So. I have fictional characters who are loud and well-developed. It's good for writing, it's good because they're legitimately helpful when I need to do something but don't want to (somehow hearing it from "someone else" even if that someone else is fictional and inside my head helps), it's good because the process of constructing them has made me more empathetic towards ways of being that I didn't originally understand. (Like, I didn't get that the emotions involved in romance were so intense until I did research and tried to replicate it in a fictional dude.) Unfortunately having people in your head tends to be associated with scary and bad things like Dissociative Identity Disorder. And even for the kind of people who don't think it's scary and bad, well, the other place that thinks this is legit is the "tulpa" (misuse of a term from Tibetan Buddhism, naturally) community, and there are a frankly spectacular number of bronies there. (And, well, all the cultural stuff bronies tend to drag in. You know.) I even know exactly which brain circuitry I'm using! It's the part that lets you predict the way a good friend will react because you know them so well. (The neo-tulpa folk think that because their fictional characters claim they're conscious and separate entities that they're actually conscious and separate entities. I... disagree with that, too.) I don't think this is a problem because mental illness is 'things that make it harder for you to function' and my fictional characters actually make it easier for me to function. But all the same, you know, the popular culture concept of "crazy" is having "voices in your head"...
There are definitely people in my head. My fictional characters. Other peoples' fictional characters, if I know/identify with them enough. The Goddess Freyja. All except the last I'm 100% sure that I am fully responsible for their creation; I'm running an emulator of them, an autonomous process that predicts them. We're capable of splitting ourselves off like that; it's a really valuable trait, being able to create models of other people so we can think about what they'd do and say. The Freyja thing is quite possibly all me too, but I entertain the possibility that's not because that one came unbidden and says things to me unexpectedly that surprise me. It could just be the human's inbuilt religion circuitry working, though, or just that I'm fucking nuts, but meh.
my fictional characters deffo live in my head. How else am I supposed to plan out stories if i don't know how they react to normal life situations? (Also, drawing on fragments I have picked up from psych classes here and there, I'm pretty sure if you are you + fictional characters you've made up and someone says you have DID, they may need to reread their DSM V, so no worries on that? if you were worried. you probably weren't. anyway)
The religion circuitry thing interests me - it reminds me of how the tulpafolk theorize that when people ask themselves "what would Jesus do?" they're actually creating one of these things inside them. Most of my characters surprise me at least on occasion. Could be worse. I'd forgotten that I liked dried mangoes until one of them requested some.
Running an emulator is a good metaphor, I liken them to programs or scripts that don't have access to the operating system, myself. Which explains why they aren't 'present' when I'm fatigued/overloaded/angry/other emotion that hogs all the RAM. They sometimes do/say stuff I don't understand/plain do not make sense, and half a year down the line I get some context and suddenly everything clicks into place.
Silver Gale was my main character in the now-defunct City of Heroes. I spent something like six years years RPing her, so by now there's a part of my brain dedicated solely to thinking "how would Gale react to this situation?". She inherits some of my character traits, but in other ways in quite different from me (sometimes by design). She's a fictional character, but she can still be my sounding board or moral support if necessary.
Yep, I too have people in my head. Any character that I RP long term takes on a life of their own. I think I could probably not do this, but honestly I don´t want to. There was a time where I was too miserable to be creative and was therefore alone in my head, and I honestly can´t say I like it much. The only one you guys would know is Santino. He tends to sit in my brain and make snarky comments. -Whispers- Don´t tell anyone but Cassie is basically hm...offspring? Of Nepeta. What Nepeta become in my mind.
I can sorta relate. My OCs don't really interact with me per se, but they definitely have their own little lives and personalities, and sometimes character traits kind of just. Pop up without me thinking about them. Dunno if that's quite the same but yeah.
There's a couple of my characters that were close enough to me in the first place to sort of become part of me, so whenever I'm reacting to something there's a bit of them factored in. Also, one of my characters has really bad agoraphobia and I never did, but sometimes the part of me that's her insists that large open spaces = Bad. But that's probably more similar to the time I was working for several hours on a culture for a story that views eating as really gross and private, and then I was really offended when I was called for dinner. I don't know.
