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Sophie's Wonderland Tips


Sophie

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Maybe there's no wonderland guide because it really would just be one sentence. Imagine a place in your mind, that's your wonderland. Do whatever and enjoy.

 

Well, that was two, but still.

 

That's all you need to know about wonderlands, and if you're still reading this thread instead of doing that, you're wasting your time.

 

Of course if you didn't want to waste your time you'd be forcing instead of browsing the forum to begin with, so I'm going to assume most of my readers are still with me. Just know that everything to follow is just footnotes, and a waste of time.

 

Wonderland Design

 

Ultimately, the design of your wonderland is entirely up to you, so like the rest of this guide, you're free to disregard this section. This is just my personal opinion.

 

I feel that the best kind of wonderland is something like the Myst games: vast, beautiful, and nearly deserted, with an area you can call home. It should be somewhat secluded from the outside world, but not so cut off that you can't explore later. Let's explore these concepts in a bit more detail.

 

Vast & Beautiful

 

I suggest vast and beautiful for a two reasons. First, this may be your only chance to build something completely without limits, and you should take full advantage of it. It doesn't matter if you can't afford the land or the materials. It doesn't matter if the building is even physically possible. You can have castles built on clouds if you want. Not even the sky is the limit.

 

The other reason I suggest vast and beautiful is that you'll want to spend more time in a beautiful and impressive place, and you'll want to experience it more vividly.

 

Nearly Deserted

 

I recommend that you keep your wonderland sparsely populated at first. This is so you can focus on interaction with your tulpa, so you don't create a bunch of other characters you feel should be elevated to tulpa status, and because it'll be easier on you mentally not to have to worry with a bunch of characters when you're still new to this idea.

 

Of course you shouldn't take this suggestion as absolute law. Animals, for example, will very rarely cause you any trouble. Having squirrels in the trees, and cows in the fields isn't going to hurt you in the least, nor is having a couple of goldfish, or a parakeet. Where you might start to run into problems is having animals with complex personalities and behaviors, like cats or dogs, or anything that can hold a conversation. Again, these are usually ok, but if you want to have forty different cats, each with its own fur pattern, name, and favorite sleeping places, you're probably going to forget some, or combine them, or otherwise corrupt your mental data relating to them.

 

Imagine for a moment that your wonderland is a stage play. Animals are almost never allowed on stage, so every one of the animals in your wonderland will be represented by something else. Cows and squirrels and goldfish in a play will usually just be painted on the backdrop, or maybe represented by a prop. Some animals, however, need to be portrayed by actors, or directly manipulated by puppetry. What I'm suggesting is that you keep the number of "actors" low -- at least at first.

 

An Area You Can Call Home

 

It can be nice to have a place where you can feel safe and relaxed, where you can keep things and know that they'll still be there for you no matter how long you're gone. Having a home has a few other advantages as well. You can use it as a memory house, or just as a home away from home. Reportedly, US Army Special Forces were taught how to make wonderlands during Vietnam, so that if they were imprisoned in a POW camp, they would still have some privacy and sense of home in their minds, even if they couldn't have it in the physical world.

 

Secluded, Not Cut Off

 

Most people have difficulty keeping the entire surface of an Earth-sized planet in their heads. You'll get better at it over time, but initially you may not want to make your wonderland too big. You may be able to handle a square kilometer, or maybe just a few dozen square meters, depending on how complicated the wonderland is.

 

What you may want to do at first is limit yourself to a particular area. Build a house in a valley, for example, and explore that valley all you want, but don't venture outside until you feel you're ready. Eventually you will want to visit the lake to the north, or the forest to the south, but I suggest that you let it wait until you have your valley firmly in mind, so that you don't forget the details of the places you go almost as soon as you go there.

 

Once again, all of this is my personal opinion, and you may find that none of it applies to you.

 

Making Your Wonderland More Vivid

 

When you first start with your wonderland, it may not feel very real. This is natural, and it will naturally become more vivid over time as long as you keep using the wonderland, but you can speed up the process as well. Here are a few tips to get you started.

 

1. Every time you visit your wonderland, spend a little time time with your senses. Yes, that means sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but don't neglect the other senses either.

