Part of dealing with being a multiple personality is struggling to find a way to convey some concepts that our language just isn’t really set up for. Especially when the question is some variation on ‘What’s it like to have people in your head?’. So one way of dealing with that is to find analogous ways of conveying what it’s like. One of the things that has helped has been to create a mental ‘map’ that allows us to think of our mind as a material place. And a few years ago we drew it out in a way that we could reference. We’ve had several versions, but here’s one of them:
Recently, we decided to take it a step further, and build the mindscape on a Lego scale. We’d already created Lego minifigs for each alter:
Left to right in front are: Rubi, Sam, Martha, Kiara, Paul, Baby Paul, and Nyx. In back are Gracelyn, Stephanie, Jarett, and Cherish. Obviously not completely accurate, but representative enough to work for us.
So to build the mindscape out of Lego - that’s a big job, and one that would require some planning. We went back and forth between the Lego Digital Design program and graph-paper-and-pencil a few times. On the graph paper, I made the mistake of putting walls on the lines instead of allowing a square for the walls, but figured that out and made new plans. We ended up with something like this:
There’s an office/interaction room that represents the space where we interact with the outside world. Only the alter(s) in that room are active outside of our head. Just below that room is an observation room where alters can watch what’s going on without actually participating. I’m almost always in one of those two rooms. There’s a Social Area to the left with TV and games and stuff where alters interact with each other, and a Quiet Room to the right that, although technically connected with the office and the rest, is harder to move through and kept dark and still. Silent One has a jungle-filled cave-type space in there. Each other alter has a ‘bedroom’ that’s their own space. And then there’s cold storage down in the bottom right. We envision that like a morgue-drawer kind of setup, where we ‘store’ alters that aren’t active, whether voluntarily or not. That’s new from the older map above.
I knew I would want to do certain colors in certain areas, but that was going to mean buying more Lego, so I went ahead and built the whole thing with no regard to color first, knowing I would be rebuilding it. First the base for it. It had to be sturdy enough to hold the whole thing and be able to picked up and moved. So I put down large flat pieces, added the under-plate supports to make them work, and then moved the flats to the top instead of the bottom.
The bottom is a mish-mash of Technic bricks that have holes in them, attached with little pins to other Technic bricks. I tried to get support everywhere that corners of flat plates would meet. Then I put regular bricks around the edges to give it a nice look and add some more stability.
Once the base was set, I started building walls. Again, at this point I wasn’t worried about colors. I had a nice two-pip border all around, and three in the front, but I had to make some adjustments to keep all the bedrooms wide enough for beds, which need to be about 4x8 pips for the ‘Big Girls’, and about 4x6 for the kids. I also started looking through the fancier printed and shaped Legos that I already had for decorative elements, like the Coke Machine.
The storage and cave areas weren’t just simple rooms, and there would be moving drawers in storage, so that took some designing - and ended up moving the walls out further, too. I fiddled with the design a while before I figured how to get six ‘drawers’ stacked that would hold minifigs, open & close smoothly, and fit in the space. I didn’t worry about building the walls all the way up, since I knew I was going to rebuild it, but I did build it most of the way to see if I would have enough (I did, but just barely).
Then I started buying more Lego. I wanted a nice single color floor throughout. Rubi wanted a fireplace in her room, Kiara found some decorations she wanted, and I didn’t have enough doors and doorframes of the same types & colors to use throughout. Of course, while buying these things, I found baby dragons and microfigs and all kinds of other Lego I ‘needed’. I spent a fair bit of money getting to the next step, but the shopping was fun!
Here’s the underside. I moved around the Technic supports a little, but mostly I just replaced the flat floors and the bricks around the edges with a uniform dark grey. After all, the colors on the bottom aren’t really important if no one sees them.
I did an initial foundation round of dark gray all along the outside walls, then placed doors for the bedrooms (all matching), and started looking at colors. My shared wall with Sam was easy - we both wanted red. But all the other walls were shared between two color choices, so some decisions had to be made. I wanted to make the wall with the doors light gray so the hallway would be uniform, but I was frankly out of grey bricks by the time I rebuilt the storage area, so I’m glad I didn’t pursue that idea. I finished off the office and observation areas first, where I only had two colors to combine.
I finished off the bedrooms next, then worked on the storage area and Silent One’s cave. I’m actually quite happy with the way those turned out, since that’s really the newest portion of my mental imagery. I built all the walls all the way up, using a different color for each space. I am now out of dark grey, light gray, green, brown, and cream 1x bricks. Worth it, though.
