The ability to shift back and forth between simple immersion and immersion-via-witnessing is what seems to define your status as free subject, it is not just the excess over experience in knowing that it is you who is experiencing, but the freedom to shift focus between these two modes. Actually there is far less of this freedom than you think, not only can't you maintain it as you move in and out of various states in the course of a day, but often you cannot tell if you are really witnessing or if you only just think you are, that is, have only added on some conventional feelings of self-consciousness, reduced it to shorthand. The problem is not that witnessing is weak but that it is mislocated onto the autobiographical self. This is an error but a productive one. Stream-of-consciousness as a literary technique arose out of a fusion of art forms in the late nineteenth century and over the course of the next hundred years diffused into literary and mainstream fiction and via TV and movies into everyday speech and modes of thought. Every new turn of phrase that spreads virally casts a fleeting beam of light across the face of that persistent illusion, the self who is both participant and witness, and consolidates its claim to existence. The urge to substantiate this claim, its very strength and persistence, the extraordinary satisfaction that arises from its fleeting victories and the black despair that attends its collapses, which happen so easily and so predictably, should alert us to its futility. It is based a category error that would be laughable if it were not so tragic.