The Subconscious Mind and The Conscious Mind

Just as every living organism poops, every living organism also sleeps. Speaking of which, can you remember the moment you woke up? What were your first thoughts once waking up? Did you experience a brief struggle in understanding your identity and who you were? And at the moment everything slowly comes flooding back, but why? Perhaps for a moment you piece together a dream that you had the night before…

You were dreaming of an expedition to the Alps. It turns out that you and your friends are the worlds best cave explorers, and now you’d like to expand your cave adventures into the territory of the unknown. While flipping through some pictures online, you discover an unexplored cave somewhere in the high Alps and decide to go on a new adventure with your friends to that very cave. After getting ready for the adventure, everything is going according to plan. The expedition unfolded beautifully. The weather was great, your friends were excited, and you’ve never felt more alive. For the most part, every expedition was rewarding and fun but this time something about the cave seemed to raise hairs on your skin. You couldn’t understand why. You decide it was nothing more than a little nervousness. Maybe you were just overthinking it because it was your first unexplored cave.

After arriving at the cave, everyone begins unpacking their equipment and begin to dress into their gear. But despite everything, there was still something in the back of your mind urging you not to go. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. You brush it off as irrational jitters, and besides, it is the first unexplored cave that you and your friends have ever explored, and you could encounter anything in there. Perhaps it’s an ancient site where our ancestors painted beautiful portraits of the landscape? Perhaps it was a pirate's gold cellar, where booby traps and maps were scattered on the floor, just waiting for us to discover it and become wealthy and rich. If anything, this should be an exciting adventure more than a jittery experience. You’re with your friends and if anything were to happen, you would have each other in even the most pressing emergencies.

Your friends begin their descent into the cave. You turn a rounded corner and find a large cavern just feet away from the entrance. You’re stunned. There are bones everywhere. The air is musty and the smell of rotting flesh seems to greet each person with a sense of terror. You’re not the first to discover this place, in fact, you’re probably not alone in this place, there’s something else here.

Just as you enter the cavern, your eye catches a distant figure. It's figure barely visible on the far side of the cavern. From within the cave, several bones fall from a stone outcrop making loud and distinct noises that only bones could make. As it tumbled down the stone face, they rattled to a halt on the cave floor. Something in the depths of the dark cave had knocked over a pile of bones and everyone stopped talking and moving as if to acknowledging the creepiness of the sound “Did you see that over there? Something moved…” A friend had whispered. Just as the words fell out of his mouth, he points a light in the direction to reveal a large mass of tangled hair hunched over a large archway towards the end of the cave. It had the shape of a human, but it was larger; It was even too large to be a bear or any other animal in this part of the world. Suddenly, overrun with fear, you turn around and run in the opposite direction. A large roar followed by several blood-curdling screams came out from behind you as your friends were paralyzed with fear and weren't as quick.

You run and keep running, as you hear the voices of your friends diminish one by one, gargling and screaming until there was no more. Every piece of your being is overrun with fear. Gasping as your lungs heave and push for dear life. Your body moving faster than it has ever moved before. A part of your mind begins to think that you’ve outrun this troll, and just to be sure you glance behind your shoulder only to see a bloody mass of hair, a small rounded head and bloodied mouth pummeling towards you with its black claws closing and opening as if anticipating your flesh locked in its grip. You turn around almost stunned in horror and heave your body upward towards the top of the mountain. You’re running up and around large boulders and scrambling up beyond every rock and blade of grass as you pull yourself up and up and up.

You continue running and climbing and climbing until you reach the very top of the mountain. You stop for a moment and study the environment. You notice a particular and all too conveniently placed artifact. A large coffee container sitting out in the open as if it was waiting for you. You don’t wonder how it got there, or what its purpose is, all that you could think of was the troll and you didn’t have time to relax! The troll was coming after you, the same troll that killed your friends and it was heaving up towards the top of the mountaintop where you were waiting. If you didn’t act fast enough, you would be next. Before jumping into the container, you glance over the edge of a cliff to see the large and bloodied troll moving closer and closer. It's movement uninterrupted by the boulders and snow. Its blood-curdling scream pierces the air sending shivers down your spine.

Without another moment to spare, you jump into the container and seal yourself away, and suddenly you’re at your high school reunion. You see Mrs. Jackson, your evil math teacher, talking with the vice principal and she’s pointing in your direction with a horrified look on her face. An unsettling feeling falls over you. It’s as if there was there was something on your mind that you can’t remember… You look down to see a cup of fruit punch in your hand and take a drink only to look over at your friend and discover a huge and massive hairy body standing above you. The troll is right there, towering in front of you with its blood-drenched face and open mouth.

