Finally she got home, stumbled in the door and collapsed into a big chair in the sitting room. Sedna was there.

"Dema, you look awful! What happened?"

"Too many ghosts! Everyone has a ghost, and I see them all. Yours too."

Sedna watched Dema for a moment, then said, "Well, stop looking! Close your eyes and relax! You need to reintegrate!"

"Reintegrate? You sound like Mom!"

"Well, Naga was right about this. You've gone into some kind of sensory overload. Tell me what happened."

Dema looked up and opened her mouth to begin, but Sedna cut her off with a gesture. 

"Don't look! Close your eyes! Just talk to me."

So Dema did that. She leaned back into the soft embrace of the chair, closed her eyes, and told Sedna about the dead girls, how they got Hanley to confess, then about Cindy and Doug at the office, and the crowded streets on the way home.

While she was talking, Naga and Kore came in. Dema reluctantly opened her eyes to greet them, but it was a lot better.

After hearing a brief explanation of what was going on, Naga said, "Mother is right. We're visually oriented. You've opened up a new channel in yourself that gets expressed that way. You needed to stop the visual input. The talking is good too. That reverses the flow, focuses your mind more on output."

Dema said, "I remember telling my friend Ryan in Seattle how the physical universe is a feedback mechanism. I had him close his eyes and asked him if the room was still there. His reality got a little shaky. 

"This is sort of the flip side of that, isn't it. I was getting too much of the spirit side of things, and it shook up my visual feedback system. Sitting here with my eyes closed turned off the feedback, so I could come out of the intense shaman dream and ease back on the spirit stuff.

"But you know what's really interesting? I realize now I've always done this. I mean, I've always seen people the way they see themselves, at least partly. I pick up on their internal vision and incorporate that into my own internal view of them." 

She looked around at the others. "I'll bet we all do. I mean, everyone, not just our family. But it's good to understand it. I'll be able to control it better."

Naga had that distant look in her eyes that meant she was into some deep theory. 

"There's a double inversion," she said. "The more obvious inversion is that people build their internal world view based on their perceptions, and this internal view is what they take to be external reality. 

"But that is actually the second inversion. The first inversion is that all people, all beings, project their internal reality onto the quantum foam of agreements, and perception is feedback from this projection. 

"So internal reality is after all the first reality. But it gets modified into conforming to the general agreement by the feedback of perception."

Sedna stood up and headed for bed. Kore was already asleep in her chair. 

Dema smiled at her mother and said, "I think the general agreement around here is that that's enough quantum foam for now. 'Night, Ma." They stood up and hugged each other. 

Naga said, "Goodnight, Dema. Put your ghosts to bed too, and sleep well."

As she was getting ready for bed, Dema thought that this experience of seeing the inner reality of other beings overlaid on her visual perception of the world was not entirely a bad thing after all. 

She would have to learn to distinguish direct awareness from appearances filtered through perception, and not let them blend willy-nilly as it seemed they had done in the past, or appear like the double vision that had plagued her earlier in the day. But if she could get that under control, it might turn out to be quite useful.

She smiled to herself as she closed her eyes and put her ghosts to rest.