Finally, I finished off the social area - the brown space, building a couple of features into the walls and working on some furniture for the space as well.
After I took most of these photos, I added one more run of 1x flat pieces to the top of all the walls, just to finish it off. So here are some ‘finished’ pictures of the whole and of each room (I don’t expect it to ever be truly finished, of course).
The Office, with me manning the desk.
Here, you can see the computer (and soda) on my desk, and also see into the Observation Room. Alters that want to watch what’s going on, but not participate, can hang out in there. There’s a control panel under the windows to represent a kind of intercom system with the desk. If too many people try to be in the observation room at a time, it gets really loud and hard to figure out what’s going on. There is a tiny window to look over and see what’s going on in the jungle/cave space, but no way to communicate over there.
Black walls, of course. She wanted a fireplace, so we found a round brick with fire on it for her. There’s a bat’leth hanging above it on the wall (bought at a brick convention). The red square you can see on the outside of her room by the door holds, on the inside of the room, a dart board. Rubi’s fond of fire and darts and other hurty things.
Sam’s a hedonist. She gets the fancy-design bedcovers and padded headboard/footboard, a vanity table with a little lamp for bedtime reading, and a chocolate bar. I’ll probably be adding more to her room, as I find things that are appropriate for her.
Colors weren’t a problem here; Sam likes red and black. So three red walls and one black was great for her.
My Room
After taking the pictures, I’ve rebuilt my room to have a bedside table (and turned the bed the other direction) so that I can have a book in there, like the ones in the living room shelf.
But all-in-all, my room’s fairly plain. I don’t spend a lot of time in there, anyway. Red for me, but I don’t mind the blue accent wall that comes from Kiara’s room.
The bed was part of the Disney castle I recently built, with a few modifications.
I have probably rebuilt this room more times than any other. Kiara likes blue, and has the strongest personality, so she got all four walls blue. She wanted a bed up off the floor, like a loft thing, and then we found the huge butterfly brick. So we’ve tried ladders and steps to get to the bed in several permutations, but then she wanted the dresser too. We finally got that to work. At the top of her stairs-to-bed, there’s a small radio brick. In our mindscape, she has more of a jukebox, which may blare out all kinds of music at any time of the day or night, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to build a jukebox at this scale and also make it fit in the room. There are also ladybugs on the wall.
Paul gets to share his room with Baby Paul, since they are sort of the same, just different ages. We had these neat car-themed lockers and brick strips, so he gets a car-themed room - because he’s a boy. Green is his color, but he’s not going to fight with Kiara over it, and I needed the other long wall to be gray. Since we didn’t have many green bricks anyway, that worked out.
My favorite is the treasure chest full of nanoblocks, because he’s the real Lego fan in here. And yes, he sleeps that way. I tried to position everyone how they typically seem to sleep. Yep, we even switch while we’re asleep.
Cold Storage
This is the space with morgue-like drawers to hold inactive alters. It was a bit of a challenge to my building skills. You can see Gracelynn with her open drawer - she does, every now and then, come back out again for brief periods of time. The one with the cream handle holds Cherish, and the two brown-handled drawers are for Stephanie and Jarett. The two with gray handles are currently empty. I wanted this area to be all light gray to indicate the cold clinical feeling of the space.
Jungle Space / Quiet Room
Between the storage area and the office area is a kind of no-man’s-land. It’s kind of dark and damp and filled with plants to make a jungle sort-of feeling. That’s the darker scarier part of our psyche, where we might hide when in a mental crisis. We’ve hinted at the feeling of the space in this model.
Nyx's Cave
Nyx is the primal/animalistic alter that fits in that jungle space, and we’ve made it a cave rather than a bedroom in this model.
Social Area
This is where alters hang out when they may not want to be alone in their rooms, but aren’t out front or observing, either. However, the noise from the social area is often audible from the office, as there is no door between them.
Here we built a sofa and a bookcase (both adapted from the Big Bang Theory set) and a piano I built from a picture found on the internet. The bookcase was originally going to go in the hallway, but needed to move over to the corner, there. The TV is my own build; The sticker came from a Star Trek Kreo set, and Boss helped me come up with a way to lever it out from the wall at an angle. I figured out a way to angle the couch, too, and was quite proud of that.
You might also spot, here, the whiteboard by the entrance to the office, where we leave each other notes about important things anyone who’s in the office needs to know.
And here are views of the entire mindscape, from the front and from the back. I hope this helps when trying to discuss how something works in my head. I’ll be keeping the physical model, of course, so those that know me well enough to come to the house, please ask to see it. I would love to show it to you.
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