Is that different from having an imaginary conversation "in your head" with an imagined person?

i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind".

Could that be a temporary virtual consciousness (like a virtual CPU)?

It’s just time sharing, we can’t really do parallel thought. But signal processing does happen in parallel obviously, often times not even having to “interrupt” the CPU (e.g. reflexes can react before the signal reaches the brain, but the brain itself also has different parts, so coordinating walking won’t disallow thought)