The lucid dreaming thing seems similar. I wasn't trying to have a lucid dream, but I might have gotten myself into that position by accident. I went to a sleep clinic for answers, and the therapist was disinterested and overworked. He said the problem was anxiety. But of course the anxiety was the effect, not the cause of the problem. The problem was that the sleep cycle could evidently go so accidentally awry.

I don't think the inner narrative is mister obvious, exactly. It's reporting the consensus reached after all the neurons are competing for attention. There's nothing obvious about the outcome of those interactions. The many sides of ourselves evolve and compete in a dynamic interplay, and conscious awareness spotlights the signals that win out. So we shouldn't identify just with the spotlight or the inner narration, but with the whole brain (and body) and all the sides of ourselves, all the signals that add up to the mountain of mental processing.

We may not think in words or in images but in neuralese, whatever that is. The inner voices and personalities might be models or simplifications of what's going on in the brain, as the video below explains.