 

Sight

 

If you're a visual person, you probably already imagine looking at the objects in your wonderland. We look at things all the time though, and the brain tends to filter most of the things we see out.

 

As an example of this, try turning around and looking at the room behind you. After ten seconds or so, turn back and type up a complete description of the room. You'll probably describe some of the room flawlessly, while completely forgetting other objects. What sort of objects did you forget?

 

Usually we pay the most attention to certain kinds of objects -- things that are very big or maybe very small, things that are in motion, and things that are brightly colored. Remember this when you visit your wonderland.

 

Find a large object like a tree or a house and look at it from far away. Then approach it and get a good close look at the detail -- the shape of the leaves, the texture of the bark, the ants crawling on it, or the way the paint peels or bubbles, the way the painter's stray hairs have been painted over, and so on. Examine the object from different angles and different distances. Can you still see the obelisk when you're on the other side of the mansion?

 

You might also try changing your own size. If you want to look at your house, try becoming a hundred-foot-tall giant, and examining the house from that perspective. Then shrink yourself down to an inch in height, and explore it from that perspective.

 

I said that the mind focuses more on objects in motion. It's easy to pick up an apple and toss it into the air, or to pick up a leaf and drop it to watch it fall. For larger objects like buildings, you can get a similar effect by moving yourself. Try flying in a circle around your castle, or riding a roller coaster.

 

Every time you visit your wonderland, try to explore three objects visually in one of the ways described above. This will help you to develop your wonderland body's "eyes", which will help you in seeing things better in the future.

 

Hearing

 

Hearing is very much the same as sight, but it may be harder to find objects in your wonderland that make sounds, particularly if, like me, you make vast, abandoned Myst-like wonderlands. In these situations, you can always make sounds yourself. Listen to the sound of your footsteps as you walk on different kinds of surfaces. Knock on walls and doors. Splash water around. Throw things. All of these will create sounds for you to listen to.

 

Again, try to explore three sounds every time you enter the wonderland.

 

Touch

 

The sense of touch may actually be easier than hearing. Your wonderland will be full of things to touch, and you shouldn't have any trouble finding them. I personally like to feel things with my feet. I like the sensation of walking barefoot in the grass, or on a cool tile floor. Water is also lots of fun, and you can get a lot of variation with it, depending on how much there is, where it is, how it's moving, and so on.

 

Like sight and hearing, try to explore three tactile sensations every time you enter your wonderland.

 

Scent & Taste

 

Scent and taste are underrated senses. You may not think of your house or your workplace as having a particular scent because you're there every day -- but they probably do, and although you don't realize it, you're picking up those scents constantly. If you leave your home or your job for a year, and then come back, you'll smell the place immediately, and along with the scent, memories of the place will come flooding back.

 

Scent and taste may be harder to incorporate into your wonderland, which is why I'm combining them here. In my case, I have a particular scent for my wonderland house, and of course the earth and moss in the garden have a different scent. Try to find places in your wonderland that smell different from each other. If you can't find enough, make yourself some food, or just pick some fruit and taste it.

 

The Other Senses

 

The other senses might perhaps be harder to incorperate than scent and touch, but they're very important as well. The sense of balance is often very different between worlds inside the mind, and worlds outside the mind -- people who do things that involve the sense of balance report more lucid dreams than other people, for example.

 

You probably won't be able to include many of these senses on a daily basis, but try for at least one. Swing on a swing set, ride a roller coaster, drive a car, go swimming, sit by a roaring fire, or go walking through the snow.

 

Feelies

 

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, many computer games were packaged with "feelies" -- small objects intended to represent an item from the game world. Since games in those days were mostly text, with very little graphics or sound, this was the only way to give players a way to see and feel a part of the game.

 

A good way to make your wonderland a bit more real in your mind is to collect and create feelies for it. For example, if there's an ancient marble temple in your wonderland, you might want to print out pictures of similar temples, build a model, get a piece of marble, or just find a marble structure near where you live that you can visit.

