Do you have an Internal Dialogue?

A book I ordered on Tuesday already arrived! (it's Thursday as I type this). I can't get over how quickly it arrived and part of me feels like the Universe is keen for me to dive into it and keep myself in the magic of the Reclaiming Tradition as this book is the very first of the core classes of the Reclaiming Tradition:

I am going to really try to take my time with it though and dive deep and do the work. Also, I still have a 4,000- to 10,000-word literature review to write by next Thursday so not really any time to begin to dive into this just yet. When I do start to dive into it though I will blog about my thoughts and experiences as I go.

I had so much to say, to write about while I was at WitchCamp and now my blog feels boring and lacklustre. My life has gone back to the mundane, overworked, too high mental load that leaves me with little time and what time I do have I am exhausted from the mental load. Today's mental load brought to you buy hours working on my literature review trying to synthesize the details of all the studies I've read so far on the Inner Experience by way of inner-speech, internal monologue and internal dialogues. It sucks at my bandwidth and leaves me depleted, especially knowing I only have one week left until it is due. This literature review will be my life over the next 7 days.

It is a fascinating topic though and the study of "The Phenomena of Inner Experience" by Christopher L. Heavey & Russell T. Hurlburt (2007) talks about 16 different ways of experiencing our inner world but this study focuses on the top five most common occurrences:

1. Inner seeing

2. Internal dialogue.

3. Feelings - such as I am feeling sad/angry/scared.

4. Unsymbolised thinking (without words or symbols)

5. Sensory thinking - as in experiencing what you are feeling, such as I feel cold right now.

I found this topic interesting because I watched the Netflix Series "You" and then the internet lost its mind discovering not everyone has an internal monologue like the main character. As someone who vividly experiences not just an inner monologue but an inner dialogue of many different I-positions (I-as mother, I-as friend, etc) as well as internal arguments with people like the kids' father, I, too, could not wrap my head around the idea of this Unsymbolised Thinking. It just does not compute in my world. Just as, for those who only experience Unsymbolised Thinking, it doesn't compute that people might walk around with this internal monologue their whole lives. Next thing you know, I have a literature review I need to do for my research topic in my Arts Therapy bachelor degree and what better thing to research than the way people experience their internal worlds?

So, let's have a poll (I would add an actual poll here but I'm not that blog savvy yet so you'll just have to put your vote in a comment for me). How do you experience your internal world the most out of the above 5 options? Or do you regularly have a combination of them? For instance, I always have some kind of internal dialogue happening, I often have inner seeing (or visualisation) happening at the same time and I am sometimes experiencing feelings. What about you? How do you experience your internal world? Do you hear yourself or even someone else speak words in your mind? Do you only see pictures? Perhaps you just know things without any conscious awareness of words or symbols. Inquiring minds would love to know how you experience your internal world. Maybe it's something completely different to the five options from above. Tell me! Tell me how you experience your inner world.