After a long day of socializing in a busy part of town, I'm walking along a 4-lane street. As I near its end, a small group of women walk up and ask me "How do you handle your multiple selves?"

I don't seem surprised by the question; I take it for granted I have multiple selves. I find myself saying "Well... I only have nine current selves now, so I just number them. I deal mostly with the higher numbers because the lower numbers are well known and pretty much integrated so I don't NEED to fuss with them; they do their jobs without monitoring."

"These days" I say, "pretty much all of them ARE sides of me. Used to be, some were introjected voices from parents or society. Decades of dreamwork really have banished most of those fake selves."

• #1 is habit-me
• #2 is my conscious taking temporary control to reprogram those habits (tiring! use sparingly!)
• #3 is me when reading or hearing music or seeing art--generating an imaginary world, though not one of MY imagination
• #4 creative me--another, more active sort of trance where I choose the world I generate!
• I forget the middle numbers but know they're familiar (and in at least one case, a familiar.)
• #7, 8 and 9 aren't so much selves as sensory modes--quieting my other parts and using my magnetic compass sense (like a bird's, just weaker; in most humans, unconscious), my future-sense (warning dreams that help me choose good time-forks), and my aura-sense (showing me a sort of faint amoeba around each of you; the flow of its cytoplasm--though I should call it ectoplasm since we're gettin' all Theosophical--tells me your personality and mood). But to get these quiet signals, I need to quiet my more dramatic selves, and that takes work.

When I woke, I didn't know.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Only nine?! Yep. A few decades ago I had 12-16 at least. For fractured me, nine is NOTHING--practically unity.
• Other's voices introjected: I grumble about Jung's obsession with long-term development, never just taking a dream literally or here-&-now, but I agree with him (and Fritz Perls) that dreamwork's first years are mostly shoveling authority figures' bullshit (Freud's superego) out of your head. Then you can try to sort out & reconcile conflicting facets of your true self. But for centuries shamans have said that's not the final stage...
• Quiet selves on the top row: the dream hints I'm well into that third stage, where I learn to quiet down so subtle senses can register--just as cold and quiet ease superconductivity and quantum entanglement, or meditators quiet the ego to make room for God. Not that what I see with my sixth, seventh and eighth sense is always nice, or peaceful, or welcome. Just... useful.

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