Intrapersonal communication is
language use or
thought internal to the communicator. Intrapersonal communication is the active internal involvement of the individual in symbolic processing of messages. Intrapersonal communication is the thought process or communication with one person or one's self. The individual becomes his or her own sender and receiver, providing feedback to him or herself in an ongoing internal process. It can be useful to envision intrapersonal communication occurring in the mind of the individual in a model which contains a sender, receiver, and feedback loop.
Although successful communication is generally defined as being between two or more individuals, issues concerning the useful nature of communicating with oneself and problems concerning communication with non-sentient entities such as computers have made some argue that this definition is too narrow.
In Communication The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson argue that intrapersonal communication is indeed a special case of interpersonal communication, as "dialogue is the foundation for all discourse."
A particularly interesting example is that of a recently designed technique of 'interviewing' one's dream characters, particularly during lucid dreaming. In the lucid state, the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming, and can proceed to question, in-depth, each dream character, whom are necessarily understood to be part of the 'self' in either a psychological sense or in the more scientific sense of each aspect of one's dream arising from one's own brain processes.
