Our Experience With System Communication
by Silver (originally posted to Dreamwidth 5/22/23, cleaned up for posting here 8/27/2023)
For context: While we feel we have spiritual elements, the way we feel our plurality works outside of the minimal theorized spiritual phenomena is very psychological.
We consider everyone in the system to reside in our brain, not somewhere else, and our inner world as what is essentially a shared 'multiplayer' daydream/complex thought we all imagine and change together.
This both effects how we perceive our material experiences, and is also why we perceive our experiences as they are in the first place.
Communication for us specifically is about 90% mental, and 10% writing and talking out loud to communicate.
For our mental communication, all of it is about the same sort of thing. Whoever is talking first thinks a thought with the internal narrative at someone, then loosens their grip to some degree to let the next person use the internal narrative to speak. This sort of feels like a muscle spasm, but a long slow motion instead of a jerky one, and as a thought instead of a physical sensation.
We may also do 'projection' which is where we 'project' someone outside the body in one's 'minds eye'. They are not literally outside the body, but are sending the complex thought as though they are. This can help aid communication while not sacrificing attention to the material world.
Some level 'talking at the same time' can happen, but its limited. We have been trying to increase our parallel processing to allow for more thinking at the same time, but its slow going. Progress yes, fast progress no.
We see the inner world as just a significantly more complex thought sent back and forth in this manner. Ergo, no one is truly 'in' the inner world, so they can be accessed 'anywhere', as there is no real distance involved. Because the inner world is just complex thought sending in of itself, all kinds of talking in the inner world are just this same sort of sending.
While we are capable of talking with tulpish/sensory snippets/wordless thought/whatever people want to call it, it can make things muddy so we make an effort to talk properly with words that have internal 'voice' to them.
We usually have a general pitch we 'sound like' internally, but its not perfectly consistent. Instead we mostly use a kind of 'flavor' that sticks to the message to distinguish who is talking. We try to consciously impress more of a solid idea of who is talking by trying to send thoughts that have an image of the speaker saying whatever it is attached rather than just the words themselves, but this can take more energy than some people have in them sometimes, so it doesn't always happen.
We also get a notable amount of thoughtbleed/passive influence/whatever you want to call it. This is often unintentional and is a result of someone 'close to front' (very aware and present, but not controlling the body) thinking too hard and accidentally thinking those thoughts with the internal narrative instead of thinking in the subconscious. Other times, passive influence works differently (such as how the fragments operate), but largely is just an extended and unintentional version of normal communication.
For the non-internal communication- we don't do this very much. We have pretty good internal communication, so there isn't a huge need for it most of the time. Even if one of us cannot communicate with another, we can pass messages as a workaround usually.
With writing, the fronter will write something and then holding the internal narrative gently with expectation of a response will prompt someone to come forward to either come to the front to respond or to passive influence the fronter to write what they want. Its the same mechanism as regular internal communication, but with an added physical and tactile-visual component that can help encourage headmates to wake up and respond or work through a communication barrier.
With speaking aloud, the fronter will speak their question aloud. As when we speak out loud we are also thinking what it is we are speaking, this does the same as writing does in that it adds a physical component. Though it also adds an audio component instead of a tactile-visual one. It again can help when communication is dodgy or one is trying to get a headmate aware of the front.
If using something other than 'normal' internal communication, we may mix and match communication types. Common examples include the fronter speaking out loud while the person responding projects and the fronter talking out loud while the person talking back writes.