Editing Tulpa (section)

==Tulpamancers==
Influenced by depictions in television and cinema from the 1990s and 2000s, the term tulpa started to be used to refer to a type of willed [[imaginary friend]].<ref name="Mikles" /> Practitioners consider tulpas to be sentient and relatively autonomous.<ref name="Vice" /> Online communities dedicated to tulpas spawned on the [[4chan]] and [[Reddit]] websites. These communities refer to tulpa practitioners as "tulpamancers". The communities gained popularity when [[bronies|adult fans of ''My Little Pony'']] started discussing tulpas of characters from the ''My Little Pony'' television series.<ref name="Vice" /> The fans attempted to use meditation and [[lucid dreaming]] techniques to create [[imaginary friend]]s.<ref name="Veissière" /><ref>{{cite web |author=T. M. Luhrmann |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjuring-up-our-own-gods.html |title=Conjuring Up Our Own Gods |work=The New York Times |date=2013-10-14 |access-date=2017-04-22 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170812174624/http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/luhrmann-conjuring-up-our-own-gods.html |archive-date=2017-08-12 }}</ref> Surveys by Veissière explored this community's demographic, social, and psychological profiles. These practitioners believe a tulpa is a "real or somewhat-real person".<ref name="Veissière" /> 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"<ref name="Veissière" /> and they "cite loneliness and social anxiety as an incentive to pick up the practice".<ref name="Veissière" /> 93.7% of respondents expressed that their involvement with the creation of tulpas has "made their condition better",<ref name="Veissière" /> and led to new unusual sensory experiences. Some practitioners have sexual and romantic interactions with their tulpas, though the practice is controversial and trending toward [[taboo]].<ref name="Samuel">{{citation|chapter-url=http://somatosphere.net/2015/04/varieties-of-tulpa-experiences-sentient-imaginary-friends-embodied-joint-attention-and-hypnotic-sociality-in-a-wired-world.html|chapter=Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: Sentient Imaginary Friends, Embodied Joint Attention, and Hypnotic Sociality in a Wired World|author=Samuel Veissière|title=Hypnosis and Meditation|editor1=Amir Raz|editor2=Michael Lifshitz|isbn=9780198759102|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|date=April 3, 2015|access-date=July 14, 2016}}</ref> One survey found that 8.5% support a [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]] explanation of tulpas, 76.5% support a neurological or psychological explanation, and 14% "other" explanations.<ref name="Veissière" />

Practitioners believe tulpas are able to communicate with their host in ways they sense do not originate from their own thoughts. Some practitioners report experiencing hallucinations of their tulpas. Practitioners that have hallucinations report being able to see, hear and touch their tulpas.<ref name="Veissière" />

Veissière's survey of 141 respondents found that the rates of [[neurodiversity|neurodivergence]] including [[autism]], [[ADD]], and [[ADHD]] was significantly higher among the surveyed tulpamancers than in the general population. He goes on to speculate that people may be more likely to want to make a tulpa because these groups have a higher level of loneliness. Tulpamancers were typically white, articulate, and imaginative and lived in urban areas.<ref name="Somer2021"/> A 2022 study found individuals that did not have psychosis who experienced more than one unusual sensory phenomenon, (in this instance ASMR and Tulpamancy) were found to have greater hallucination-proneness than people that only experienced one of the two sensory phenomenon.<ref name="Cooper2022">{{Cite journal |last1=Palmer-Cooper |first1=Emma |last2=McGuire |first2=Nicola |last3=Wright |first3=Abigail |date=2022-05-04 |title=Unusual experiences and their association with metacognition: investigating ASMR and Tulpamancy |journal=Cognitive Neuropsychiatry |language=en |volume=27 |issue=2–3 |pages=86–104 |doi=10.1080/13546805.2021.1999798 |pmid=34743647 |s2cid=240130491 |issn=1354-6805|doi-access=free }}</ref>

Somer et al. (2021) described the Internet tulpamancer subculture as being used to "overcome loneliness and mental suffering", and noted the close association with reality shifting (RS), a way of deliberately inducing a form of self-hypnosis in order to escape from current reality into a pre-planned desired reality or "wonderland" of chosen fantasy characters.<ref name="Somer2021"> [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-021-02439-3 Somer, E., Cardeña, E., Catelan, R.F. et al. Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture. Curr Psychol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02439-3]</ref>