#neurogenic

being conscious plural. like- if we forget we're plural then we get blurry and feel merged/fused and usually don't know why until something reminds us of our plurality and we're separate again and go "OH YEAH THAT'S WHAT'S WRONG"

(probably) being neurotraumagenic but not knowing what exactly caused us to form, or if we're just neurogenic another way and cant fuckin tell

having a host who struggles with switching out (hi hello that's me) and we can go so long without a switch that we forget we're plural (see first point for why especially that sucks)

not being able to see a therapist or anyone to help us get medically recognized for our plurality. Please, we need someone to tell us we aren't gaslighting ourselves

having Autism and ADHD symptoms that we're so used to that the idea of them being plurality symptoms just doesn't click. We forget things constantly? oh, yeah, that's just ADHD. Personality changes in different situations? that's masking.

and many more we cant think of ;3;

Us now: yeah so that's a way to be plural. median plurality is a thing.

Also past me: i couldn't be plural, because it's just because of my neurodivergence that makes me think like this!

Also me: Huge mood shifts and gender shifts and personality shifts, continuously uses 'we' when talking to self, is drawn to plurality for some unknown reason

Me: just deluisional

Me: WE ARE NOT DELUSIONAL DANGIT ⚫🐌

and well later in life listening to [pronoun spoken with derogatory emphasis such as might be indicated by italics] didn't help at all. to dispel that notion.

and so aetiologically, culturally, i am a bipartite system of two imagined people. the left side! who writes my words, controls my life, thinks my thoughts. and i, the silent right side, who cannot write, or think orderly thoughts, only dream and observe. i never gave the two sides names; why would you name your body parts? even if they had people in them?

needless to say i am not a Neurology Misapprehender anymore at least not to that degree. but the imagination persists. and the filing of my traits actions and thoughts as 'right side coded' or 'left side coded' continues. it is so easy to tell you, which thing is which. who does what. and so forced at the same time, because it is make-believe, an obvious daydream which does not apply to reality. but, say, these unnaturally impassioned rants, this godlike arrogance, The Capital Letters, they are very much associated with the personality i have projected onto the left. so one could pretend it is actually the left side speaking for itself here, rather than speaking for the right side, as it usually does. this is a mere fiction, reader, don't forget. my head is all in my head!

recently out of boredom and kinniism (kinnery?) i gave these two fictives names after all. nga the left, ul the right. each of these has about a dozen associations that i find to be entertaining and relevant, but i will not explain any but one for each, since puzzles are more fun when presented unsolved. nga, the arrogant architect of all that is, is named after the nenets earth god, the god of the Below. (his name means Below. although i think of my nga as a 'she.' somewhat an affront to nenets folklore, unfortunately, but i promise there is thematic significance, and you will find a fairer treatment of nenets folklore within my works in time. i'd hardly be the first one to hear the poorly interpreted voice of a god, anyhow.) and ul, the inanimate mortal observer of all that is not, holder of the nonexistent personal identity of sadlyglyphtaken, a meek little box jellyfish. (his name is the mansi word for 'of course' and 'don't.' and also akkadian for 'not,' that one's a freebie to say because it was unintentional.)

and then there's the director. which is a real apparently sapient guy who seems incapable of language, thereby logically placing it on the right, bearing in mind that neurologically speaking that's a nonsensical inference. my sleep is a cursed half-sleep, such that i am still awake when sleeping, one eye still open (the left, which is the opposite as the one i keep open during the day), mind still alert. the director is the proctor of this experience.

i used to have normal dreams, i think, which is to say constant nightmares of violently dying or some other crime, intended to prepare me for imminent violent death and its like in the real world. but in the real world, i am constantly overthinking whether anything i experience is real, monitoring internally whether my mind is functioning well; and so this tendency transferred to dreams, and regular nightmares lost their purpose, as i stopped treating them as real. having some sense of dissatisfaction about this, the part of my brain making my dreams worked to become smarter until it could outsmart me, and get me to believe dreams again. but this became a terrific arms race. i was not so easily beaten, and i maintained my alertness and attentiveness. and the dreams grew to actively respond to my doubts, palpably trying to answer every little question i had and address every little inconsistency i noticed. but you can only get so far, stopping and rewinding and restarting, and editing my memories; those are hard to miss, for someone so memory-challenged as i am.

so it grew into more of a dialogue, between my thoughts on the dream and how the dream responds. and i started treating my dreams as art with intent, because the dialogue tended to make that intent not very hard to infer. and the intents of my various dreams could be connected into the personality of the artist: someone who is worried about specific issues in my life and has specific suggestions for what to do about them, someone who understands some things about me and my life better than others, someone who had particular motifs they enjoyed and aspirations for their art, someone who chose to be kind to me when i needed kindness and cruel to me when i could bear it. someone who sometimes made dreams just for the fun of it, to show me and get my opinion on it, someone i'd pigeonholed into the personality of an artist by thinking of them as an artist…

and so i named it the director. i'm not sure what, neurologically, is happening, but it is certainly at least as sapient as i am. (a very very low bar, but other people hold my false appearance of sapience in high regard, so i am merely paying the regard forwards. if i can be sapient, anything can, really.) in my cursed half-sleep, the director seems to determine how much of my outside sensations i experience, based on how relevant they are; i am usually blind in my dreams, perhaps because of my congenitally very poor visual processing, but perhaps because it is better to see whatever it is my open eye sees (not much). sometimes, i will be mostly blind, but served a vignette here and there… sometimes a dream is only auditory at all, although usually my dreams don't include sound either, being only tactile and olfactory. although there is often dialogue nevertheless, but it is the silent unvoiced dialogue heard within one's head when reading.

well, whatever, i could talk about my dreams and the director all day. i remember most of my dreams, and have a rather precise sense of how much time passes both inside and outside a dream. (complicated to describe since time is very subjective; anyhow, i could tell you the clock time outside at any point while sleeping.) so there's a lot of stuff to analyse. quirks and interactions and heartfelt moments between myself and the director as well as moments of offence and anger. it's pretty whatever. not really tumblr material. my dreams are ludicrously detailed these days, because the director still tries to get me to believe them, on days when it feels like it.