 

Anything that relates to the sensations you want to feel in your wonderland can be a feelie. If there are bullfrogs in your wonderland, find youtube videos of the sound of bullfrogs. If your house smells like jasmine, get some jasmine oil or incense. If you have a swimming pool full of jello, make yourself a bowl so that you can run your hands through it. All of this will reinforce the memories of these sensations, and make them more vivid when you imagine them.

 

Developing a Wonderland Body

 

One thing some people find hard about wonderlands is getting a sense of really being there. This is partly because when many people imagine themselves doing something, they imagine themselves from a third-person perspective, watching their body as it goes through the motions.

 

Imagining yourself from a third-person perspective can be useful, but it's not good for making things feel real. All of the tips on making your wonderland more vivid should help with this, but there's more that you can do.

 

The best way I've found to make your body feel more real in the wonderland, and to feel more attached to it, is to do some simple exercises. When I first learned this technique, it was called "subtle body exercises" but different teachers use different names, so the same technique has nearly as many names as wonderlands do.

 

Ideally this should be integrated into your regular exercise routine. If you do something like calisthenics, or tai chi, or yoga, or weightlifting, do this then. When you do an exercise, sit and rest for a few seconds afterwards, and recreate the sensation of doing that exercise in your mind. Do this every day with every kind of exercise you can, until getting up and moving around in your wonderland feels just as natural as it does in the physical world.

 

The Dream Interpretation Theory

 

Some writers have suggested that the wonderland will communicate with you in the same manner as dreams. In other words, if weeds grow in your wonderland garden, that may represent some manner of negativity that is draining resources that other parts of your mind need. If you, or your tulpa, or even servitors pull these weeds, that's sending a signal to your mind through symbolism to get rid of that negativity.

 

Once again, take all of this information (or don't) as you wish. Feel free to neglect anything I'm writing. After all, Sands told you everything you need to know about wonderlands, and the rest of this is completely incidental.

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That's called a paracosm.

 

Do I need to do this shit again?

 

No. A paracosm does not mean a large wonderland. A paracosm means a detailed, large conworld, a constructed world often made for a book or a game, but could be just done for your own fun as well. While it's possible for this conworld of yours to also be a wonderland or a place you explore in your imagination as well, not every conworlder does that. Some just write or draw without exploring it like you explore a wonderland, and I could never call any place I don't actually visit in my imagination a wonderland, at least.

 

Also do note detailed in my list there. A large wonderland does not mean detailed. If you look at examples listed at paracosms on something like Wikipedia, Middle Earth is listed as one. So, for your wonderland to be a conworld and an actual paracosm, you're going to need a lot more than just size. You need details. Animals and plants? What are they, do they have names, how do they grow, can they be eaten? What do they eat? Are there people, cultures, history and languages? What kind of countries are there, have you drawn a map, named cities or special landmarks? Any religions or special people? What about the laws of physics, are they actually different from our world? Is there magic? What about astrology?

 

That is a paracosm. And once your wonderland has that detail put in it? Then you can call it a paracosm. But you better actually know it instead of just thinking you see it all, because work goes into actually developing that.

The THE SUBCONCIOUS ochinchin occultists frt.sys (except Roswell because he doesn't want to be a part of it)

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Well, I'm open to suggestions on titles. Wonderland Blueprints? Sophie's Symposium? The House That Your Mind Built?

 

To add to what Sands said on Paracosms, it occurs to me that there are different kinds of detail. Let's use Middle Earth as an example. As Sands said, we have information on Middle Earth that we don't have about the average wonderland, like history, culture, language, geography, and so on. But if the Shire were your wonderland, you might know which direction the major streets run, what geographical features the town is built around, and how to get from one house to another -- none of which is included in our books about Middle Earth.

 

To use the ever-popular Minecraft/wonderland comparison, the game Minecraft maps out places the player is going to see in the near future. You might start the game in the forest, and Minecraft knows where each individual tree is. Until you go north, the game only knows about what's north in a very vague way. It'll know, for example that there's tundra or desert or ocean in that direction, what sort of plants and animals might be found there, and how the land might be shaped. Until you actually go north however, the game won't know where each individual cactus is in the desert, or whether there's an oasis, or what animals might be found there.

