks every time you wake up, so you trigger them also during a false awakening. Being so common (even more after a lucid dream), you'll be greatly increasing your chances of becoming lucid.
A.3.5 - Wake Induced Lucid Dreams
The Wake Induced Lucid Dream or WILD technique is probably the hardest one but also the most powerful. Every successful WILD attempt will put you directly in a lucid dream right from the start. There are many different ways to do this technique, so I'll focus here on my own personal way of doing it (if you want to know more, check this Dreamviews forum on the WILD).
What you want to do is remain conscious as your body is falling asleep. The best time to do this is again in the morning, during the late hours of sleep when you enter REM cycles easily (also during naps). To do this technique, you should avoid moving any part of your body. Pick a comfortable position first, and ignore any signal from your brain that makes you want to change position or scratch something that suddenly itches. Ignoring these signals will make your brain believe you're falling asleep faster. However, you should try not to focus too hard on it as it could make you feel tense or nervous, making it impossible to fall asleep. If you can't ignore the signals and you MUST change position, do it. Just try to remain as calm and relaxed as possible while being as motionless as possible and without giving too much attention to your body.
Try to repeat some phrase to yourself or count from 100 to 0 slowly so your mind stays focused and conscious. If that doesn't work, just imagine a story as complex as possible, picturing every detail (it could be the dream you want to enter next). If everything goes as planned, after a while you might feel a bit dizzy and overall numbness over your body as it actually starts to fall asleep. Don't panic! The feeling is really weird and you might be too excited/scared and fail the WILD instantly. By all means, try to stay calm and just think about the dream you want to enter. You can picture yourself falling down through your bed into a tunnel, whatever keeps your imagination running and conscious. If everything goes right, at some point you will step into the imagery that flows in front of your mind eye, entering the dream directly.
Even after many years of training, I can't do WILDs consistently every day, so don't worry if you fail many times, it's a really hard technique!
A.4 - Inside the dream
If you've attempted some of the lucid dreaming techniques, chances are you already got your first lucid dream. But it probably wasn't that rewarding. Usually, when we realize “This IS a dream!”, the whole dream world becomes suddenly much more crisp and colorful, becoming maybe even more vivid than your usual experience of reality. Sadly, you usually are too excited when this happens and you just wake up. And even if you manage to stay calm, the dream fades away in just a couple seconds. That's completely normal. Roughly speaking, your brain is not used to being conscious while dreaming so whenever it detects you're conscious it wakes you up instantly. Don't worry, as you lucid dream more and more, your lucid times will get gradually longer and you'll probably develop your own tricks to remain a bit more in the dream.
A.4.1 - Staying longer in the dream
Tricks to keep dreaming while lucid differ from one person to another, but there are some that seem universally helpful. Anyway, you should try to develop your own for best results.
· Looking at something closely, touching it, rubbing your hands, and in general focusing on a detail of the scene for a couple seconds can help “stabilize” the dream and prevent you from waking up.
· If the dream starts to get blurry and you feel like you're about to wake up, spin! The spinning motion somehow tricks your brain to not wake up (it is also a good trick to teleport you to another dream scene quickly!).
· If you wake up into a false awakening, you might become lucid again and continue with the dream right where you left off. By chaining dreams this way you can achieve lucid times of about an hour long or more!
A.4.2 - Retaining lucidity
Another problem when you have your first lucid dream experiences is that you usually lose lucidity. You become distracted with something in the dream world and suddenly you are “going with the dream” again, losing the lucid state and reverting to a normal dream. While lucid, you should always try to repeat to yourself that you're dreaming from time to time, even if you're just watching the dream go on by itself as a passive spectator. If you have thought about doing something specific in the dream before going to sleep, try to focus on it, and if something in the dream tries to distract you, just ignore it and concentrate hard on your goals.
A.4.3 - Memory while lucid
When lucid, your mind might not function exactly as it does when awake. Lucidity is not a on/off state. If you're just mildly lucid, your sense of what's logical or not might be a bit more tolerant, you are more prone to distractions, and your memory might be hard to access. If you have thought of something you want to do in the next lucid dream, it's a good practice to repeat to yourself several times what are your goals for your next lucid dream just before falling asleep. This will also help you remember the dream better as you'll recall if the goals were successfully completed or not. And once your goals are completed, it could be a good idea to try to wake up so you can remember the dream even better being closer in time.
