BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Thursday, September 17, 2020

“A Christmas Carol” (post 2) by Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s Visitation Dream


At the end, Scrooge wakes up in his own bed. He had gone to sleep Christmas Eve and woken up on Christmas Day. When he’d met the ghosts or spirits, he’d been asleep, which does not prove they were not real, since sleep may just be a good time for ghosts and spirits to visit.


Of interest here is that “visitation dreams” may seem more real than real:


https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/mystery-behind-ghost-visits-dreams

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dream-catcher/201110/visitation-dreams


Before looking up the above, I had not heard of visitation dreams. And the idea that they can seem “more real than real” reminds me of how some novelists say they experience their characters when they are writing.


Is part of the fiction writer’s creative process a sort of visitation dream (the visitors for both Scrooge and fiction writers being alternate personalities)?

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