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.

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?

Day 14. Average day. During one session, I wanted to go somewhere, but wasn't sure where, so I asked her. One word that popped up was "bath", but I rejected that after some consideration, because I felt getting undressed might challenge my focus. Next the word "volcano" came up. It's a little hard to accept that I'm not just brainstorming myself to these ideas, but they do feel like they arrive out of emptiness rather than as the conclusion to my train of thought, so it seems perfectly possible that they could be responses, and hopefully treating them as such will encourage her to come up with responses more often.

So I decided that the mountain in the middle of the island we're usually at is actually a volcano. And for the best view, I put up a balcony above the mouth of this volcano. After staring over the railing for a little while, I decided it would be more comfortable to sit down, so I put up a cafe table. Which made me want some coffee. So I figured it would be clever to just reel up a piping hot bucket with some cups in it from the volcano. But I realized it's kinda rude to assume Melo would want the same as me, so I asked her if she wanted coffee, or hot chocolate, or tea. Not getting any response, I decided to put one of each down on the table and see if she took one. I felt I could see her immediately grabbing at the first cup I put down, the tea. I'm usually skeptical to motions when visualizing. Like with the railing earlier, it felt a lot it was just my mind making a very obvious connection between little girl and cool view, and I just automatically imagine the most obvious scenario: her almost climbing over the railing to look down. But her grabbing at the tea was more interesting, because both her timing and her choice was unexpected. I intended for her to choose after I had lined them up, and I would have expected her to either pick hot chocolate because little girls like sweet things, or coffee because it's what I like. Feels like a subtle display of independence and autonomy.

So I'm done with daily updates for now. Kinda relieved. Reflecting on the day does help me with staying on the right track, but sometimes I feel like I spend more time figuring out what to write than I spend forcing. Looking back, I feel more confident now than when I started with daily updates. I think my visualization has improved quite a bit (though visualizing her facial features still has a distinct lack of progress). And I feel I have a deeper bond with her now: It's not just "she's gonna be so great when I finish this", I actually have memories of doing things with her that were fun and made me happy. Just in my perception of her, she's slowly moving from being an idea of a person to being an actual person. On these notes, I wanna stay optimistic, though I'm sure there will be more bumps in the road.

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 10. Another crappy day. Spent most of the day feeling tired, and it's unsurprisingly difficult to focus deeply while fighting back the urge to fall asleep. Had to settle for a few 5 minute sessions of light visualization. I actually really long for a longer session as soon as I have some more energy to spare, there's definitely some things I wanna do that I never get around to if I just let myself quit after 5 minutes.

On another note, I've noticed I've been getting vivid dreams very consistently lately, which I'm guessing is because I've been training my visualization skills every day. Just neat to see that my effort is taking some kind of effect, even if it's a mostly unrelated one. But if the trend continues, maybe I can one day see for myself whether this meeting your tupper in a lucid dream thing is just a meme.

Day 8. Had another hypnagognic hallucination when going to sleep last night, imagining myself in that bed, hugging tulpa. Was a voice declaring its love for me. Though this time it was a male voice. Kinda awkward. I'm no homo, bro. I'm gonna assume that tups with no clearly established mindvoice sometimes just end up hijacking voices from recent memories.

Didn't feel as stuck on visualization today, fortunately. It's still not easy by any means, but I can work with it.Gonna dedicate a little more time looking at reference images to recreate in my mind, and trying to visualize close to real life objects I know are the same height as her, since I know those two things help.

My go-to strategy now when I'm forcing and can't think of what to do is to try to make some sounds. For instance, I tried parroting Melo humming Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which turned out to be one of my better experiences with imagining sound. Melodies like that are supposed to be memorable and easy to hum, so they're good to practice with. Definitely something I wanna do more of.

Passive forcing has felt like a bit of a struggle the past few days, but I think a part of that is me focusing so much on forming cohesive thoughts that I forget that I'm actually supposed to direct those thoughts somewhere. So 10 minutes into a philosophical monologue, I suddenly remember that I just wanted to tell Melo that the weather today is nice. Gonna practice more on shutting up and just focusing on her until I got something worth telling her.

Yes, that would be quite effect, if not as charming as I had imagined it. Also, thanks for reminding to catch up on oglaf.

Day 6. Almost there. Been slipping on the forcing schedule, though. Nothing unexpected, it's really easy to skip a session if it's inconvenient, and it's often inconvenient when it's every hour. 10 minutes every 2 hours might work out better, but I'll keep trying at least another day with this schedule, because never going more than an hour without giving the tup some kind of attention feels like a really nice principle to have.

First session today I didn't use the timer, figuring I'd just go a little longer to make up for putting it off. But it actually made it harder. Lacking the commitment of the timer, I found myself much more distracted by all the things I could be doing if I stopped forcing right away. Obviously I don't want to depend on a timer forever, especially since it can sometimes completely pull me out of a session, but for now I think it's helping me more than it's obstructing me.

Following some of the thoughts I had yesterday, I've been reading a little about the creative process of great composers and writers. Wouldn't surprise me if there were people throughout history who used something similar a tulpa in their creative process, but hard to find any concrete examples. Maybe Dante's Beatrice existed within him as more than just the woman he met, considering he spent his whole life obsessing over her and dedicating his writing to her despite only meeting her twice? Who knows. What ultimately interested me more was reading about how Shostakovitch would compose all of his works in his head, not needing to play it out along the way, just writing it down after finishing it in his head. That's exactly the kinda thing I wanna train myself to be able to do. I honestly have no clue if it's something I can learn, or if it's just a freak talent of savant composers, but surely only good can come out of gradually training myself to reproduce different timbers and tones in my head and trying to turn them into melodies and harmonies. Even if it doesn't turn into a useful skill, it should help with musical memory. Gotta teach Melo to sing one of these days too. Had this short session today where I tried to make up a new instrument consisting of bells with various pitches, and pedals to operate them. Wanted to play a chord on it, but can't do that with only 2 feet, so I got her to help me out. You could say we're in harmony now.