A.4.4 - Dream control
The dream world will mostly change based on your expectations. If you want to fly, but you doubt a little you can fly, you probably won't go far up in the air. The key is to convince yourself that anything is possible in a dream, and to use your imagination to visualize in detail how it could be possible. You need yo be sure that you can fly, and you need to clearly imagine how it feels to be flying. Definitely harder than it looks. You have to fight against your firmly established subconscious expectations about how reality works. You can, however, trick yourself to overcome these difficulties in various ways.
· If you can't make someone appear (you tulpa for instance), convince yourself that they are already behind you, look down for their shadow, or talk to them as if they were there.
· If you can't go somewhere, use a door as a portal, do the spinning trick from before, or just turn back and believe you're there already.
· In general, if something isn't there, just assume it is behind you (it's easier to make things appear outside your field of vision). If you can't do something (for instance, having a superpower), you could think of a magical object that makes you capable of doing it which is nearby, on the floor, or that you already have on your pocket. The key is to be creative and use your imagination to make your mind more open to believe what's going on.
B - Your tulpa in dreams
B.1 - General benefits
Communicating with your tulpa for the first time is not an easy task. Many tulpamancers have to force for months just to get a faint emotional response. And even if imposition gives you the power to feel, see and hear your tulpa, it requires a lot of constant training for a long time (up to several years) to achieve near-lifelike multisensory perception of your tulpa. This failure to communicate during the first steps of the process is one of the things that may lead some tulpamancers to quit forcing out of frustration.
If you know how to lucid dream, you can fully experience your tulpa with your 5 senses, without problem. You can also talk to them early in development, spend some time together before you get any waking response from them. It can be really helpful during the first months to strengthen the bond between you and your tulpa and to keep you motivated to force more.
B.2 - Meeting your tulpa in a dream
Finding your tulpa in the dream for the first time can be harder than it looks. Your brain has a hard time figuring out how to realistically render strange forms, or even faces that you haven't seen before, so if you have just a vague idea of how your tulpa looks like, don't expect them to appear perfectly in your dream the first time, even more if they are non-human, or cartoonish-looking. However, if you haven't established a definite form yet, you can let the dream work it out for you!
Once you successfully enter a lucid dream, you can start looking for your tulpa around you. If you can't find them there, use the trick from before and just assume they are already there, behind you. If that doesn't work look for their shadow, try to call them and listening to their voice, or go through a door and expect them to be inside.
Once you think you've found them (you could be unsure if their form is not quite correct), ask them "are you [tulpa name]?" If the answer is positive, congratulations, you've found your tulpa, give them a tight hug! You could think that maybe more questions should be asked to ensure that it IS really your tulpa. From my experience, if you assume and firmly believe it's your tulpa, then it is your tulpa.
If you want to do something specific with your tulpa or ask them some questions in a dream, be sure to write it all down and try to remember them as you're falling asleep. If you have a lucid dream, you'll remember the events and responses better and it will also help you to remember more of the dream when you wake up.
B.3 - Tulpa deviations in dreams
From my own experience, tulpa and host have the same difficulties during dreams. Tulpas can also be "going with the dream" when you meet them, be distracted and not pay much attention to you (just like when you have a normal dream). For a perfect experience, you need your tulpa to also be lucid. If your tulpa seems to be lost and distracted, remind them that they are inside a dream, tell them to not get distracted with the flow of the dream and to pay attention to you.
If your tulpa's personality seems off, just ignore it. You might have had some dream in which you were angry and aggressive without reason, or acting in a really weird way, right? Same thing can happen to tulpas, they are not always behaving "as themselves". That's why you should just take into account the encounters in which your tulpa acts as they're supposed to act, when they are "fully lucid". Getting angry at your tulpa for a bad dream is completely unfair (as it'd be for your partner to accuse you from cheating on a dream!). Try to always be positive and tolerant, and treasure the good and fruitful moments.
