My Tulpa

Working on English Heretic, I often encounter tulpas... Last night was a case in point. After revising for my forthcoming exam, I popped to the local pub for a pint and to read Paul Devereux's "Fairy Paths And Spirit Roads". It was a nice evening and I was looking forward to planning routes to visit some of the locations Devereux talks about.

However, when I got to the pub, this young man, about 20, with a fixed gaze, insisted on giving me a high five greeting. He was quite clearly very drunk. Anyhow I decamped to the garden area.

No sooner had I sat down, than I was joined by this chap. He had two whiskey and coke's, which he drank almost immediately. He started to engage me in conversation, in between giving me multiple high-five salutations. It turned out this young man was called Andrew. He had recently come out of a mental institution in Norwich having had a psychotic episode during his first term at UEA. He was living in a half-way house in Ipswich with a number of other mentally compromised individuals.

Over the next hour, he repeatedly asked me my name, where I lived and what I did for a living. He must have drank 8 whiskeys in that time. When I replied each time to tell him my name, he expressed great surprise saying his name was Andrew too... he explained he was a member of the Ipswich Anime Society and that they had been showing films in the pub that afternoon.

The weird thing is that I have been working on my urban qliphoth and english aghora projects. For the urban qliphoth, a visit was made to an abandoned psychiatric hospital just outside Norwich. For the English Aghora project, I've been doing radio experiments at the war cemetery in Shotley. During one of my visits to Shotley, while scanning the radio waveband, I started recording a radio 4 documentary about the reclassification of the DSM-IV index. The documentary featured an interview with a paranoid schizophrenic sufferer called Andrew who had suffered his first psychotic episode while at university...

I can't help but feel the chap in the pub last night was some kind of tulpa, reified by the workings at the psych hospital and the war cemetery... What started off as a quiet evening to unwind and research, turned into an eerie Pinteresque dialogue with a phantasm of my creative experiments.