Anosognosia

I remain fascinated by the condition known as anosognosia, in which a person suffering a disability is unaware that he or she has it and I can’t help but entertain the possibility that I could be suffering a particularly virulent form of it.

For instance, it seems reasonably plausible to me that I could be living in some kind of Truman Show scenario, in which everyone around me, including family members, friends, students—current and former, shopkeepers, coffeeshop baristas, and even my dog are all hiding some key bit of information about me from me and nothing I could ever do would induce them to spill the beans.

I’m pretty sure that information would have to be something like the revelation that time and personal identity are an illusion; that is, everybody in the world but me knows that there are no discrete selves; human beings, such as they are, are disembodied spirits who can inhabit different bodies at different times; consequently time travel is completely possible (in fact, it’s utterly commonplace), so that when you’re in a group of people, talking to say, a casual acquaintance in the year 2010, you could be—and everyone else knows it, while I don’t—actually having a conversation with the “spirit” of your “dead” mom or dad.

Of course, why this information is being kept from me is something of a mystery, (to me, that is) but everyone else knows why it must be so: it probably has something to do with the fact that, were I do be told, the entire universal superstructure that sustains this reality would come crashing apart, although why that is, I have no idea—even though, of course, everybody else does.

Now, a person might observe that talk of this sort smacks of psychotic paranoia to say the least, but see? Here we go again; maybe I am a complete and utter paranoid schizophrenic, but anosognisic I am, I just don’t know it.