Plurality vs Common Experiences

When educating yourself about plurality, sometimes you may start questioning too much whether some everyday experiences are not by chance a sign that you are plural too. It's perhaps caused by a fact that we rarely discuss our internal life with others and we don't have much knowledge about what the norm is. If you have this problem, we made a list of experiences that are completely normal for an average singlet:

• not remembering first few years of your childhood (childhood amnesia) – on average 3-4 first years, 6 in case of traumatic childhood^[1]
• rememberning less and less not very significant details, the more time has passed from the time of remembered events
• occasional forgetting about responsibilities, meetings and other important things; more frequent forgetting may be a sign of for example: exhaustion, burnout, depression, ADHD, PTSD, dissociative disorder or Alzheimer's disease
• doing everyday tasks on autopilot and occasional forgetting that you have done them; more frequent occurence of this may be a sign of dissociative disorder
• zoning out / getting distracted once in a while and missing things that were happening in your surroundings (e.g. a boring lecture), or noticing you are doing something other than what you intended to do (e.g. opening the dishwasher instead of the fridge); more frequent zoning out or problems with staying focused may be a sign of for example exhaustion, depression, ADHD or dissociative disorder
• behaving a little differently in different situations (e.g. with parents vs with friends)
• occasionaly speaking about a past or future version of self like they were a different person (especially when you've changed a lot since then, regret some decision you made or you are leaving dealing with some problem for the future you to handle)
• having an internal child, meaning traits, emotions or desires that don't fit a stereotypical understanding of adults (e.g. feeling lost, curiosity and fascination with the world, finding joy in snowball fights or building sandcastles)
• dealing with internal conflicts due to having contradictory desires or values (e.g. when you feel a need to buy a nice decoration you just noticed in store, but you want to stick to your plan of saving for a new phone)
• small changes in your physical and psychological skills (e.g. coordination, drawing logical conclusions, legibility of handwriting) caused by tiredness, stress, rush, sickness or distracting envinronment
• imagining conversations and interactions with other people, real or not – only when imagined characters start surprising you, especially by doing something against your will, it's a possible sign of plurality; and if you're spending very much time in your imagined reality and it negatively impacts your life, you may be dealing with maladaptive daydreaming
• having imaginary friends, mostly in children; it may be a sign of plurality, if you don't have control over their behavior (see above)
• reading messages from friends in their voices and statements from characters in books or comics in various voices (not beloning to anybody in particular or belonging for example to actors playing their roles in the film) – only when you regularly hear those voices in your head in different situations, it may be a possible sign of plurality
• thoughts with no deeper meaning, often focused on taboo topics, sometimes appearing from nowhere in your head; when those thoughts appear often and are a cause of stress or discomfort, but they don't belong to any voice you could hold a logical conversation with, you're most probably dealing with intrusive thougths, which are common in e.g. PTSD, anxiety disorders and OCD
• reapeating word or phrase or music playing on a loop in your head that you can't stop when you try to (earworms)
• subconsciously integrating some gestures or phrases used by people you like and spend a lot of time with into your own behavior; only when you start sometimes feeling like all of your identity was copied from another person, it's a probable sign of introjection
• getting into the main character, identyfing with them while reading a book or playing a roleplay game
• getting into played character for the time of rehearsals, performances, movie production or ttRPG sessions, inluding a change in gesticulation and way of speaking and having intuitive understanding of what this character wants and how they would act in a given situation, in people with a talent for acting; only when this character starts manifesting outside of these situations, it's a probable sign of plurality
• meeting autonomous characters manifesting some level of consciousness (especially for lucid dreamers), sometimes having access to memories or information unaccessible your conscious memory, in your dreams^[2]
• occasonaly having dreams about being a different person
• hallucinations of seeing or hearing a voice of a loved one during the grief period after their death (post-bereavement hallucinations)^[3]
• occasionaly having hallucinations shortly before falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations) or after waking up (hypnopompic hallucinations); experiencing them more often may be connected to insomnia or mental disorders^[4]
• occasionaly doing even complex tasks while asleep that you don't remember after waking up (sleepwalking); more frequent episodes that negatively impact quality of life or pose a danger to you or other people are a sign of a sleep disorder, sleepwalking disorder in particular^[5][6]

There may be other experiences that are not listed here, but are typical for the majority of society. If your only suspicions regarding plurality were motivated by one of the above, most probably you don't belong to a system. But if you are noticing other, definitely plural signs, these experiences don't invalidate them – it seems you were just looking in the wrong place. There's also the fact that plurality exists on a spectrum and it's impossible to draw an impermeable boundary between "plural" and "not plural". In case of experiences that are somewhere in the middle only you can decide if this way of interpreting your identity works better – if treating your school self and home self as distinct parts of yourself helps you better understand your internal conflicts or if you get into the character you play so deeply that it stops being play-pretend for you and events from the story have a strong impact on your emotions.

Przypisy

1. ↑ The Neurology of Traumatic "Dissociative" Amnesia: Commentary and Literature Review, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, Ph.D., Child Abuse & Neglect, 1999
2. ↑ Consciousness and Abilities of Dream Characters Observed during Lucid Dreaming, dr Paul Tholey, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989
3. ↑ Post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences: A critical overview of population and clinical studies, Anna Castelnovo i wsp., Journal of Affective Disorders, 2015
4. ↑ Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations: Pathological Phenomena?, Maurice M. Ohayon i wsp., The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2018
5. ↑ Disorders of arousal from non-REM sleep | ICD-11, World Health Organisation, 2018
6. ↑ Sleepwalking disorder | ICD-11, World Health Organisation, 2018

Created: 25.12.2024
Translated: 17.05.2025