The Menagerie

World

We've been building an elaborate imaginary world for all of us to inhabit, which has also been helping us rekindle our imagination. The process is something between creation and discovery, figuring out how things intuitively work within our own mind.

Headspace

This all started with our fronting room (which we still generally refer to as our headspace, whereas the broader universe is our innerworld). It's an airplane, usually empty of airline seats, with a multi-person desk set up at the windscreen. There are bedrooms recessed along the bottom of the sides, and an elevator in the back. Captained by a protogen, the plane usually flies aimlessly through empty skies above a planet named Gaia.

Eventually, we wondered about landing the plane elsewhere in mental space. We started coming up with home worlds for our headmates and connecting them together. Now it's a sprawling nine-dimensional universe with antigravity, strange loops, and branching timelines. (Not much chess, though.)

Animism

The distinction between people, creatures, objects, and places is malleable, if it even truly exists. The concepts are often interchangeable in various ways.

If there's, say, a couch in the innerworld, then clearly that's a part of our mind that is fully existentially content with being a couch. (Which doesn't necessarily imply a lack of personhood.)

A far more useful distinction is what can front. Some objects can; some people refuse to.

There are objects that can act as pointers to specific places and warp you there if you interact with them in certain ways. These often look like simplified little dioramas of the destination. Creatures, too, can have pointers to their own little hammerspace pocket dimensions. Other beings seem to encode their own internal worlds through some sort of metaphysical holography, or are deities who embody different parts or aspects of the innerworld.

Physics

Matter

Matter in our world is highly simplified and idealized. Everything inhabits magic shapeshifting clay that has infinite resolution and can take on any desired property. Multiple creatures can fuse together, which often involves some weird species math that only makes sense to us.

Forces

Fundamental forces like gravity work differently. There are other special energies, fields, and weather metrics that can affect us.

Spacetime

Unlike matter, space in the innerworld is not continuous. It is segmented into realms, which act a lot like videogame areas that are loaded in separately and switched between by activating warps. Each realm is unbounded in size, and can be expanded without affecting the relative positions of the realms as on a map. The connections may not fully make sense if you think about it too hard (a bit like the floor plan of a cartoon character's house).

Sometimes it doesn't feel like we're at the physical boundary of a realm, but a gate materializes as a shortcut bridging over to an adjacent realm.

On a larger scale, the space is divided into layers. Each layer is like its own plane of existence, and they're stacked along an extra spatial dimension that feels vertical. Many layers are themed after materials, time periods, virtual worlds, fictional universes, and afterlives.

Technically, the world is at least 9D. It's not as confusing as it sounds. There are:

Language

Although we're ultimately thinking in the languages we know, in principle we speak innerlangs, notional languages that exist within this imaginary world. They can sound and act completely unlike human languages, but we can still intuit the meaning being conveyed.

Different innerlangs are spoken in different parts of the innerworld, and are often associated with specific layers or realms. Occasionally, there are communication barriers where we need multilingual headmates to interpret what others are saying.