Tulpas

A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you. It’s currently unproven whether or not tulpas are truly sentient, but in this community, we treat them as such. It takes time for a tulpa to develop a convincing and complex personality; as they grow older, your attention and their life experiences will shape them into a person with their own hopes, dreams and beliefs.

The concept of tulpa was popularized and secularized in the Western world through fiction, gaining popularity on television in the late 1990s and 2000s. In 2009, anonymous posters on the discussion board 4chan started experimenting with creating tulpas, and the community gained popularity through the emergence of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom. The fans attempted to use meditation and lucid dreaming techniques to create imaginary friends. Surveys by Veissière explored this community's demographic, social, and psychological profiles. These individuals, calling themselves "tulpamancers", treat the tulpas as a real or somewhat-real person, or a thing, or place in some cases. The number of active participants in these online communities is in the low hundreds, and few meetings in person have taken place. They belong to primarily urban, middle class, Euro-American adolescent and young adult demographics and they cite loneliness and social anxiety as an incentive to pick up the practice.