Your Headspace?

Thank you, I got a bit curious because with us it is like in real-life, but with some extra mind-games (like talking with the mind, changing things inside your own house with your mind). Yet Claire can't see when she is at the inside, she can see (half) when she is in front.

Katie drew house!
http://i689.photobucket.com/albums/vv25 ... G10812.jpg

Again, not our thread but that's a really good drawing. loving all the tree houses Awesome displays

Interesting post. I have been keeping a journal, and I wrote a chapter about my headspace. All us peeps with DID have pretty powerful imaginations. It's how we coped with things that are still overwhelming to try and cope with. Here is a selection from it:

-The House-

Almost every night I find myself in my "house" in my dreams. The house is a revolutionary war era colonial. There are many rooms. There are no lights, and it seems as if shadows are shadows. There is a haunted stillness inside. It is as if the stillness is in fear of the chaos lying inside. Outside it is twilight.

I walk up the stairs and turn right and open the door to the bedroom. Inside the room is dark. I walk forward and open a chest in the middle of the room. Inside, M lays curled up. M is sad and hurt. I don't want to write about this room anymore.

I find myself walking thru the maze underneath the house. Parts of the maze are tunnels lined with granite stone. I turn a corner and the ground becomes muddy and uneven. There are cracks by the ground that expose another layer that appears to be an underground river. I see my hand feel the walls as I travel thru the maze. Flashes of images of abuse hit me. I can't handle them and I push them away. It seems as I I am always pushing to find out what is around the next corner. Yet I am terrified. I feel foggy yet determined to continue. I imagine Alice must have felt the same way during her adventure in Wonderland.

Another section of the maze is a dark, large room that reminds us of an office building from the 1920's. I am walking thru the maze of wooden veneered half wall offices and fine mahogany desks. The wooden planked floor creaks as I walk. I turn left and walk down another hallway. The office doors are open. Inside, the desks and chairs are covered in dusty white linen sheets. An odd twilight falls upon this scene. This section feels the oldest. I feel the need to be armed while in this section. Something terrifying is in here.

The maze occasionally leads to a garden outside. I call it the wicked garden. All the plants in the garden are wilted and dead. There is a haunted sadness in this wicked garden. I find myself looking at a garden surrounded by a tall rusted cast iron fence. Beyond it lays the shadow of a dark forest shrouded in fog outlined by a setting sun. Shadows seem wickedly skewed. A dirt path winds thru this garden. I imagine the feeling of the lifeless fallen leaves in my hand. The crisp sound of the leaves falling apart in my hand. I suspect a homosexual part feels at home in this area.

This house is in my inner world. M has his own room. I imagine the other rooms belong to other parts. I wonder if the maze is where the memories exist. I had the mental image of standing in a "music room". I find myself standing in this room in my mind during times of stress. When the music becomes too loud I lose time and control. The room is unlit with mahogany walls and shelves of books built into one wall. On the left wall, a window overlooking the wicked garden. There is a single gramophone in the middle of the room. During a trauma we used to block everything out by focusing on a song and creating it.

That's a good idea to journal Humpty Dumpty, I like what you shared. We have a house too but as is more basic with general structure at present.

we have a house, too. Jo doesn't know about it yet. not all of us live there though, just me, Amelia (kinda, she's got the separate room above the garage, not that we need a garage), and Theresa. my room is awesome, it's got everything i need to entertain myself.

we also have a dark forest, that's where a couple others live. i'm not sure where Nadia and the others live, but Nadia visits us a lot. why she doesn't just move in with us i'll never know, she's here all the d@mn time anyway.

~Rachelle

Most others in our system doesn't seem to have it like this but Jacob & I have everything we need to have a (close to) normal life inside. We cook, we clean, **trigger warning for religion** we cut down our own tree for Christmas **trigger warning end**, we shower, we read fairytales to each other and listen to the radio, and so on and so on.. We live together in our timber home out in the winter forest while the polar bear roams outside. We're a family and we live our life on the inside. We much prefer our lives in there, Jacob & I. Anyone else out there like this?

Thread continued here:
What's your inside world like?

(Just for continuity on this forum, for those only seeing this thread)

ManyHearts wrote:I have a question to the other ones with their own "world" inside their heads. How do "see" your world? is it just like real-life that you see everything around you with your eyes and you are able to hear and locate every sound, etc. or is it something completely different?

It looks like a dream, like a place built out of old dreams, that is as close as it can to being realistic but somehow mystifying within every particle.

Background:
Inside we are almost all "Differed", a form of altered Human with special powers.

• Core is the only one who's abilities work to his advantage.
  He "flickers" which is a form of teleportation, which lets him move to any place within our internal world he has visited before within seconds simply by visualising that place.
  
