more timbers per. well.

plurality in real life:

friend: is something wrong

[ options: Yes, multiple; yes | Yes, multiple; rarely / with difficulty | Yes, multiple; no | Yes, one; yes | Yes, one; rarely / with difficulty | Yes, one; no | No deity members | Unsure | Nuance/other | Results ]

People often say they don't understand monoconscious plurality, and it makes sense if your introduction to plurality was classic multiplicity. It might be hard to conceptualise how multiple separate people could have a single train of thought and honestly, yeah. It doesn't help that many of the explanations here on tumblr don't feel totally encompassing of all our experiences either. Most of what I've seen only touch on a few things, leaving the rest under the surface

Often monoconsciousness gets described as "shapeshifting" or slipping into different psychological coats. That's part of it, but it doesn't address the whole multiple-voices-in-the-head thing that most plurals seem to experience. It also doesn't come close to fully describing our experience either

The simplest way I can put our experience is (and I suspect this will also ring true for a large amount of other monocon plurals): There is one ability to think, and everyone has to share it, as pictured above

We have to be in contact with the metaphorical consciousness orb, otherwise we don't think. For us personally this looks like temporarily falling unconscious when away from the front. Some plurals I'm sure have constant voices, because nobody leaves the consciousness orb vicinity unless they're dormant. So yeah, definitely different people, even if we all have to share an ability to think. Doesn't necessarily mean we all think the same thing, or that there's 0 distinction between our thoughts (although there are monocon plurals that DO experience this, and that is also just as much more-than-one)

This one is also funny because I think our internal communication is yet another thing that differs from what I usually see other systems experiencing

The vast majority of the time we don't really "speak to" each other. It's more like we overhear each other's thoughts? Or the internal monologue briefly "slips in" to the thought process of someone other than the current fronter?

Like that one time the host was having a real bad time sitting on the floor 5 seconds away from crying, but their internal monologue was all "We have to remember that things are going to be okay! Life has ups and downs, bad days don't mean that (blah blah blah)" -- obviously the caretaker. caretaker thoughts. but it was not really the caretaker intentionally "speaking to" the host. the internal monologue kind of just turned into her thoughts.

We kind of view ourselves more as "mindsets" than like, individual separate people sharing a body. Reoccurring mindsets and patterns of thought and mannerisms who prefer different names and have different self expressions.

I guess it's because we don't have a headspace or individual coexisting streams of memory or anything. We obviously exist still when we're not fronting because we can communicate in our thoughts and stuff, but nobody has memories from the perspective of what it's like to be "in the back"/not fronting. Mindsets.

Sometimes we do speak to each other more intentionally, whether it's the fronter initiating conversation on purpose with someone "in the back" (to check in for whatever reason or coordinate a switch), or someone "in the back" speaking spontaneously on their own (caretaker likes to shout "I'M PROUD OF YOU" when anyone else does a self care task they were struggling with)

but we consider ourselves to exist as mindsets. the currently dominant one "in the front" controlling the decisions, sometimes one co-fronting and strongly influencing the internal monologue, ones "in the back" hanging out as thought processes that are mostly inactive until something relevant to them brings their thoughts or opinions back out.

forgetting passwords, forgetting names and people, forgetting your dreams, having too vivid dreams, insomnia, brain fog, face blindness, remembering your days like a blur, struggling to remember your schedule, school/work day gone too fast, forgetting to eat, forgetting to drink, derealization, depersonalization can all be caused by dissociation. i know its hard to accept but it is, just because you don't black out doesn't mean you don't dissociate; if you sit on your computer stopping for a second doubting your password or if you wake up feeling like that was a trainwreck of a dream then suddenly it stops being visible is caused by dissociation. if you're awake, looking around but having the feeling that something with the existence of the surroundings is wrong is also dissociation. if you suddenly remember that you forgot to eat that day, that you forgot to drink that day, the time is 3 am and even though you never blacked out and you were always there, is still dissociation.