While I’ve completed the move to the new laptop [link], it’s occurred to me that my on-site Tumblr drafts folder is also not included in my backups, and I should probably clear *these* drafts out too.
Tumblr doesn’t seem to provide information on when a draft was made, but this one was already pretty old when I mentioned it in June 2017 [link]. It also pre-dates my switch from italics to asterisks to denote emphasis: I have edited its word-emphasis method to help the emphasis show up more reliably.
(This post is not entirely unrelated to my previous post [link], which is what reminded me to do this now.)
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I was sick, and it was the middle of the night, and earlier I’d been having problems where my brain would skip straight to dreaming while neglecting to fall asleep first. (It is a strange and unpleasant experience to dream non-lucidly despite also being aware of one’s body lying on one’s bed. Especially if one is having a nightmare about alien invasions.)
I knew I was going to sleep terribly, one way or another, but I was determined to lie there until morning and hopefully get a bit of restorative unconsciousness here and there. (Sometimes I get to bed a bit late, but if it is Designated Sleeping Time *and* I have already gone to bed, by god I will lie there as long as it takes (or until 8 AM or so, whichever comes first). I do not give up on bedtime.)
A couple hours in, I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t mine.
I was 14, so by this point I’d already read a bunch of neurodiversity stuff on multiplicity. I was in a lucid period and knew she was *probably* a transient hallucination, but the possibility that she might not be didn’t freak me out.
I calmly explained to her that while I was not *inherently* averse to considering her a real person, given the circumstances I was understandably reluctant to assume sapience, and she would probably do the same in my place. I told her that if she were still there when I was fully awake I would provisionally accept her personhood, and if she stuck around even after I’d recovered from my illness we’d start hashing out plans for co-existence. In the meantime, real or not I could use the company. Any ideas for a conversational topic?
She ignored me, and continued complaining about having to share the pain of my ear infection. Shortly after, she was gone.
(Okay, this next bit may require some context. My thoughts often take the form of dialogues, which seems to be fairly common. People vary in the level of independence of these “conversational partners”, but I am pretty far towards the singlet end of the spectrum, and perceive myself as consciously controlling both halves.)
So a couple hours after that, around dawn, I was thinking (like you do), in dialogue form (like you do), and…not all at once, but gradually, I realised: I didn’t know what he was going to say.
And he said “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? Is this what it’s like, being alive? Is this how you feel all the time? So *vibrant*?”
He said he knew it probably wouldn’t last long, and that while he *liked* being this way, it wouldn’t be *so* bad to go back to being a mere part of me. It wasn’t like it was dying or anything, just…he wished we could at least merge *properly*. He was sad that I wouldn’t remember this conversation from his perspective, that this part of him, this interesting experience, would just *vanish*.
(He wondered if he would get it back if I hallucinated him again in some future illness, if other hallucinatory hims would have continuity with this one. It hasn’t happened again, so we haven’t found out.)
He was, at least, better company than the complaining woman.
Tags:
#whether he was actually sapient during that conversation I don’t know #I expect the woman wasn’t but he was more responsive and *much* more introspective #in which Brin somehow manages to be among the most singlet people she knows #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #illness tw #death tw?
Brinens and Things 
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