 

Middle Earth (and any paracosm, really) is more like the area that's far away in Minecraft. We know that hobbits live in the Shire, and we know what it's 50 leagues from the northern moors to the marshes in the south. We don't know, however, where each individual house is, and although we get a few names and personalities of hobbits, we don't really get to know most of the inhabitants of the Shire in the way that we would if it were a wonderland.

 

Wonderlands, by contrast, are more like the area nearby in Minecraft. We know where that craggy tree is, and where the fork in the road is, and where that pack of wolves lives. This is the kind of detail I'm saying that the mind can't maintain on a planetary scale. Google tells me that the worldwide population of wolves is something like 150,000. That'll be more than 21,000 wolf packs, which is probably more than your mind can keep track of.

 

And of course I'm talking about Earth-sized planets. If your wonderland is a "planet" like the one in The Little Prince, about the size of a house, you probably can maintain the entire thing in your mind with ease.

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Not liking this statement. "No matter how long you've been making wonderlands, you won't be able to keep the entire surface of an Earth-sized planet in your head."

Very frontloading esqe, and untrue. Easy enough to imagine an earth sized desert planet for instance. Or an earth sized grassy debug type world with repetitive grass patterning.

 

"Scent and taste are harder to incorporate into your wonderland"

Frontloading. Who says it's harder? Some people are great at smelling things. Others not so much. Very depending on one's person, yes?

 

"When you first start with your wonderland, it won't feel very real."

Frontloading, way to increase the probability of people having a very real wonderland experience from the start.

 

"The other senses can be even harder to incorperate than scent and touch, but they're very important as well.''

can be. closer.

 

"One of the hardest things about wonderlands is getting a sense of really being there. " Is it the hardest? Is it?

 

Honestly you could say "Your mileage may vary" every time you give frontloading. Neutral terms, use them. You're attempting to help people, yes? Then why are you giving your readers suggestions that things will be hard? Talk about making things harder than need be. If you want to be an author, consider what effect your words will have on your readers. Here to help, not hinder.

 

Disapproved for tips until you make neutral these phrases.

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Not liking this statement. "No matter how long you've been making wonderlands, you won't be able to keep the entire surface of an Earth-sized planet in your head."

Very frontloading esqe, and untrue. Easy enough to imagine an earth sized desert planet for instance. Or an earth sized grassy debug type world with repetitive grass patterning.

 

...

 

I suppose saying "Many people have difficulty making their tulpa visible to other people" is frontloading? :) Oh, alright, that's some valid criticism. I believe I've changed everything you mentioned.

 

I even get the point you're making about a grassy debug planet, and I've changed that as well, but if you think a realistic desert planet can be easily held in memory, you're crazy. Mars is technically a desert planet. Head over to Google Mars and see how much of that you can memorize.

 

Also, there's a whole lot of variation between deserts. Deserts are defined by the amount of annual rainfall they receive, so even the polar icecaps of Mars are still desert, as are the Siberian steppes here on Earth. There's a whole lot of variation in flora and fauna, types of sand, rock formations.

 

If you're talking about a simple debug-style desert, like your grassy plain, sure. *Maybe* even if you took a square mile of a real desert and repeated it endlessly. But any realistic planet (by the current scientific definition of "planet") will probably be impossible for any human being to memorize. Still, I'll change the text so it applies equally to cyborg prodigies, just in case.

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Approved for tips and tricks.

"Assert the supremacy of your Imaginal acts over facts and put all things in subjection to them... Nothing can take it from but your failure to persist in imagining the ideal realized."

 

-Neville Goddard

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Approved for Tips and Tricks.

 

I had some similar objections as mayormorgan's, but seeing as they're fixed now, it's mostly fine.

 

> But any realistic planet (by the current scientific definition of "planet") will probably be impossible for any human being to memorize.

 

Your brain can generate a lot of amazing landscapes on the fly, you could perceive entire entirely original 'worlds' if you so wish, thus any new wonderland adventure could end up being of a new place.

This is more of a matter of training your imagination rather than actually memorizing more information than could ever fit in your head (and even if you could perceive it all, you'd end up forgetting everything except the memorable parts).

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