Okay so I might be an outlier here since I literally am the acting meatsuit of two (three, but poor dear Schwalbe was retired) of my characters. While I haven't played as Fauve yet, since she's new, I can definitly talk about Nono a bit (I would rather not talk about Schwalbe, it's kinda sad that I'm not her anymore. But reboot is reboot) So. Novalee Noreen Norwood, aka Nono used to be shy to the point of being almost nonverbal around strangers. She avoided conflict by running and hiding and was a weak little baby who cried a lot. Now it happens she was a dormant Fae soul and when her Red Cap side awoke she became gradually grumpier, more irritable and more crass. So now I basically have a bundle of aggression and rude to play which is hilarious because no matter how much gross white facepaint I wear people, especially men, think I'm hot and try to flirt with Nono. This is dumb as fuck because she is exclusively lesbian and actually quite grossed out by men. And she is VOCAL about that. There have been fistfights And threats to saw off arms at the elbow. And shots to knees. If I want to deal with a conflict constructively I have a nice way of doing it: Ask myself "What would Nono Do" then do precisely the opposite of what she tells me. But yeah I have that in my head with the guaranteed bi-annual 4 day takeover.
this is a very interesting thread for me 'cause, like, this thing just Does Not Happen in my brain. even though i write stuff and am rather brainweird. yet it seems to be really common and i just... don't get it. like, i bet you all'd expect me to have a very loud norm the genie in my brain but... nope. i'm the only person in my head, as far as i can tell, anyway. like, when i think about characterization and headcanons and whatever, it is very... analytical, enthusiastic but cold. i do stuff in my writing/fic just 'cause i like it, think it is intriguing or whatever, not 'cause the characters are speaking to me. there's no one in my brain telling me about themselves or reacting to stuff. it's just me, myself and i. and yeah, it's more like watching it from the distance than actually being in it. sometimes i wonder if this is why i have so much trouble creating ocs and stuff. (since this Does Not Happen to me, i might be misinterpreting it or wording things wrong. i dunno.)
There are people in my head too, but they're not my fictional characters (usually). They're aspects of my personality and history, naturally personified; they arise of their own accord, complete with names and appearances (generally human; very occasionally disembodied; and in one instance, a giant chess piece). There's absolutely no dissociation involved, although one of my people is really pissed off about that - she thinks I'm a lazy undisciplined slob, and hates the fact that she doesn't actually have a life of her own to live up to her own standards. Being in my head isn't like being in a room full of people; it's more like, if I think about my own mental state, or reflect on myself, then it 'translates' into this dialogue/interaction between all these different people. I don't hear them arguing as I face an inner conflict, but if I try to explain that conflict to somebody else, or if I recall it after the fact, I see it as an argument between the people in my head. Words I've heard to describe this, apart from the squickily-associated 'median', are 'aspecting' (apparently a little-used otherkin community term) and 'ego states' (part of a therapeutic approach known as ego state therapy). Personally, I refer to it as interopopulation. The people in my head are my interopopulus; I am interopopulated; this phenomenon is interopopulation. Anyone who likes that word is free to use it for themselves. And I agree with what Vacuum Energy said about it not being a mental illness if it doesn't cause problems; I think it's odd, but not that odd, and not inherently related to trauma or mental dysfunction. I suspect most everyone has some degree of interopopulation, sort of like synaesthesia - even if it's just a few mild associations. (Also, for the most part, my people aren't 'voices in my head', because they don't have voices. Imagining speech or sound is not something that comes naturally to me; I have to focus on it consciously. This is why my dreams are about 95% silent.)
@unknownanonymous That sounds exactly like me. Making up characters is hard. :( Of the ocs I actually use, one started as a self-insert and the other was originally made by someone else.
Nicole/Nick/N., my badass roleplaying butch turncoat spy, is so much a person who lives in my head that I actually summon them to function in my place if I feel I'm not up to a task! I have a playlist for them and if I feel I'm simply too out of spoons to do a thing I can play it and pretend I'm N. and get into their mindset to give myself a very temporary boost. I've done that, for example, one time when I really needed to read a thing for a work meeting and was struggling with it. I became N. inspecting a document for debriefing. When the meeting came, I had the answers on the tip of my tongue and absolutely managed to act like a competent, focused professional :B Other characters function like that to me too, but N. is the one I incorporate the most.
@wixbloom that is one hell of a skill to have @Mentarnes most of my characters started out as self-inserts, and then took a life of their own (is that the right term? i have no idea). they gradually did more and more things i wouldn't have done that way, and at some point become fully autonomous. or maybe it's more of myself looking through their eyes / attempting to influence their actions, and them shaking me off, but at that point, i have established connection to their surrounding verse.
