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It’s still a bit strange to think of what we experience as a story rather than as reality, because we treat it so much as reality, as something absolute and unambiguous. I suppose it would be difficult to deal with if we didn’t treat it as such. If our conscious brain had to make sense of all of the input we received, it would probably be entirely overwhelming and the world would be a very strange and confusing place. Still, it leaves me wondering how much of the commonality in human experience is based on learned terminology and cultural ideas and how much of it really is the same? On the other hand, it is sort of comforting to think that we are individuals, at least in the sense that we have different perceptions of the world.

The fact that there is a distinction between unconscious processing and things that we are aware, things connected to the I-function makes sense in that our behavior is not always related to our perception of the world.  Possibly this has something to do with phobias. People can never really explain why they are afraid of heights or crowded rooms or open spaces, they just are, to the point that it hinders their normal functioning. Maybe that fear is so disconnected from the I-function that it can’t be accessed by it at all. This might also help us make better sense  of mental illness. Perhaps people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe anxiety simply have stories that are so radically different from those of other people that they cannot function well in society. Do anti-psychotics and other such medications then have some effect on the stories a person's I-function tells them? How exactly do mental illnesses affect perception anyway?