What do possession and switching feel like?

[Summer]

It interests me that other system can experience switching in a whole different fashion. I can't say for sure if what we thought about switching is, is actually true. I guess I'll input my experience for what I believed switching was just for the intended topic.

 

What terrifies me about switching is that you can easily manipulate your hosts' thoughts. In my experience, once I was switched in to the front, everything became sharper and clearer, all the senses responded to you as if you are owning a physical body. I can easily overcome nihi's thoughts and replace them with my own. It doesn't feel like they were responding to nihi's presence but responding to mine, the front. It felt like I am nihi's Identity and I am also me at the same time but I could still choose to be myself and ignore any foreign perception that isn't mine. Given the current control that I have, It was easy to override nihi's thoughts with mine. If I stayed longer enough there's a possibility that nihi might not recognize himself anymore and that thought alone scares me.

 

Nih's voice became weak and barely distinguishable, I could barely hear him. I needed to focus on him just to hear him clearly, like the host forcing their tulpas. Nihi wasn't "asleep" but he was in a trans like state, similar to what our states are when we doze off. With my current condition, I can easily block nihi's grip and push him away. Yet, all this freedom and authority frightens me. I can't exactly say why I feel that way but I am just concerened.

 

Take everything I said with a grain of salt, most of it is just personal. I try and avoid practicing switching but I do not whole heartly dislike it. Switching feels like, for me and to simply put, passing the whole control wheel to your partner to be themselves with the original's body and having fun with it without the preivous hosts control.

[Tewi]

It would be better if someone went more in-depth in a study of what actual switching experiences are like, and not just passing off possession as switching. For example, are there any hosts who are physically unable to control the body when they are switched? Any who can't feel the body at all and just watch it from a distance? How frequent is memory loss, if it happens? Are there certain checkpoints that they pass over time? All that sort of stuff

 

I'm sure you meant just as study questions, but you said "are there any", so.

 

I can't quite comprehend what "are there any hosts who are physically unable to control the body when they are switched?" means, unless you mean the direct practice of possession by a host, so, we are one example. For sure, because we've only attempted (partial) possession once or twice, years ago. You've probably heard our description - that it "felt like reaching over the host to do anything". A perspective that came from learning to switch first, surely, but true nonetheless.

 

Anyways, as we've also said, the senses aren't "ours" when switched out and are more something we're aware of, the difference in seeing something happen and it happening to you albeit with more senses. Perhaps with skill with possession it gets harder to tell, but for us we need only compare how we are when not switched to know Lumi is exactly like us when switched. Memory loss is non-existent and would be worrying in any system. Switching simply gives our (created from then on) memories a different "tint" associated with us, since we all think and see things a little (or a lot) differently. We can usually tell who did what months later simply because the memories "feel" like whoever it was that made them.

 

As for checkpoints, for us it was basically just how we'd get tired after fronting for a few hours, and over time (somewhere between one and three months, but still possibly as little as one) being able to front for longer without being tired before at a point we could go all day, which also let us stay switched overnight and therefore front indefinitely. Interesting note that, when we would get tired, we could literally fall asleep if we went to bed (normally napping is near impossible for us as we don't get "tired"), and yet switching back with Lumi would immediately alleviate said fatigue. That was one of the most interesting effects of the process - that it was somehow not a body-wide tiredness, even though it enabled us to sleep in the middle of the day. We attribute it to using the mind in an entirely new way for extended periods of time, up until the mind just got used to it.

[Indigo Blue]

Those were just hypotheticals for what a study would be like, I wasn't asking those myself lol.

[Ember.Vesper]

Ember: Too late, Indigo. You asked the questions; now they're on-topic. ;)

 

Vesper: Most of your experience corresponds to ours, Summer. I don't mess with Ember's thoughts -- we've enforced such strict boundaries of respect for one another's agency for so long that it is difficult to conceptualize doing that -- but it's in my control whether she gets to think at all.

 

 

It felt like I am nihi's Identity and I am also me at the same time but I could still choose to be myself and ignore any foreign perception that isn't mine.

 

 

Vesper: Having to choose to be me and ignore foreign bits instead of just 'naturally' being me is one of the downsides of fronting. But in my experience, I don't lose more of myself progressively and neither does my host.

 

 

Nih's voice became weak and barely distinguishable, I could barely hear him. I needed to focus on him just to hear him clearly, like the host forcing their tulpas.

 

 

Vesper: My specific reaction, in one of my earliest efforts at trying to talk to Ember after switching in, was, 'You're so faint! Is that what I sound like? No wonder you were doubting!' Thinking like a tulpa takes practice. She's much stronger now.

 

 

we'd get tired after fronting for a few hours

 

 

Ember: We call that "alter fatigue", because I watched my wives experiencing that for years before we started having it ourselves. Ours is a little different, in that I started getting sleepy more easily during the day after we picked up tulpamancy. Vesper can switch in and be wide awake. By the time she gets tired, I can switch in and be recovered.

 

It's normal among the DID systems I know for no alter to have the stamina to get through an entire day on their own. My hypothesis for years was that, being locked out of certain areas of the brain, toxins accumulated at an accelerated rate in the areas specific to the active alter, triggering a need for a regeneration period. I don't think I would have started failing to be able to get through the day myself if tulpamancy had not so badly disrupted our ability to sleep.

[Guest]

Is it possible that you can block your host's thoughts? (directed mostly Summer and Vesper where the host is still active)

[Ember.Vesper]

We tried it. And while I can't block the fronter's thoughts by direct force of will, I can filibuster indefinitely, since there is only one channel for thought and none of us can articulate thought while another is or even interrupt. But Ember can not only sustain awareness, but take simple actions and apparently make simple decisions independently of conscious thought, which is cool and worthy of further investigation.

 

-Vesper

[Breloomancer]

For us whoever is switched in has the power to cut the other off, but it's pretty rude

[Apollo Fire]

Same for us. We have the ability to suppress one another, but we don't ever do that (intentionally, at least).

[Guest]

Tewi described it best for us here.

 

And after the last couple posts here, thanks guys, i am pretty sure we can switch, and have switched without really knowing what it is and twice by accident.

 

The experiments held last night left us with questions, but they're pretty irrelevant now, the fact is, we switched pretty much how Tewi described it, using the technique per the link i gave earlier, as in, basically relax and dissociate and exist instead in wonderland, which wasn't a heck of a lot different then my normal wonderland adventures.

 

Apparently we have benefited from dissociation to boost wonderlanding for quite some time without knowing it had anything to do with switching.

 

One thing that happened: when Dashie fronted, she could fillibuster and i couldn't talk as if i forgot how to talk.

 

Another thing that happened: i don't feel like the memories she generated up front are necessarily accessible to me since my memories are in wonderland at the time, so if i passed out, i can see a way that amnesia could actually occur if Dashie doesn't tell me what happened.

 

I wasn't sharing her senses at the time, all my senses were in wonderland.

 

These are our experiences to the best of my ability to describe them. I kept impeccable notes and will publish them in my PR.

[Guest]

Nevermind, the question was inappropriately worded.