A wise man once told me "don't let your memes be dreams". But still, lucid dreaming is just one of those things that would be nice to achieve as a side-effect, but that I won't put a lot of effort into.

Day 11 was great. I did what I've been wanting to for a while: Just turn off the computer and all the lights, put on a timer for an hour, and shut out everything to spend time with Melo. I started out messing around with some symbolism, something I haven't been doing too much of since it feels kinda corny, but I've come to appreciate how straight-forward it is when you just treat it like a ritual around giving the tupper attention. After this, I wasn't quite sure what to do, but I thought I could feel and see her pulling me towards that merry-go-round (which I had pretty much forgotten about at this point). I obliged what I assumed was her intent and took a ride with her. Some affectionate gestures were exchanged, and I was driven to this blissful emotional state that would be difficult to describe in words, except that it's far beyond what I'd expect to experience from just sitting down and imagining stuff, and it made me feel a lot closer to her. After that, most of the remaining time was spent on narration while messing around a little with her.

I can't promise to be able to dedicate an hour straight every day, but it's definitely something I want to repeat more than occasionally. And it's very encourage to confirm that I have it in me to not just bear with it for that long, but to have fun with it.

Day 12 was alright. I've started to habitually ignore the hourly notifications, but I still get some forcing done by having some longer sessions.

I've been noticing a bad trend in my attitude, though. I'm getting really impatient for progress. I thought a little about how long it's been since I started up again, and how I would have expected to make some more progress by now given the time I've put in. Then I'm hit with the weight of all the other times I've tried and fell off because I made too little progress. I really, really don't want to stop again, but there's this worry creeping up on me that even if I keep going, nothing will change. And this time I can't just blame it on something I've been doing wrong, because I really don't think I have. I wanna just ignore all this, since I know it's irrational and that all I need to worry about it spending more time forcing, but those pestering thoughts in the back of my mind don't just go away. I don't know. Maybe I'll just wake up in a better mood tomorrow and forget about feeling this way. Maybe I'll be able to toughen it out by continuing to direct my focus away from it while forcing. I just hope I won't let it get to me. If I lose motivation now, I might never recover.

Day 13. Feeling a little better. It helps to meditate to get into the mindset of focusing on the present and acknowledge past regrets and future expectations as mere distractions. The whole idea of forcing because I want to be rewarded by progress feels like something I should just unlearn, in favor of seeing forcing as something inherently rewarding.

Finally reached the point where I'm just ignoring the hourly notifications. But it's fine. For now I'm able to just set aside the time and decide how long to force. Allows me to focus more on my desire to force, which I think I've been gradually cultivating the past weeks.

Um wow what if she wanted an onsen episode?

You're not thinking of lewd things, are you? Tupper should punish you.

Feels especially bad to say this after how well things were going last time, but same thing happened again, I fell out of it. Soon after my last entry, my attention returned to some other stuff in my life I had been neglecting, and before I knew it I had suddenly gone weeks without forcing. It felt like a huge setback, like the final nail in the coffin on my belief that I'm even capable of sticking to this long enough. But I got help.

I wrote a while ago how it was being investigated into whether I might have ADHD, and how this would explain this persistent issue throughout my life. And it turns out I do. The thing I've been trying to explain to people all my life, that I can really, really want to do something, but somehow end up not seeing it through without ever changing my opinion on whether I want to do it, is actually a problem I'm sharing with tons of people, researched extensively, and demonstrated in neuroscience. And more importantly, they got medications for it that generally work pretty well. I got prescribed Ritalin. I was hoping everything would start falling into place again with the first pill, but obviously it's not that simple. The real effect came when I actively tried putting things into place. I noticed that I can decide to do something, and then actually see it through. Even if it's something I don't particularly want. It's fucking amazing. I mean, it still takes willpower if I don't want to do it, but I don't get the cognitive paralysis that I got intimately familiar with while failing last school assignment.

It definitely helps with forcing. The constant urge to get up and do something more mentally stimulating that I've been fighting with in nearly every active forcing session is mostly gone, and I can force for much longer as a result. The actual habit of forcing regularly didn't come automatically, but it's so much easier to build productive habits in general now. I'm trying out a morning habit, after breakfast, but before doing anything that might distract me. I haven't counted, but I feel it's been working pretty consistently the past few weeks. As long as I don't wake up feeling like shit and use it as an excuse to fuck around. Hard to defeat that one.

And we're making progress too. Though I felt like I had regressed at first, Melo now feels more autonomous than ever. On several occasions I've noticed her grabbing my arm and dragging me along to show me places, some more vivid than others, but always places I felt I had no part in thinking up. Recently I found myself questioning whether she had learned to pick up my slack, when she pulled me from feeling lost in thought to having perhaps the most vivid adventure so far.

I still have some emotional baggage regarding all this. 2 and a half years of second-guessing everything and anticipating the next setback seems to have lasting effects on my attitude today, and it's not something I'm able to undo overnight. Even posting here gives me some negative feelings, since I've come to associate it with my own naivety about my future failings. I suppose it's just going to be part of the process to identify these thoughts so I can distance myself from them, and let them fade to the background as they're invalidated by actual progress.

Main thing on my mind right now, though, is getting from autonomy to vocality. We still haven't made any progress towards vocality, which I find curious. Maybe it will start coming as I force more, but the lack of progress in this one area in particular makes it seem like there's some prerequisite I've neglected. Any ideas?

Yeah, always keep an eye on if you might be experiencing weird symptoms that are bothersome so you stop using the stuff if it looks like it doesn't work for you. This is something you could treat without medication, so always keep that in mind and try to achieve that, even if you do need or think you need meds right now.

My big breakthrough in vocality was to actually sit down and try to listen with the assumption that the tupper can talk. Before I would talk a lot and ask questions, but I never expected an answer and I never really waited for it. There's two sides to vocality, tupper learning to express themselves in a way you can hear and you actually hearing them. Sometimes one of these will happen way earlier than the other.

I have a feeling I just need to learn to disengage my mindvoice. I was trying the other day to see if I could make her vocalize some sounds, and noticed a clear difference between trying to add my mindvoice to force out some sentences, and just stopping and listening. I tend to see any kind of imagination as something I do actively, but I'm noticing a more passive aspect, where I simply need to be receptive instead of deliberately forcing myself to see and hear things.

Been making some attempts in talking out loud too. With passive forcing, it makes it extra clear where I'm directing my narration. Which quite often turns out to be nowhere at all. Even while playing a slow and comfy video game, it's surprisingly easy to lose track of the simple ideas that someone is listening to me and that they might respond at any time. Another thing that probably just comes down to practice. With active forcing, I feel that talking out loud allows me to separate narration from stream of consciousness, making me feel more organized and less prone to mindwandering. And listening feels more manageable to work on when I don't need to use my mindvoice at all.

Oh, and the hypnogogic hallucinations are getting really consistent now. They got a lot more frequent after I started up again, and while they used to be completely random voices of any gender without any particular meaning or intent attached to them most of the time, they're now always some kind of sweet and feminine voice that feels like it speaks to me, and it feels completely natural for me to respond to them. But if I get to enough awareness of try to say anything meaningful, it cuts off and I forget most of the details of what just happened. It's intriguing and pleasant, but ultimately feels useless in terms of progress.