//------------------------------// // 4 // Story: Betwixt Dreams and Reality // by GeekyGami //------------------------------// Tulpamancy. The art of creating a separate, consistent, independently thinking and feeling entity within your own mind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Alright, that's the shadows done. Gotta do the ambient occlusion now.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I had found the subject of tulpas to be quite interesting. In fact, tulpas were the main reason I got into lucid dreaming in the first place. You see, there are many ways to go about creating your own tulpas, but I only knew of one at the time. Auto-hypnotism. Now if the subject seems a bit foreign to you, that's none too surprising. It's a meditation technique, usually used to reprogram one's thoughts to be more positive, somewhat akin to programming placebos onto yourself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Done with that, alright. New layer, dodge, hmmm, let's go with 65% opacity. Alright, clipped to layer below, moving along.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From there, usually, you would enter what some would call your "wonderland" wherein you would proceed to concentrate on perhaps a dot, or whatever else you conjured as your tulpa's beginning form, and would tell it what its personality traits were, perhaps also physical traits. After that's done, you would talk to what you conjured for as long as you chose, and you would do this over multiple sessions, until at one point, you received an answer when you didn't expect it. It'd be somewhat straightforward from there. Create the physical form of your tulpa, show it how it can and can't move, then let it do it on its own. There's multiple other methods, of course, as it's entirely subjective. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Alright, first light pass is done. Hmmmm, what next? How about... Mmm'yes, let's start actually shading and lighting the hair. Overlay layer, light version of color, check. Dodge layer, check. Multiply layer using hair's flat color, check. Alright, let's get started. Clipped and ready to rumble.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unfortunately, the process wasn't so simple for me. I wanted to be able to get into a visual state of auto-hypnotism without needing audio guides, as they had a tendency to cut your time short and get you out of the activity after a good 20 minutes. That didn't pan out. I didn't have the discipline for it, never mind the discipline for proper visualization. I thus decided it would be a better idea to focus on another possible method: lucid dreaming. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- '... That's enough of that, getting tired of working on this. Let's work on music.' '... On second thought, let's not. Haven't played Fallout 4 VR in a while.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I only learned a few months later that you could make a tulpa without a form, but I wanted a tulpa I could perceive with all my senses. An elaborate, controlled auto-hallucination of sorts. Thus, I kept practicing to lucid dream to overcome my inability to visualize a wonderland. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Why do I even bother with this game? It's so uncooked I've spent more time trying to optimize it than playing it! Now I'm finding out it doesn't even have a seated mode? No wonder it got critically panned on release! I can't just stand for over two hours when I'm on break! I'm already standing for hours when I work!' '... At least I didn't pay full price.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Of course, I still tried to learn different methods. I ended up doing research over research on different techniques of auto-hypnosis, on top of guides of all sorts. It's often advised that one should take everything related to the subject as entirely subjective, as there's no one right method. I, of course, only learned that recently, after focusing for so long on lucid dreaming. I also ended up learning that thinking about visualization as actually "seeing" on the back of your eyelids was entirely erroneous. Apparently, it was more of a question of suggesting to your mind's different senses what you are attempting to visualize, without actually using your eyes. Some had a tendency to call that method of "seeing" the "mind's eye" as illogical as that may sound. It wasn't an entirely surprising discovery, as some guides actually told people to breathe using their stomachs, which makes no sense, when you consider that the stomach area is not taken up by your lungs. (They actually mentioned the stomach area because that is the feeling you're going for when trying to stimulate your diaphragm, a muscle that, when contracted, opens up the lungs further.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- '... Alright, I'll actually work on music this time. Uuuuuh, let's open up "Wan Yeah Yeah.mmpz," that should be fun.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It shames me to admit that I am no closer to tulpa creation than I was previously. At least I learned how to lucid dream from that, so that's nice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Yep, sounds way better after gain staging everything. Shame I don't know how to continue the track. Guess I'll return to it later.' As I closed LMMS, I noticed it was starting to get pretty late. '2 in the morning! Yikes.' It was about time I hit the sack. My work sleep schedule was going to be screwed up enough as it is. So, I ate a piece of cheese, brushed my teeth, and went to bed for the night, or morning rather. