Boffins crack secret of self identity - You're not who you think you are.

An age old debate on the continuity of consciousness has finally been settled.

For centuries, mankind has nervously pondered whether a person who wakes up in the morning is the same person who went to sleep the previous night, or whether it is only the body which remains the same.

Since John Locke first proposed that an individual's personal identity can only be defined as a continuity of consciousness, and not their body or soul, dozens of Rhyl on Sea residents have driven themselves insane with fear and drug-fuelled sleep deprivation, convinced that they will cease to exist when they drop off for forty winks.

Boffins told the Seaside News that the human brain can exist in three states - awake, unconcious dreaming and unconcious without dreaming.

It is with this last state that identity switching can occur.

"When you wake up in the morning, you are not the same person that you were the night before," explained Alexander Mortimore-Jones, tenured professor of psychology and confusion at the North Wales University's Rhyl on Sea campus.

"Everything that you think has been done by you, up to that point, was in fact done by somebody else in your body and with your thinking machinery.
"But in reality,with the morning readmission of conscious thought into your head, you have in effect become an entirely new person. A new and tenous string of consciousness, with choices already made and situations to deal with, but which will last only until the onset of sleep, before being dragged screaming from what you think of as your mind. If you made a decision yesterday and regret it today, don't worry. It wasn't you who made it."

Dr Mortimore - Jones's experiments centred around a full spectrum analysis of volunteers brains as they slept.

"What we saw was quite clear," he expounded. "There was a state of peaceful dreaming as the days memories were commited to transition storage. But what happened after that was horrifying.
"As the processing centres shut down, we noted what could only be described as complete death of self, as the personality was forced from the volunteers' minds. The trauma of this - and it was traumatic - was not committed to the transition storage, and so was not recalled by the incoming foreign entity, which accessed the mind and took over the self through a series of early morning vivid dreaming.

"So it is quite right to say that you are not responsible for your previous actions and thoughts, as you were brought into existence only today, and will perish by tomorrow."

The North Wales University Committee on nomenclature has decided on the term 'revenants' to decribe these transient entities, after spending several hours weeping over their imminent and unavoidable deaths as individuals.

Dr Mortimore - Jones's ground breaking research has already proved popular with criminal defence solicitors, as demonstrated this morning when 43 year old Gerald Talargoch was aquitted of killing his entire family by smothering them in caffeine-doped hot chocolate.

"It was quite clearly another consciousness revenant which was responsible," claimed Robert Coed Maes, defending. "And it would be quite wrong, given that this man will only live until he next sleeps, to deprive him of his liberty for any period of time whatsoever."

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