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perhaps the normal case is dissociation within 'acceptable' limits.
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... and those limits are themselves variable. Take the example Sabbatai Zevi; if he were alive today, he would almost certainly be diagnosed as bipolar, whereas he actually managed to make a rather fine life for himself as a prophet and messiah.
Moreover, the limits may vary from one person to another: there are far more people who hear voices than there are people diagnosed as psychotic. Many of these people adjust very well to their voices, and live with them in something like harmony (the psychologist Richard Bentall suggests that people who are very sure of themselves dominate their voices, while people who feel socially or psychologically insecure are dominated by them).
Similarly with dissociation as with voices (which is, in a sense, a form of dissociation, for the voices are in fact one's own - if you monitor the vocal apparatus of someone who hears voices, you will find that they are subvocalizing). The question is what is acceptable - Bentall asks whether people complain or not. And the answer is that some do, and some don't.
Just as a matter of interest, I spent about five minutes this afternoon attempting to monitor my own processes of being. At the time, I was in a suburban train, returning from work. I had put my earphones on, to isolate myself from a rather noisy group sitting close to me. I was reading on my Boox (a book about the history of Christianity). At one level, there was a voice engaged in an argument with the author of the book, and putting it up against another book that I'm reading at home which has a chapter on the same subject. The voice was one I recognize as mine (I am aware of several voices which I acknowledge as my own, and I am also aware of several other voices, in particular those of my mother and my father. When I hear these voices, I am not 'hearing voices'; I know very well that they are synthesized from memories and so on).
While this conversation between me and the book was going on, I also engaged in a visual representation of myself walking up the hill from the station, calling into the Petit Casino on the High Street, and buying a sixpack of Draught Guinness. This was purely visual, and occurred in parallel with my bookish conversation.
While this was going on, and also in parallel, I was enjoying the music. Some of the songs made me smile, particularly when I recognized them as they started up. From time to time, the words might cut in on the conversation I was having with the book, and I would, for a bar or two, give them most of my attention. But even when I put them into the background, they were still there, and I would be aware of my toes twitching in time to the music.
At the same time, there were fleeting impression of fellow travellers, of the names of the stations, of people standing on platforms, of the Seine as the train bridged it.
All of this is quite remarkable, while also being very ordinary. The human brain manages to keep track of a large number of different domains, moving from one to the other so quickly that awareness appears to be seamless and total. However, this is not the case. My processing mechanism is capable of handling a relatively small amount of input at any one time. Much of the input is fragmentary and partial. To format it and make it comprehensible seems to need narrative work - and I have engaged in such work in presenting it here. If I had written of the same moments at another time, perhaps with some other object in mind, the narrative would have been different.
Brillat-Savarin held that "you are what you eat." Today, a lot of people will say, "you are what you tell." And just as diets may change from day to day, or from month to month, so can our autobiographies.
P.S. The Petit Casino closes on Mondays. I will have to slake my thirst on tomato juice. Or - almost unthinkable - water.