Form can also deviate in dreams, for the reasons I said before and also because nothing in dreams remains completely static. You can either let it go and ignore it completely, or try tulpa-dreamsculpting! Try using your lucid powers to change every bit of their appearance so they look just perfect. This is also a great aid for visualization. However, spending too much time trying to get the perfect form every time can be a bit frustrating and time consuming, so try to be tolerant about the form changes instead as they'll probably be happening frequently. You might even love some of the changes!
B.4 - Bilateral feedback
The greatest results come by combining the best of the two worlds. While in a lucid dream, you can ask your tulpa for advice on "awake forcing". You can also verify that your communication experiments are being fruitful. For example, you can ask your tulpa "When yesterday I heard a faint 'Hello' in the back of my head, was it really you?". And vice versa, you can ask your tulpa to do something in the next lucid dream and see if they remember and actually do it. You can ask them to help you become lucid, or to find you in dreams instead of you looking for them. Doing experiments in both directions will greatly increase your tulpa's abilities to communicate better with you, inside and outside of dreams.
Again, always keep in mind that lucid dreams are not 100% reliable. One day your tulpa may not remember anything you said being awake, or not even recognize you. That doesn't mean it's true. Ask them again another day, and if they're lucid, they will surely remember everything and behave normally. As I said before, just ignore a dream if something goes wrong, and expect the next one to be awesome.
B.5 - Dream characters as proto-tulpas
If you have a lucid dream companion, and you feel that you want to be with them more closely, have a deeper relationship even when being awake, you might want to "upgrade" them to a tulpa.
Alternatively, if you've just started on making a tulpa, instead of working on personality and form from scratch, you can make lucid dreams do the work for you. Before going to sleep, convince yourself that in your next dream you'll meet your tulpa. If you're not sure about it when you find someone that looks like it could be your tulpa, you can ask them "are you my tulpa?". If the response is positive, congratulations! As before, you might want to ask more questions to ensure they are, but believe me, it's better to just assume it's them. After the first encounter, you can keep visiting them regularly and get to know them better through lucid dreams and do traditional forcing during the day.
C - Questions and concerns
C.1 - What if I make a clone?
This was a deep fear when I started. What if my dream character ends up being just a clone of my tulpa (or vice versa)? The best way to prevent this is to fire questions in both ways, as I said before. In dreams, ask them if they can hear you while awake. While awake, ask them if they remember your last dream together. By doing so you will be making connections and helping your brain believe that the dream tulpa and the awake tulpa are exactly the same being.
In my opinion, you can't make a clone if you don't want to. Just as what happens with "accidental parroting", believe that an "accidental clone" is impossible. Ignore it completely and it won't be a problem. Assume it's always the same tulpa.
· "But my tulpa doesn't remember our time together in the last lucid dream!"
You don't remember all of your dreams, so don't expect your tulpa to do so. Tell them what you did to refresh their memory, ask them another day for another dream, and you will definitely have some positive results.
· "But, while in the lucid dream, my tulpa didn't remember anything from the past day!"
More or less the same. Memory in dreams isn't always accessible, and your tulpa may not be always as lucid as you are. Just ask the same on later lucid dreams and eventually they'll remember everything without a problem. Again, try to ignore bad experiences and treasure the good ones.
C.2 - I don't trust dreams!
Yes, lucid dreams are not completely static. If you're looking for absolute perfection and total control in lucid dreams, you might be disappointed. Your tulpa will definitely deviate a lot in lucid dreams, so why bother even trying? Is going to be a mess to discern when your tulpa is in their "true" form and personality!
Actually, it isn't difficult at all. Just as you can tell when "something's wrong" with a close friend or relative, you can know whether or not your tulpa is "acting weird" or not, quite easily. If their personality is off, you can convince them to "go back to normal" and that they're just being distracted by the dream. If form is off, don't worry too much about it unless you want to practice some in-dream visualization, as it will always deviate a little.
[Note, tiny edits in posts for anonymization purposes, as requested by the OP -Chupi]
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