To discover if people you know, or if you, yourself, have a normal version of multiple personality, note puzzling things and ask about memory gaps, routinely.

I sympathize with people who visit this blog and find it amusing, but always get stuck on this question: If a normal version of multiple personality is so common—over 90% of novelists and up to 30% of the general public—why haven’t you, yourself, seen it? Indeed, why don’t all the novelists just admit that they have it and end the controversy?

Why don’t most novelists admit it? First of all, if they do realize they have it, they fear that admitting it would label them as mentally ill, since there is no consensus that multiple personality does have a normal version. Second, most novelists have rationalizations; for example, that the voice they hear is their “muse” (not an alternate personality) and the source of prewritten work is their “unconscious.” Third, the regular personality of most people with multiple personality is mostly unaware of it, because awareness is compartmentalized in the various alternate personalities.

So how can you discover if anyone you know has multiple personality? Routinely ask everyone you know if they have had memory gaps. If you don’t want to ask everyone, then ask only those who seem to you or themselves to have had a puzzling inconsistency (which would be due to the various alternate personalities, incognito).

Another way of asking about memory gaps is to ask if things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but they don’t remember doing it.

If you ask such questions of most people, they will either not know what you are talking about, or, to be accommodating, they will answer with some kind of irrelevant ordinary experience. But you will eventually make this inquiry of someone whose answer does raise the possibility of multiple personality. You will realize that something mysterious has been going on.

Now, some people find the very idea of multiple personality to be spooky. And if neither you nor the person you were questioning wishes to go any further, you don’t have to. Moreover, alternate personalities, themselves, usually like their privacy, and may be thinking that you should mind your own business, anyway.

But if both you and the other person want to pursue it, it is sometimes very easy to do, once you know something about an alternate personality, which was the purpose of asking about those memory gaps. You want to know something that happened during the period of time that the person’s regular personality does not remember.

To take an example I have previously discussed, suppose a person finds a poem among their personal papers, which nobody else could have written, but they don’t write poems, and they don’t remember writing it: the memory gap is the period of time in which they must have written it; perhaps when they thought they had been asleep.

The poem, then, is a marker for the existence and interests of an alternate personality. If you persist in discussing the poem, you will get to a point that only the relevant alternate personality will be interested in the subject and have the answers. And then you will notice a change in the person’s demeanor, interests, and knowledge. You are now speaking to the alternate personality, who may or may not have its own name, but will have it own memories and sense of personhood. And when you then leave the subject of the poem and address the person by their regular name, you will see the switch back to the regular personality, who will have a memory gap for your conversation with the poem-writing personality.

If you, yourself, are the person who may have multiple personality, then the initial inquiry will be somewhat different. If you hear voices, which you have not previously thought of in terms of multiple personality, you may ask the voices to tell you more of what they are about; for example, do they see themselves as people in their own right, who have memories and opinions of their own.

If you already keep a diary or journal, you may look through it to see if there are any entries that you do not identify with as your own. Sometimes alternate personalities have different handwriting or use different colored ink or even sign their own name, but it may be only the attitude and what is said that indicates it was written by a different consciousness. 

If you get material for your novels from your “unconscious,” put yourself in your writing frame of mind and ask, with an attitude of gratitude, if anyone who has been helping you in this way would like to take some of the credit. Invite them to answer by voice or in writing.

In conclusion, keep in mind that whatever you find is nothing new, since multiple personality starts in childhood. It has been going on for many years, and will continue to go on, whether you know more about it or not. And if you or the other person or the alternate personalities are not ready, wait until you are.