We learned a couple interesting things about our alter Nigel yesterday. One is that he doesn't just read aloud for us, though he does that in order to help us concentrate when we're all over the place and really want to start understanding something. He has an interest in reading Tarot cards for people. More in the realm of Jungian psychology for someone's benefit to open up their minds to possibilities they're not seeing rather than any interest in the occult. I don't think he believes the cards are anything but random events but he sees value in supporting broadly symbolic thinking.
He knows the fact that he's English and speaks in a variety of English accents would tend to make his interpretations more palatable for some Americans -- though not any people we know because I don't think he's comfortable speaking American English! Unless we could pass him off as an act. No, it'd never work, his voice is younger. We've imagined others coming out at, say, a costume or Halloween party and taking on a persona but that just will not work, it's just a daydream.
The second interesting thing is that he is an age slider, our first. When we initiallythought he was here, we guessed him to be 21, then later changed that to 12 because he seemed young, if mature for his age. He didn't appear to us like the others. He had already been around a lot, reading, we just never considered that when we switched into the English accent to read aloud, it wasn't one of us, the host probably. We didn't feel at all dissociated, which would have made what was read less followable, not more. We definitely did have the experience of being read to, which was the entire point. It didn't occur to us there could be an alter who was so visible, right under our noses. In fact, unlike almost everone else, we don't have a specific date when we identified and we found him. It happened from suspicions over time and we only tentatively put his arrival in July 2014.
We also heard Neville a lot starting maybe a year ago. We thought they might be alternative names but maybe there's another (English) alter? As always, we started out thinking this guy was much more uni-dimensional than he is. We made the distinction about his interest in tarot yesterday when we drove up to Salem, Massachusetts. We were ready to leave but he felt driven to go buy what he wanted even though I just wanted to go home.
The English grandparents were clearly an influence. But I've felt him paying attention to variations in British accents and felt what I realize is now his compulsion to try verbalizing what he's heard. He's able to seem mature, as old as 21, though his natural state seems to be a 12-year-old English boy. It's the reading which pulls him older, in order to understand and pronounce what's being read. It feels clear he was around until college, when he stopped aging, though he's always read to us aloud when we need that.