To tell you the truth, i am more in favor of calling them modes, except now that i am in a relationship with someone who actually pays attention, i am told that i am not remembering things i said, did, heard in other modes. most frustrating. i did not start calling myself a multiple until a woman involved with jack accused him of having other people inside him. at that point we reluctantly re-considered the possibility. we had considered it years before but discarded it as we had only a few instances of memory lapse.
i have a theory that everyone has modes and that due to things like extreme stress, the modes can become more fragmented. i think this happened when we lost a job and could not figure out what was going wrong and couldn't fix it, even after asking.
but yes, mostly one at a time. sometimes i can watch , but there is only one mode i can do that with. there is another mode that sometimes influences me - not quite sure how that works.
most of my life i called them modes and when we talked i would tell people who overheard that i was talking to myself.
i am still figuring out how it works.
I have 'modes', and my memories can get a bit blurred between them. When I'm hypomanic, it's difficult for me to remember what it's like to not be hypomanic, and the same goes for when I'm depressed or neutral. I get a similar thing when I'm going to sleep and start to dream a bit before I'm completely asleep; I'm suddenly able to recall my past dreams in detail, which are fuzzy and difficult to access when I'm fully awake. Someone I was involved with once thought I was bipolar since I could change so much in what I thought and remembered and how I acted. I've found that various drugs are useful for breaking down the barriers between the different modes, making it easier for me to unify my experiences for a short time, but I haven't done much of that sort of thing for years.
what drugs? did they work for the memories too? how long was a short time?
Anything that gives greater plasticity and flexibility to thought processes while allowing you to remain lucid and cogent is likely to work. I found that butane worked the best out of the few things I've tried, but I wouldn't recommend following in my footsteps with that. Low to moderate doses of alcohol can work, though with less clarity than butane, and it tends to put me into a depressive mood which makes it more difficult to be objectively self-analytical. Cannabis and salvia divinorum are too disruptive to my mental functioning to be of much use, though I seem to respond unusually to cannabis in finding it a powerful hallucinogen, so other people are likely to have different experiences.
Butane and alcohol helped with accessing memories and with being able to explore the different ways that I think and act in different modes from an outside, 'trans-mode' perspective. The effect lasts for the duration of the drug experience, so would depend on what you were using, but it also produces somewhat of a lasting improvement in the ease of access. I've never tried LSD, but it could potentially be useful. I'm wary of it though because of the long term effects; I knew someone at uni who saw swirling patterns in surfaces after repeated LSD use. I don't lose memories of factual things that I've learned in different modes, but memories about how I've felt, things I've thought and things I've said can get obscured. When I'm depressed or hypomanic or neutral, it feels like I've always been that way, since the personal memories that come to the surface of their own accord are all of me in that same state, and I have to make a deliberate effort to recall that I'm not always like that, and to remember in a blurred fashion what it's like to not be like that.