• Mal is "black eyed" and a "broken key".
  Being blackeyed means he has superhuman strength when his abilities activate. When this happens his eyes turn black and his emotions become overwhelming so while he has super strength and speed at this point it is also hard to avoid overreactions and he is bound to lash out out of proportion to the original threat.
• Being a "key" gives you the ability to speed up or slow down internal time so that you can move at superhuman speed in relation to relative time or slow down your body speed so that years pass while it's only seconds subjectively.
  Being a broken key means you can't move superfast but your body will randomly slow down so you lose time inadvertently.
• Mara is a "thrower"
  Being a thrower is a form of telekensis, which makes her an excellent fighter. She carries a bag of glass shards which she can wield as weapons or surround herself in like a protective shield in an emergency situation.

I think Pony is also a broken key.. but I don't know her very well yet so I could be wrong.

All of this was required because before we were all self aware our internal world was a dangerous, war torn place.



Okay.. so now for our headspace..

We have a few different safe places within our world:

• Mal used to hang mainly in the City. It is a delapidated, abandoned place which had been flooded in the past. Mal used to squat/hide in broken down buildings.
  
• Core also has a place in the City: Teal
  Teal is a tall slim townhouse, but you'd never see it unless you were looking because it is at the far back of a broken down, delapidated factory. (You know, actually it reminds me of the house on Paperstreet from the Fight Club movie LOL)
  There is a comfy kitchen and lots of rooms people could use as they turned up to visit.
  
  At first Mal would occasionally stay in the attic, which he could reach running across the roofs of the city. Later on he started interacting with the others more, but even before he started doing that he was always welcome to spend the night at Core's Teal.
  
• Outpost: This is a small wooden farmhouse in a clearing. Again, comfy kitchen, a few bedrooms upstairs and a safe attic. There's a greenhouse outside and nowadays Core's caravan (think old-style Winnebego) is parked out front.
  The picture in our avatar reminded us of Outpost. Only there are no trees infront of the porch, just dirt floor and the woods in the distance (a brook/river flows through the woods, with one area wide/deep enough to swim in. It's nice, being shaded by the trees, especially in the summer heat.. it's usually summer. We rarely feel like playing in the snow. Seasons are pretty much on demand since we've become aware)
  
• The Ditch: Another wooden farmhouse. Slim and high. Kind of an "add to it as required" structure. It's just the other side of the woods from Outpost, but you have to get pretty close to see it because the land dips around it so it's hidden from a distance.
  
• The Summer Palace: I remember Core and Mal built this one when the City became unsafe. It's another wooden strucuture with our trademark comfy kitchen and plenty of bedrooms upstairs for weary wanderers
  
  There is a barn where hay is stored. It's a nice place to get away to for some alone time.. or you can open the door to the hayloft and watch the sun go down in silence.
  
  There is a greenhouse here too and some additional outhouses/structures come and go as required. Core's caravan is usually parked here too, that is if any of us are around
  
  There are a couple more places, but we haven't been there in a while. Now we are no longer "camouflaged" we spend more time together inside, so there is no point for each of us to have their own place anymore.
  
• We also have an old Ford pick up which we use to travel.

It's just open land between these homes. There are woods and plains..
huh.. the only mountains are beyond Outpost.. but as far as we are concerned they just mark the end of the world. I don't think any of us have traveled beyond them.


Unsafe places
(NOTE: the body has never had to endure places like this but given Mal & Mara's history it kind of makes sense for them to have experienced this inside):
The Institute: A place where differed boys are taken. Full of hurt. Think borstel.
The Sisterhood: A place where differed girls are taken and turned into a regimented female fighting force.

We've blown up the institute and have taken down the sisterhood.. more than once unfortunately.

There also used to be an evil overlord running the City.. Lud the devil. He reminds me of a voice (parent1's) I used to have in my head but thank goodness haven't heard in a long time. Mal has taken care of him.. more than once.


Before we became "self aware" Mara thought our internal world was a script for a book.

Well, I'm not yet sure whether a daydream, an inner world or whether I just made it up, but there was something that looked like it... It felt pretty real though.
(a bit more information here).
There are some mountains. There seem to be people there - tribal people. They seemed to be quite dangerous at first sight, but didn't seem to want to do any real harm (they were probably just surprised or something). And then there was one time someone who warned me it got dangerous - ** possible trigger? ** and then there was some huge snake - like the huge snake in Harry Potter. Some took me down to beneath the earth, where I (and them) were supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, it seemed I could jump around in the inner world just by thinking about some other place, so I accidentally got above the ground and got attacked. (This is why I suspect it was just a daydream, nothing really inner-world-ish). Won't go into details, but it hurt (just like the flashes - if people had seen me, they would think I had pain, but I didn't actually feel any pain). And survived, in the end.
** end **

Teatime wrote:Before we became "self aware" Mara thought our internal world was a script for a book.

Actually, after I had seen all that, I wrote it down like a story. Nothing serious, less than one page (just part of the plot) but I thought it would be a good start of a story.
The snake happened to have some mental health problems, though and it seems like the snake endured trauma (maybe it is more real than I thought - maybe yet another part?)
Before that, in elementary school, I wrote a (quite long, for that age) story (huh? Seems like someone else claims to have written that... ) that was about some dragon. It was a bit different, though, so probably unrelated.