The strange case of Margaret and Jack. One has a pleasant and calm demeanour, is chatty and doesn’t want to be a bother, and suffers from a brain seizure condition. And the other is challenging, sarcastic, defensive and does not have a brain issue. The scans of Margaret shows the brain irregularity that cause the seizures, Jack’s scan does not show any irregularities at all and was viewed as normal, despite him being decidedly obnoxious as a person.

Now, here’s the twist, and why I found this interesting. Margaret and Jack are the same person. A case of multiple personality disorder they say, but with no explanation on how two different physiologies may present themselves depending on the ‘state of mind’ and how they can actually co-exist in the same body and switch between the two. Leading one to think that having a state of mind is as powerful as they say, and realising that the placebo effect as it’s named, can indeed steer a person’s fate, because they believe it to be so real, that it makes it real. Well, they do say create your own reality, and all things start with an idea. Split personality disorders are interesting though, even more so once you factor in things like this, because while you might believe it’s one person having some identity issues, seems like perhaps for some there is something else going on. In times past, we might think they were possessed rather than putting them into a psychiatric category. Easy to miss something if you don’t know what you are looking for, and you have a multitude of other options to choose first, perhaps then getting rather lost in what then transpires from interference, medication, incarceration and what they call therapy.

But how is it that a person can become fractured into more than one? For the above case, I guess it’s possible it was the brain issue causing the problem, but goes no way to explain how it can switch the physical body to match the mental state. Sounds like a shape-shifter type of move to me, which again leads to more thoughts on whether things we have noted as Myths, Monsters and Legends may have slightly more grounding in reality than we might think. Also makes me think of the strange Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde tale. And my article Soul Harvester gives an idea of the soul being split too, or is able to be. So, might the soul and identity be more related than we think, and even only one of those is accepted as a real thing, and just as consciousness gets questioned and cannot be defined or explained properly, so too does the soul.

And we focus on identity as the basis of the definable reality we find ourselves in, and how we function around others who we also like to ‘identify’ as something. Like the constant need for you to have a name, a number or a code so you can be identified and categorised, and now they have put into people’s heads that they need to choose a physical reality as well as a mental one. With their technological advances in virtual reality probably hoping to help make that part of the future where it will be Virtually Real Life. It seems though that maybe our brains are capable of creating more than just ideas, and what we imagine in mind, may be more than just a thought if it then goes on to create reality from that. So, we try as best we can to define the difference between real and illusion, or reality and fiction, and unravel what it is that makes us who we are, or who we think we are. But if the brain can indeed create physical manifestations of what should only be thoughts, well, that raises more than a few questions, one or two of which was probably covered in Creating A Nightmare Reality. Or is it that there is indeed something in the physical realm which alters our mental perceptions and then our body adapts to the mental changes? I haven’t decided at this stage, and although will be giving it more thought, will be even more mindful of those thoughts, as you never really know where they are going and what they are creating…

(c) K Wicks