You’re paralyzed with fear, your heart is racing, your eyes wide open and your mouth screaming. It reaches out and grasps you with its claws. You can feel them digging into your flesh. You look into its eyes to see two green beads and bloodshot white eyes that are nestled in a thick coat of bloody hair. It pulls your head up towards its face and places your head into its mouth. You feel the teeth press into your skull and hear the heartbeat of the animal pounding slowly in its mouth. Its teeth begin sinking into your flesh and your scream turns into a bloody gurgle of desperation as your body is pulled in the opposite direction and your neck snaps off the spinal cord. Your tendons becoming tight and tearing like strings ripping out of an overplucked guitar string. Just then you shoot up and out of your bed and you’re screaming until you pause and realize that it was all a dream.

Now you’re awake with the feeling of terror and adrenaline pumping through your veins. After waking, your head is pounding you’re happy that it’s over. You sigh in relief as you realize that it was just a dream. There was never any troll, there was never any danger, and there was never any reason to be terrified in the first place. It was just a dream. But the dream was a powerful one and it left an impression that doesn’t seem to leave you, even after days later when you thought it might disappear. You’re still thinking about it on your drive to school, you’re still thinking about it during your lunch break and you’re thinking about it while at home and eating dinner. Something about the dream left an unsettling feeling in your gut and it doesn’t leave. But why?

The remarkable ability of the mind to produce such a strong response from your body alone is enough to make you wonder what's going on. It’s a sensation that some people spend their entire lives searching for. An adrenaline junky would consider yourself to be lucky. For the most part, people consider themselves irritated with their brain's ability to create such convincing terrors while at the same tame overly delighted with a dream that leaves the experience with feelings of elation and euphoria. Either way, your brain has a convincing power, and it is nestled deep within your subconscious. To be honest, no one wants to be convinced that a snow troll is trying to kill them, but even more irritating; the idea that your brain is creating these experiences without any desire from the conscious mind, and even further irritating is the convincing qualities of the subconscious mind to completely encapture the conscious mind without ever being aware of it in the first place.

Is there some kind of mystery locked away in our heads or is it just in our heads? Is there a difference between consciousness and subconscious? It seems that within the realm of the subconscious, rules, and logic do not apply, but the conscious experience still remains. The body trusts the conscious mind, but yet the conscious mind doesn’t seem to trust the subconscious mind, or at least the conscious mind doesn’t trust the subconscious mind until it has left its influence. Although the real question arises out of what has the strongest effect? Does conscious have a stronger sway over the subconscious or is the subconscious in complete control at all times? By this I mean, until you wake up from the subconscious world of dreaming, you are fully convinced that the dream is real and without any “deception” you take it for reality, does this mean the subconscious is superior to the conscious mind? But why must the conscious mind remain trusting and open to experience the subconscious mind as if we had no choice? In reality, we believe that we’re fully in control and take reality as it comes. We believe our decisions are based on logic and experience where the only influence is reality and our understandings of it. However, all of this is gone and nulled in the subconscious mind, which overrides the conscious constructs of ego, logic, space and time.

What exactly is the purpose of the subconscious mind? It doesn’t seem to live in an area that represents who we are. It seems to lack the ability to satisfy our immediate needs and desires, and instead, it seems to act as a tool of experience. It’s as if our conscious mind is the subject of our subconscious mind, where objective reality truly exists. Without dreaming of a snow troll and experiencing such a shock, we may never know the depth of such a danger until we have faced it in reality, but by then the inadequate and ill-prepared are left to die and the rest are too nervous to wait for the next move. Some would say that the subconscious acts as a sorter, something that goes through all the memories of your collective experience and pulls from it meaning and definition for which it applies in the subconscious landscape.

What’s going on here? Is this just a mechanism that has developed over millions of years to ensure our existence or does it serve as a pointless factor in our evolution? An accident?

Some would claim that all images and experience perceived within a dream have some kind of related conscious experience. For instance, if I see an apple there must be a conscious experience that is attempting to communicate some kind of deeper meaning that otherwise couldn’t be communicated through any other medium. Let's say you have a message to a friend, and you struggling to convince your friend that a snow troll is on its way to kill us. But at that moment your friend is unamused and doubtful. Perhaps the subconscious serves as a link in the real world and the imaginary world where if the subconscious understands something that is fundamental to reality it will present it to you in the most believable way to create a change? Perhaps it’s trying to communicate that reality is unpredictable and serves as a reminder that we cannot become relaxed and complacent?

But enough of the speculation, let's talk logic. From what we’ve observed, every animal must undergo some kind of sleep, whether that’s shutting off one side of the brain, going into hibernation or simply closing your eyes and falling asleep. The fact is we all sleep and it’s something that none of us can live without. Up until recently, we’ve discovered a unique characteristic of sleeping. It is the process of shutting off our brains and allowing cerebral fluid to soak into our neural networks along blood vessels where the toxic material is released and carried away into the bloodstream. These toxins are byproducts from the cellular function in the brain, and sleep is an essential part of clearing up debris that would otherwise impair cognitive function. That’s why it is absolutely necessary to get enough sleep each and every night, for if we don’t, the toxic material will build up in the brain where it then begins to damage delicate neural networks. It will do this until the inevitable death of the brain but most people cannot fight the onslaught of sleep anyway and fall asleep to avoid such damage.

