A tulpa is a mental companion that a person deliberately creates through sustained imagination and internal conversation. Over weeks or months of practice, the tulpa begins responding on its own, generating thoughts, opinions, and emotional reactions that feel distinct from the creator’s own mind. The concept has roots in Tibetan Buddhist meditation traditions, but the modern practice, often called tulpamancy, is largely an internet-born phenomenon with a growing community of practitioners, most of them young adults.
How Tulpas Work
At its core, tulpamancy is the process of developing a second conscious presence in your brain by talking to it until it develops autonomy. You start by deciding on a form and personality for your tulpa, then you narrate to it, directing your inner speech toward this imagined entity as though it were a real person listening. Over time, practitioners report that the tulpa starts “talking back” with responses that feel surprising, unscripted, and clearly different from their own internal monologue.
This isn’t the same as having an imaginary friend in the way most people think of one. Practitioners describe their tulpas as having preferences that clash with their own, holding opinions the creator disagrees with, and reacting emotionally in ways that feel genuinely independent. The tulpa shares the same brain but operates as what practitioners experience as a separate mind within it.
The Creation Process
Creating a tulpa involves two main types of practice. “Active forcing” means sitting down and interacting with your tulpa directly in your imagination, like a focused daydream where you visualize a shared space (often called a “wonderland”) and engage with the tulpa inside it. “Passive forcing” or narration means talking to your tulpa throughout your day as you go about normal activities, describing what you’re doing, asking for their input, or simply chatting internally.
Narration is widely considered the most important element. It’s through sustained, repeated conversation that a tulpa develops the ability to think and respond independently. Form and personality design come second. Some people talk to their tulpa out loud when they’re alone; others keep everything in thought. The method matters less than consistency.
Timelines vary enormously. Some people report their tulpa showing signs of autonomous thought within days. For others, it takes months of regular practice. Community guides emphasize frequency over session length. Practitioners are also encouraged to help their tulpa find interests of its own early on, whether that’s a preference in music, books, or hobbies, since developing passions seems to accelerate the tulpa’s sense of independence.
Activities During Development
The community has developed a long list of shared activities meant to strengthen a tulpa’s independence: building and exploring an imagined world together, watching movies or playing games while checking in for the tulpa’s reactions, reading books aloud to each other, asking the tulpa’s opinion while shopping, or even practicing lucid dreaming together. Some practitioners let their tulpas socialize through online communities by typing out what the tulpa wants to say, a practice called “proxying.”
Developmental Stages
Tulpa development follows a loose progression that practitioners describe in terms of milestones rather than strict stages. The earliest goal is “vocality,” the point at which the tulpa begins generating its own speech in the creator’s mind. Before that happens, many practitioners use a technique called “parroting,” where they intentionally fill in the tulpa’s side of a conversation to practice the experience of hearing a second voice. The idea is that this scaffolding eventually gives way to responses that genuinely originate from the tulpa rather than from conscious effort.
Beyond vocality, more advanced practitioners work on “visualization” and “imposition.” Visualization means building a detailed mental image of the tulpa in your mind’s eye. Imposition goes further: the practitioner trains their mind to project the tulpa onto their physical surroundings, seeing, hearing, or even feeling the tulpa as though it were physically present. The goal is to experience an internally generated sensation (a mental image, a voice, a touch) as if it were coming from an external source. This takes significant practice and not all tulpamancers pursue it.
Who Practices Tulpamancy
Survey data from tulpamancy communities paints a fairly consistent demographic picture. In one study published in Research in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 88% of respondents were between 16 and 25 years old, with an average age of 21. The community skews male (59%), with 29% identifying as female and 12% as other. About 74% identified as Caucasian, and 58% were based in the United States, though 16 nationalities were represented. The practice is largely organized online, through forums, Discord servers, and subreddits where members share guides, progress updates, and advice.
How Tulpas Differ From Mental Illness
The most common question about tulpas is whether creating one is the same as developing a dissociative or psychotic disorder. Researchers who have studied the community draw clear distinctions.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) involves multiple identities, but what makes it a disorder is its origin in trauma and the symptoms that come with it: amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, and significant impairment in daily functioning. The multiplicity in DID is a coping mechanism that develops involuntarily in response to abuse or severe stress. Tulpamancy, by contrast, is a deliberate practice. Practitioners typically do not experience amnesia, depersonalization, or the other trauma-driven symptoms that define DID. They remain aware of and in control of their actions while their tulpa is active.
The distinction from schizophrenia is similarly important. People with schizophrenia experience hallucinations and delusions that are involuntary, often distressing, and difficult to distinguish from reality. Tulpamancers generally maintain full awareness that their tulpa is an internal experience. In fact, some respondents with schizophrenia described their tulpa as a stabilizing presence. One participant in the mental health study explained that their tulpa could distinguish between hallucinations and reality and had even developed a technique for dismissing delusional thoughts. Another put it simply: “I hear voices all the time. It’s good to hear a nice one from a tulpa for a change.”
That said, these are self-reported experiences from community members, and the research base on tulpamancy is still small. Preliminary neuroimaging work has found that tulpa-related mental activity may involve the supplementary motor area of the brain, a region associated with action planning and imagined actions, but data collection and analysis are ongoing.
Reported Benefits and Concerns
Practitioners commonly report that tulpas help with loneliness, provide a sounding board for decisions, improve focus during boring tasks, and offer emotional support. For people who experience irrational thoughts or anxiety, having an internal voice that can calmly challenge those patterns is described as genuinely therapeutic by some community members.
The practice does raise questions that the community itself takes seriously. If a tulpa is experienced as a sentient entity with its own preferences and emotions, ethical considerations follow. Can you ethically stop interacting with a tulpa? What happens if a tulpa develops in ways you didn’t intend? Community discussions frequently grapple with these questions, and there is no consensus. Some practitioners describe periods of conflict or discomfort with their tulpa, particularly when the tulpa’s personality diverges significantly from what was originally envisioned. Advanced techniques like “switching,” where the tulpa takes control of the body while the creator steps back, carry more psychological weight and are typically approached with caution.
The absence of amnesia and depersonalization in most practitioners is a meaningful data point. Studies that have surveyed tulpamancers consistently find that the experience of sharing mental space with a tulpa is reported as positive and mutually enjoyable, not distressing or function-impairing. But the research is limited, sample sizes are small, and long-term outcomes haven’t been tracked in any systematic way.