The Imaginary Friends That Are Never Left Behind

A community is creating companions through meditation

By Erin Stewart

Alex is a six-foot-tall young woman with vibrant red hair living in a small town in England. She’s a vegetarian and an extroverted tomboy who loves to travel. She spends most of her time with her close friend Harrison. They share secrets and plan for the future.

The only thing is: Alex isn’t exactly real.

Alex has only existed since October of 2015. And even now, you can’t see her.

Alex is Harrison’s tulpa, or an imaginary friend created through intense meditation. Harrison, a 22-year-old software developer, is very real; and with his self-created Alex he is never alone. There’s a growing community of people just like Harrison, who manifest similar companions.

Tulpas live within the bodies of their creators, but can interact with them as though they’re separate people

Harrison was poking around the online forum Reddit one day when he discovered the “tulpamancy” community, or people who are the hosts of tulpas. Tulpas live within the bodies of their creators, but can interact with them as though they’re separate people. Harrison was fascinated — and doubtful — about the concept. “If researchers can’t give me a quick answer to things like this, then I’ll test on myself to see what’s happening,” says Harrison (who asked to identified only by his first name).

To start the experiment of developing a tulpa, Harrison consulted online how-to guides and learned to meditate. At first, he just focused on tuning out distractions. Then it became a practice of meditating on the creation of his female tulpa, or “Alex.” He imagined Alex’s personality, looks, and, what she might say in certain situations. “I literally sat down every day for over a month and spoke to nothingness, awaiting a response,” Harrison explains.

Tulpa literally means “thought form” — the term comes from Tibetan Buddhism. According to some ancient Buddhist texts, being able to envision something completely outside yourself is considered one of the highest forms of enlightenment. Yet, tulpamancy is distinct from Buddhist practice. Tulpamancers don’t collectively hold any specific spiritual beliefs. Moreover, a Buddhist thought form will take on different manifestations — it may conjure colors or project one’s own body to communicate with a person far away. But for people like Harrison tulpas are fully realized, lasting identities created through thought.

A tulpa has his or her own opinions, feelings, and ambitions, which may differ from his or her host. Harrison says that Alex, for instance, doesn’t agree with eating meat. Harrison, meanwhile, could not give up bacon.

Eventually, Alex became vivid in Harrison’s mind, and he says he has been slowly developing the ability to hear, see, and feel her. “I don’t feel like I’m ever alone, ever,” Harrison observes. “It’s not quite the same as being with another human being, but it’s fairly close.” When I spoke to England-based Harrison, on an audio-only Skype call, he told me that without seeing me, I seemed as real to him as Alex.

Over time, with practice, some people say they are even able to guide their tulpa to temporarily take over their body so they can directly experience the external world. Tulpamancers gradually train themselves to completely dissociate from their bodies and allow their tulpa to take charge through meditation. The tulpamancy community explains that after a lot of practice the “switch” becomes quicker, requiring less mental preparation.

There’s little research in this area but a growing network of the tulpamancy community congregates on Reddit and other websites, which is where Samuel Veissiere found them. Veissiere is a visiting professor in the Culture, Mind and Brain program at McGill University, and he has undertaken preliminary research on Tulpamancy through “online ethnography,” tracking the members of the tulpamancy’s online communities. According to Veissiere, tulpamancers are predominantly male (75 percent) and a proportion (around 10 percent) of individuals identify as genderfluid or nonbinary. They are typically between 19 and 23 years old, middle-class, and from the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, Western Europe, and Russia. He says they tend to be shy and intelligent.

Tulpas can’t be clinically defined as a hallucination, because people choose to create them. Clinically, a hallucination must be involuntary. It is like Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly referred to as “multiple personalities”) in the sense that the multiple identities inhabit the same body. However, tulpamancers, or the hosts of tulpas, do not report memory issues or a sense of disturbance characteristic of that condition.

According to Tulpa.info, a website which is dedicated to helping people understand and create tulpas, one of the primary benefits of tulpamancy is companionship. However, tulpamancers often feel stigmatized. One tulpamancer writes on his blog that the world is dismissive of people who report seeing or hearing people who cannot be perceived by others. Plurality is dismissed as “inherently insane, unhealthy, and unstable.”

Some organizations such as The Hearing Voices Network have been founded to provide support for people who hallucinate or have other atypical imagination experiences. They argue that hearing voices should not automatically lead to pathologizing someone with schizophrenia. In some cases, the website says, these auditory hallucinations “are similar to dreams, symbols of our unconscious minds.”

Veissiere’s study found that people who had been previously diagnosed with a mental illness reported that tulpamancy helped ease their condition. One survey respondent, running late for class and underdressed for the cold, even reported a sudden sensation of warmth when her tulpa took his coat off and placed it on her shoulders.

Alex helps Harrison just like a close friend would. She keeps him company and encourages him to move beyond his comfort zone. Harrison even reports being more thoughtful as a result of tulpamancy. He explains that he’s also more likely to notice when strangers need help. After the creation of Alex, Harrison has found himself partaking in subtle acts of kindness: walking with a woman and her baby in the rain so they can take refuge under his umbrella, buying food for a homeless man, or carrying an elderly woman’s groceries.

While small, these incidents hold huge significance for Harrison. “The peace that creating Alex has brought in me is making other people smile.”

Erin Stewart is an Australian writer living in the U.K. Her work has been published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Fairfax Media, and a number of other literary journals.