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>NIGHTMARES V
Sometimes you think you die in your sleep. Not every time. Only when you're beetles, and not every time then, either. Maybe never, if you believe Richard. You did ask about it. You explained that sometimes, if you weren't in a body, and you slept, that you didn't dream. Or, no. That was wrong. That you didn't dream like a... like a person. You could say this conclusively, since you'd started to remember your normal dreams scarily well, ever since you started sleeping again. All but these ones. Because you were dead.
Richard laughed at you sort of cruelly when you asked, which immediately made you consider going to sleep and dying right there, but it was too late, because he did answer your question. He said that— <span class="mu-i">as he'd explained earlier</span>— You, your self-concept, your self-experience, had, as a result of the process you'd taken to calling beetlefication, been fragmented into approximately 400 semi-autonomous little bits. The only reason You, as a person, as a Beetles, still exists, is because you had managed to hang on through that, keeping yourself together in the most literal possible sense, retaining the invisible but very literal bonds between said bits. It was through these bonds that there was a You, not through the beetles.
In a body, he said, the bonds are in one big bundle, so there's never any danger of disrupting the Youness. In many bodies, it's more complex. You naturally cluster up, don't you, Beetles? If dragged apart, you snap back together? If held at a distance, you feel your mind sliding, your edges dissolving? These are the bonds. He told you they were real. What's more, they are self-reinforcing. The more You there, is the stronger they get. The stronger they get, the more You there is. Understood?
You knew all that, you said lamely, you just think that maybe when you're sleeping they—
Richard was brusque. If the bonds were to snap, there would be no Beetles; there would only be beetles. Forever. You have died (you say) and come back; therefore you didn't die. Common sense. But then, it isn't so common, is it? It may be that the bonds, without active waking reinforcement, weaken during sleep. It may be that your lesser minds creep in. It doesn't mean you're in <span class="mu-i">danger.</span> Really, Beetles. Use all those heads for once.