But why does the brain remain active while this process is occurring? There must be another function to sleep. Why do we dream, and what is its purpose? One very good indication for what the brain is trying to accomplish can be found in reviewing every moment upon waking. When most people wake up from sleeping they experience an in-between state. A place where dreams are still fresh but yet difficult to access, whereas reality appears equally distant until memories flood in and bring you back into conscious reality as if nothing ever changed.

There are a couple distinct differences between waking reality versus subconscious reality. A series of checks and balances occur in order to understand where you are, and why you’re there. The kind of checks and balances that allow someone to form proofs of reality, proofs of anything substantial. Clearly, memory is a very important indication for sleeping as it is plenty available upon conscious demand but is lacking in the sleeping subconscious world because forming any kind of proofs requires access to conscious memory. The very proofs that are needed to assure yourself that you’re dreaming, but unfortunately that access is unavailable throughout the dream until the conscious is freed from the dream state.

When the conscious is in a dream state, understanding where you are, who you are, what you are and any other quantifiable understanding is completely void of existence. You can feel like you’re something and you can feel as if there is something substantial occurring and maybe even feel as if what you’re experiencing something important, but you can never truly create a proof that allows yourself a sense of identity to step into and become conscious without an all-ruling influence of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind does not care about quantifiable and physical things like we do in waking conscious reality, but instead, it seems to operate on emotional undercurrents and only emotional undercurrents. Emotions do not require proofs, even upon waking conscious reality. A distinct difference between emotions and logic is how they can operate nearly independent of one another but both exist and work together to create a reality that is more subjective to ego and identity than it is for understanding objective realities. Like that upon which you experience in the subconscious reality. Nothing has any true meaning until the subjective self can apply itself upon retrospective analysis, only available in the conscious perception when the subconscious has not locked conscious memory as so that it can create proofs of reality and determine where it is.

The moment you wake up, the strongest indication of what was occurring is the lack of memory, the heightened emotional stimulus and an overall confusion that lasts for however long it takes until you’re drinking coffee again, in the shower again or whatever else is required for you to wake up. But if every organism must undergo a form of sleep, then is there a unique distinction between their sleeping states and our sleeping states?

One common occurrence in sleep is stillness and a lack of external awareness. Every animal experiences this, but do they experience a form of emotions like us? Turns out, yes animals can feel the same way that we do, the only difference between an animal and us are the abilities to form complex ideas and understandings of the world. When we wake up from a dream, we are given access to our memories to form a subjective ego, our higher logic centers for rationality and understanding complexities of the physical world and then we can begin to use our external perceptions for what we want. Whereas a more simple organism is given external stimulus, for which is enough proof for reality, and enough emotional stimuli to preserve itself.

But still, the question remains, is there another reason why animals sleep? We aren’t given many clues to what is experienced in our dreams, and perhaps its because many of us experienced our dreams through subjective lenses, and do not feel as if it belongs to us or should be given any mental review. One thing is for certain, emotions are far more reliable in terms of memory. Because of this, emotions leave a lasting effect and are stored in stronger mechanisms than conscious and logic thought. If evolution has given us anything, it is our ability to think on a higher rational objective basis to form proofs of reality, where our emotions are always there to create a subjective ego for fighting for survival while simultaneously giving us enough emotion to go to sleep every night.

Because the subconscious mind operates on a stronger basis with emotions than it does logic, we can assume that the emotional nature is very important to the brain. But why? What necessitates emotions for every animal on the planet? Emotions are the reason we consider acting out of kindness, listening to logic, creating art, or anything else that we do as living beings. Emotions are the stuff of life, and logic is the stuff that gets us out of the tree, into a house and into new worlds of rewarding existence. It’s a tool we use in our waking conscious minds to handle and understand reality. Logic helps us make complex decisions within an even more complex world. It’s the difference between avoiding the rain because you feel awful and avoiding the rain because you know that you’ll catch a cold if you stay outside for too long. A more advanced survival mechanism that grew out of the same emotions everything else did.

It’s what separates a 'not so intelligent' choice from an intelligent choice. Our subconscious acts as a mental refinery. Where all mental basis is emotion, which the subconscious later gives complex emotional input to create better logic in the waking conscious world. This gives a renewed sense of emotional stimulus, for which doesn’t remain clear to those who experience it. Your subconscious doesn’t care about who you are, what you’re doing or how you’re doing it. If your emotional stimulus doesn’t indicate good survival characteristics, it will flag it for emotional refining, and does so within the landscape that can escape the logical proofs of which prevent your mind from making better decisions with better logic born out of the heart of your soul. And that is why life is but a dream.