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ... Werewolf. I was a werewolf. The last of my kind. The only ones left on this earth were humans. I was all alone. As I looked from above at the street below, I noticed it looked quite familiar. There weren't many streets that I knew that were laid out in a roundabout format for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It was the street my father's home was on. I noticed something odd in the corner of my vision. A telephone booth, one of the ones with glass panes. I tried using the phone. No one picked up. I was all alone, after all. As I looked back at the street, I felt that it was a rather hopeless cause I had driven myself to follow, and I decided to return to my father's abode. I went inside, up the stairs. The bathroom light was on, and so was the fan. The door was wide open. I found that to be a bit peculiar, and decided to investigate. 'What the hell?!' I thought. 'Who is this!' In front of me, taking a bath, was a cat woman. A blond-haired nekomimi, as some have taken to calling them. 'It turns out I am not the only werewolf anymore!' I thought, heavily relieved from the burden of seclusion. Now, of course, a part of me debated jumping into the bathtub to join her. However, I felt that would be a little impolite, and I felt sleepy. I decided to let her be, and went on my way to my bedroom. I laid in bed, and fell asleep. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Darkness. Darkness all around me. It didn't feel terrifying, and it certainly didn't feel like anything was there. I could however see my body perfectly. Seeing the incongruity of the situation, I looked for any signs that this was in fact just a room painted completely black, but I could not find any light sources, nor any reflections. It was at that point that I knew that I was dreaming. I recalled my previous dream. 'What the hell, how did I ever think I was a werewolf of all things?' 'How would I have even known? I was a disembodied camera floating in the sky!' 'That girl wasn't even a werewolf, what the hell!' As I kept nitpicking at the illogical things that had occurred, I noted that I was still in pitch black darkness. I decided it was high time I do something interesting with my current state of being. 'You know, it'd be cool as all hell if my heart could be accessed like in Kingdom Hearts, looking like pillars on top of which laid symbolic mosaics.' It was chosen as such, that I would attempt to reach my own heart. I tried and tried to conjure up an image of my heart, but it did not work. It was at this point that I decided to let myself float down into the depths below. As I drifted forever downwards, I started hearing something. It was Kingdom Hearts 2's soundtrack, "Sanctuary" In you and I there's a new land. As I kept drifting, something started to materialize. A sanctuary, my sanctuary, yeah. Where fears and lies melt away. I started slowing down. As the song went on, in bits and pieces, I felt more and more relaxed. What's left of me, what's left of me now. My fears, my lies melt away. I softly landed. I was in a gargantuan hall, at least 40 times my height. The walls, the ceiling, the floor. Everything was covered in small , teal colored tiles. They reminded me a lot of a public pool, or a bathroom. You show me how to see that nothing is whole, and nothing is broken. I had become the very definition of zen. I felt like a saint. The song went into the portion where it merely played an instrumental. I walked by calmly. I saw figures that had been important in my life, whether it be positively or negatively. Nicholas, a friend I drifted apart from over the years. "You know, we may not have been very close, but I still care about you." I told him. "I hope you are doing well." Jasmine, my second true love interest. Words needed not be said. "Please, follow me." I told them, as I went towards other people I had known. Follow they did. My father. He went in line with the others. The teacher that was responsible for our infographism class. "I forgive you, for what it's worth." As I moved on, more and more people I knew lined up behind me. I felt at peace like I had never felt before. That was as much as I remembered of that dream before it ended. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cobblestone. Roads of cobblestone. At least, that's what they appeared to be. It was hard to tell, because the environment around me was incredibly low-poly. It appeared to be a town from Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall at night, from the looks of it. There was something in front of me. A light blue person. A lady, with short, light blue hair. I would've asked myself questions regarding her color, but it didn't phase me in the least. As I looked at her she suddenly crouched down low and spread her legs. "Fuck me really hard, baby!" she exclaimed. 'What?! That is like, the last thing I expected to hear from you!' This was so incredibly out of left field that I ended up almost waking up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scaffolding. I was in the middle of scaffolding. It was all painted blue. I was glad, I had managed to stay asleep. That fact that my previous dream had mostly ended didn't matter too much. I figured a moment in a dream I absolutely did not expect had more meaning to it than just being arandom dream. I tried to find that character from the previous dream. Instead, I found a lady who looked like she came right out of Evangelion. Somewhat similar to before, if she wasn't entirely blue. I knew I was going to wake up soon, so I asked her her name, in case it was really the same entity. The name I got back was "Rei." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I woke up, looked at my alarm. 5 minutes before when I was supposed to wake. I had slept 9 hours, so 5 minutes less was certainly reasonable. 'Was that a sentient entity? The beginnings of a tulpa, maybe?' '... Maybe I'm just really horny?' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A certain Moon Princess had to withhold her amusement.