(Namespace: theories)

Redshift is a pervasive and far-reaching experiential phenomenon in our system that affects and/or describes the whole of its emotional functioning and dissociative mechanisms. The basic idea is that all of our suffering is caused by more of us getting crammed in here when there's already no room left.

The background fabric of Abyss is black, which makes it look black from the outside. But the inside is far from black, and far from empty. It's a pressurized vertical shaft in rainbow colors, starting at violet at the top, and redshifting the farther down you're squeezed, all the way down to violet again at the bottom.

When I picture my headmates' ideal body images, I visualize them as having theme colors (e.g. hair colors, body colors, or just background colors). I discovered the redshift spectrum by noticing that our respective favorite colors tend to redshift over time as we continue to dissociate. I also noticed our emotional states fluctuate in this process, and was able to deduce there is a connection.

When I say the redshift spectrum is pressurized, and progresses as you're squeezed down through it, what I mean is this: The memories and headmates occupying the redshift spectrum behave like a heavy gas. They expand to fill the available space, and, more relevantly, they compress to make room for more—and the pressure is gradient, lowest at the top and highest at the bottom, as if due to gravity. Memories and headmates near the top are under the least pressure, and the ones near the bottom are under the most pressure.

The pressure seems to be extremely painful and frightening to my headmates. It may even be a threat to their lives.

Perception of redshift pressure seems to vary depending on whether it's stable or increasing.

Stable pressure feels like a general sense of intense malaise. When the redshift spectrum is in a state of stable pressure, we experience that pressure as just… bad feelings. Toxic sinking feelings in our chest. Shame. Grief. Anger. Paranoia. Longing. It all depends on what color range a headmate's pressure level is currently in. If they're near the same redshift position as a traumatic memory or an introject, they associate the bad feelings with that. Otherwise, they just associate them with themself. “I'm bad. All of these bad things have happened to me because I'm bad.” Or with memories we're tethered to.

The only time redshift pressure is increasing, as far as I know, is when something or someone new is entering Abyss; that is, when I'm actively engaging my dissociative mechanisms. Everything and everyone else has to get squeezed down farther to make room. Stable redshift pressure is already painful and scary, but increasing redshift pressure is abject mental anguish. And this time, there's blame. When redshift pressure is increasing, everyone, including the newcomer themself, perceives the cause of the extreme agony to be the newcomer, and perceives the harm as intentional and perpetrated out of contempt, disregard, denial, ignorance, etc.

“Tethering” is how I describe it when a headmate has diverse internal parts nested inside that threaten to split out, or diverse parts that have already split but are still attached, or partial entanglement with other headmates entirely, or any other reason they're partially or fully “stuck” to one certain location in the redshift spectrum.

How we experience this phenomenon may vary. Some of us can't leave certain rooms in headspace, or can't stay away from them; if we try to leave, our mind blanks out and then we find ourself back in the same place again. Some of us are especially prone to switching between one another despite not being close together on the spectrum or in headspace. Sometimes we'll picture ourselves as physically inside each other, or our accent colors will reference each other.

Both how much redshift pressure a headmate is under, and the overall variance of the points they're tethered to, seem to be factors that contribute to their risk of breaking down and becoming a subsystem. Breaking due to variance feels like shattering or being pulled apart, whereas breaking due to pressure feels more like being crushed. We perceive either one as death, inclusive of all the unpleasant emotions that entails. Every part of anyone who dies down here lives on without them, but the decedent themself does not.

With every split I've seen so far, exactly one of the deceased headmate's released parts still thinks of themself as the original, or a reincarnation or outgrowth or development of the original, or even a ghost or an empty shell—while the others all immediately or quickly understand they are new and distinct entities. It's unclear whether this is always the case as a general rule, or if it has just happened to work out this way.

Different color ranges in the redshift spectrum seem to have different intrinsic characteristic emotional states, corresponding to trauma/stress response types. I think I've worked out that the memories and headmates accumulated in these ranges may inform how we describe the associated emotional states, but the pure emotional content of a color range does not vary over time nor with changes in redshift pressure. The same color is always connected to the same feeling. Just conceptualized differently depending on who lives there right now.

We're getting deep into bikeshedding territory here, but I think maybe the redshift spectrum has a few weird geometric features with important emotional ramifications.

The first of these theoretical features is what I call greenshift pressure. If blueshift is a shift of visible light toward a higher frequency, and redshift is a shift toward a lower frequency, then greenshift, I figure, is a shift toward a middle frequency. And that's what we see in this kind of pressure: emotional features that escalate toward the middle of the spectrum, rather than the bottom.

One somewhat fantastical way to look at it is… Abyss is spherical, but flattens out into an infinite plane as space becomes hyperbolic near its event horizon. Corresponding to this flattening-out, the redshift spectrum actually has two centers. The bottom of the spectrum, the magenta-violet range, is the core, but the middle of the spectrum, the green-yellow range, is also the core. They are, nonetheless, two different places (I think). Abyss just has two middles.

As I said earlier, it's a mystery to me—it's kept a mystery to me— what exactly is going on in the green-yellow range. But whatever it is, headmates become more volatile the closer they get to it. Their tethers go all over the place. They'll do anything to avoid going in there. They'll wrap themselves around it, if that's what it takes, rather than go in—leading to internal parts of them getting stretched out very far apart.

The noteworthy emotional effects of this are… well… As you approach the green-yellow range from either side, you begin to feel increasingly scared. Headmates closer to the magenta-violet range are more upset, but headmates closer to the green-yellow range are more scared. They feel smaller. More vulnerable.

This entails—and indeed, this is how it seems to work out—that the following is how your emotions change as you're pushed toward the bottom of Abyss over time:

• From violet down to green, you go from feeling strong and contented, to feeling small and terrified, but still only halfway miserable.
• Something bad happens from green down to yellow.
• From yellow down and back aroudn to violet, you go from feeling small, terrified, and halfway miserable, to feeling fully miserable, but also strong again.

In some sense, the top and bottom of the spectrum seem to be connected, as if the whole space were circular. Travel between the top and bottom doesn't seem to be possible, because if you reach the magenta-violet range, you're crushed to death. But headmates close to the magenta-violet range seem to gain the power to reach across it and temporarily access the violet-indigo range; that is, they can temporarily access inner strength.

Lucy seems to exemplify this capacity, in particular.

It seems like from violet down to green, the farther down in the redshift spectrum you go, the earlier whatever you remember is perceived as having happened. This doesn't necessarily hold from yellow back down around to violet; anything pushed down past green-yellow seems to get jumbled up out of order pretty badly.

It also seems like from yellow back down around to violet, the farther down in the redshift spectrum you go, the more fictionalized you become.

It's almost like memories remain mostly intact from violet down to green, with only minor amnesia, and then past that point they start getting completely torn apart by dissociative_mechanisms.