My Shadow

[sushi]

An hour or two a day should be helpful. I hope things go well.

[zymish]

A small sign of progress, maybe, or just coincidence - last night, before sleeping, I asked him to help me remember my dreams. Usually, I don't remember them at all. I can remember maybe one or two dreams a month. This morning, I woke up and could remember three of them. Really cool!

 

Visualization didn't go so well last night before bed. The first five or ten minutes were pretty solid, but after that I couldn't stay focused and my mind kept wandering, even after I brought it back to him. I think I was too sleepy; I was up a bit later than usual. I'll keep at it and see if I can improve my concentration.

 

Thanks for the kind wishes, sushi!

[zymish]

I just finished re-reading my progress report from the beginning, and holy wow, is it disjointed. We have got to get better organized. I suspect that it's fairly common for someone to try several different tacks before striking gold, so to speak. But I was just all over the place with a) what I was doing, and b) how I went about doing it.

 

I think it might help to organize my thoughts and process a bit better. It's late now, but I'll make that a task for tomorrow, and I'll post it here to keep myself honest and guard against procrastination.

 

For now, I think I'll just give myself a small summary of our progress so far:

 

Form is established, down to skin tone, hair color/style/length, eye color, overall body shape, and most facial features. Still nebulous are ear shape (pointy vs animal vs human), freckles (present or not), body hair (present or not - if so, where and how much), and height. Height is pretty vague; I know he's taller than I am, but I don't know by how much. Also of note is that he changed his own eye color, which I take as an encouraging sign of independent will.

Mindvoice is faint and inconsistent. Slight concern that I've been getting false positives, but let's pretend I haven't, because "parrotnoia" is to be strictly avoided. Mindvoice still sounds like mine, though we seem to be mostly agreeing upon a goal for what he will sound like. Kind of like Simon Pegg. We'll see if that sticks, though.

Visualization skill is adequate and improving, concentration skill unsatisfactory. Using calm.com for pre-visualization meditating. Results unclear; haven't been doing this long enough to tell whether it's having any effect.

Passive forcing and narration - nearly adequate. Doing a better job of staying aware of his presence throughout the day, but could be putting more effort into talking to him.

Tactile imposition - sporadic, faint. Sometimes, when I'm paying attention and he touches me, I can feel a tingling where his skin would contact mine. Nothing like the firmness and weight of a meatspace person's touch, and it doesn't happen every time, but it has happened enough times that it's unlikely to be coincidence.

Visual imposition - nil. Still seeing him with my mind's eye and not my eyeballs, though open-eye visualization seems to be coming along okay, especially considering there hasn't been any conscious effort put into this. In fact, any open-eye visualization that has occurred has been spontaneous and unintentional, something I'm taking as a good sign. Not so much a result of my deliberately imagining his form, but usually as a reaction to something (more specifically, he often grins or laughs about things, and he's physically affectionate, often resting an arm or his head on my shoulder). He spends a lot of time hanging around near my right shoulder. I don't know why. My tentative hypothesis is that it allows him to look over my shoulder, which affords him a vantage point close to mine, while also providing physical closeness, something he seems to want a lot of. (This last was unexpected, though unsurprising, considering that he was almost certainly created out of a need for love and compassion. Also possibly explained by the fact that, as a young tulpa, he lacks independence and cannot wander far.)

 

So, looking back at where we were when we began, I can see definite progress. Not as much as I thought there would be by this point, but then, I wasn't giving him nearly as much attention and time as I intended to. I have been rectifying this in the past couple of days, and will continue to do so. Preferably without expecting sudden leaps. "It's never too late to start" and "It will take as long as it takes" have become helpful things to tell myself when I begin to feel discouraged. We've got a long way to go, but I think I should relish these early stages; I will never again create my first tulpa. This is truly a once in a lifetime experience. This will be the only time I'll get to watch him grow and develop into a full-fledged person, which is both a fascinating process and something that should be emotionally significant to us both. I think if I can keep that mindset, of enjoying the process for its own sake rather than straining toward the end of it, it will benefit us both and serve to enrich the process itself.

 

As a side note: I wonder how many times throughout this process I'll realize something that should have been obvious from the beginning.

[zymish]

I made a nice little outline for myself to help stay better organized. It's a rough draft, but it's better than nothing.

 

Here's the outline.

 

I'll continue updating it to account for progress and new insights. If anyone has any advice to offer or suggestions to make, please feel free to share them either in this thread or via PM.

 

Kida. His name is Kida.

[zymish]

Today, someone recommended a guide on something called image streaming. The idea is that, by constantly describing what you're seeing with the mind's eye, you'll be less likely to get distracted by other thoughts.

 

I was pleased to find that it worked brilliantly for me. I managed a much longer and, I felt, more productive session today than I have in the past, simply by telling Kida what I saw. I was not able to see his face any more clearly, but I was able to focus for the duration of the session, despite being hungry at the time, and I also saw his feet and hands in much more detail than before, because I was paying closer attention.

 

I'm definitely going to use this method again.

[sushi]

That looks like a good schedule. I really need to do something like that myself. Does Kida answer questions when you ask him directly? I've found interviews to be better than narration, once you can do them. I just find some questions from fictional character worksheets on google, and get Fench to answer them.

[zymish]

He does answer questions sometimes, but not consistently. It's usually a bit unclear, and sometimes I don't hear him at all. So I think I'll continue to work on narration for a while. It's become a bit of a habit anyway.

 

I like that idea, though. I think I'll have to try that myself.

[zymish]

I've started divvying up active forcing sessions between visualizing and narration; thirty minutes of visualizing is usually just right, and then I just yammer to him about whatever's on my mind for however long I can keep it up. It's working out quite well so far, and I'm beginning to find the experience more relaxing than taxing. Rather than being an interruption, or a chore, it's a peaceful break from my day when I get to just hang out with him and relax.

 

I'm able to see him a lot better now than I was before. I can actually see his face now, though I can't hold the image for very long. My biggest obstacle at the moment seems to be proportions; I can look at just about every part up close now (though his face and abdomen are still a bit hazy), but when I back up and try to look at him all at once, the lengths of various parts are strange and disproportionate. I guess I'll have to start working on that next. It makes sense that I'd have this problem, because so far visualization has been spent focusing on individual parts. I can see his legs, but not legs + torso. Same goes for arms, and head. Ah well. It's something to work on.

 

I've been considering creating a wonderland as well, but if I do, it's not going to be terribly soon. I'd like to give him as much of my time as I can, rather than spending my attention and effort working on something less important.

 

I did a doodle of him on DoodleOrDie. It's not great - his skin tone is close but not spot-on, his hair is a bit too light, and his facial features are exaggerated because that's the way I draw, apparently - but I'm pretty happy with it considering how little time was spent on it.

 

[SakuraSky]

Welcome! It's very helpful to continue to do narration in your head throughout your day. It doesn't really matter what you talk about, but the more you narrate the better (seems that way to me anyway, at least until they become vocal and you can have discussions instead of narrating)

[zymish]

I do narrate throughout the day, a bit. Probably not as much as I could, though. It always feels a bit weird to give him a play-by-play of what I'm doing, since he's right there watching me do it. But I guess it's not so much about the content as the act of talking to him. Thanks for the advice!