The Bridge

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The Bridge of the fictional version of the Sunspot corresponds with and mimics our conscious mind space.

Other systems call it "the front room" or "the cockpit" or other similar terms, depending on their inworld conceptions.

How it works

The best we can gather, what we call the Bridge is constructed of all of the thoughts, emotions, and senses that we are collectively consciously aware of. This includes internal visualizations of anything, and also our perceptions of each other's presences and influences.

According to current psychological theories, it is built and controlled entirely by the subconscious mind, which chooses what to feed it after processing nervous stimuli and deciding what to do about it.

Because of our plurality and multiple perspectives, we find it to be a little bit more complicated than that.

We call it the Bridge because usually we perceive it as a space in our mind that closely resembles the bridge of the Starship Enterprize, and there's usually a number of us present in it.

We can usually look around inside it easiest when we close our eyes. Sometimes it's very strong and is just like dropping into a dream when we do that. Sometimes we can perceive it clearly when our eyes are open, not as an halucination but as a daydream that is just happening involuntarily.

However, as we move about in it and change who is fronting, we start to get a sense of how we create it as a cooperative group.

It does seem that each system member consists of a subconscious self and a conscious projection, just as if they are a singlet with full control over the brain. So, a lot of the mechanisms that other human brains experience are taken care of in that manner. But we are often in conflict with each other over what we're perceiving and deciding to do in reaction to those perceptions.

But also, we somehow share enough working memory through the Bridge that it creates the fragile but persistent illusion that we have a single mind's eye. Fragile in that we can break it very easily and see clearly that we have multiple minds' eyes. And persistent in that it mends and is re-established quickly.

We have several hypotheses as to how and why it works this way for us, but we have more notes to take of pur experiences and more reading to do before we can begin to explain them.

The Fictional Bridge

In our comic Systems' Out, the Bridge of the Sunspot evolves over the course of the plot.

In the beginning, it is simply a virtual space where the ascended conscious minds of the Crew can congregate to manage the ship. It is typically featureless, with a projection on one wall to act as a view screen. And Crewmembers can call up visual representations of controls to manipulate if they like. It acts much like a holodeck from Star Trek in that it can be configured to look like anything. Though, typically each Crewmember can only dictate the appearance of their own workstation area, which grows and shrinks in proportion to the number of people on the Bridge.

After events convince the Crew that it is a good idea, they program the Bridge to automatically share emotions and thoughts between anyone present on the Bridge, to increase cooperation. This connection can be broken at will be anyone at any time, but it takes a conscious effort, and when everyone relaxes the connection re-establishes itself.

This later version of the Bridge mimics our own mind almost perfectly.

Dreaming

When we dream, the Bridge seems to remain active. We can have multuple system members on the Bridge interacting with each other as we do when we're awake. And we perceive ourselves to be inhabiting a single dream body that we can then move around in our dreamworld, which we call the Garden.

People and monsters that we encounter and interact with while dreaming are invariably played by other headmates who are not currently part of the Bridge Crew. They can join the Bridge Crew at any time, or invite the Bridge Crew to switch to their dream body and perspective. This happens regularly but not frequently.

Sometimes we just dream about being on the Bridge, in which case we are entirely separated from each other, with our own inworld bodies. Such dreams, however, do not involve very much movement or physical interaction and more closely resemble heated board meetings.

When we wake up from a dream, we can ask anyone we encounter in the dream to come forward and share their memories of the dream. They will always remember it from their personal perspective and share their spacial and emotional perceptions of the dream, as their memories recorded it at the time, even if the Bridge Crew was not sharing their perspective in the dream.

In other words, if we encounter a monster, such as Wentin, in a dream, and interact with it, in the morning it can front and give us visions of what that dream looked like through its eyes.