On The Subconscious (Another Excerpt From "Things I Have Learned")

Unconsciousness is your mind on standby mode. Most external input is disabled or turned down really low. But you never stop thinking. Or rather, the thought processes keeps going on, but at some point there just stops being a “you” that’s thinking it. I would imagine dreams then as quite likely the ego’s attempt to exert some sort of narrative control over the stream of white noise think-babbling, dropping a protagonist into the back alleys of the subconscious. And really, who the hell knows what’s there? The subconscious is the “wrong side of the tracks” of the mind, where the unseen workers live in tenement buildings, and in every dark alleyway is some cold, unemployed old subroutine or memory just waiting to pounce on a hapless ego to vent its frustrations.

Or, less dramatically, dreams are quite likely the equivalent of the songs you might hear in your head when there’s white noise (like a window fan or TV static) playing. Significantly, this white noise effect most often happens while you are falling asleep, as if your mind’s ability to transform noise into signal increases as consciousness loses its control. A good image: the trains of thought running amok when the conductor (consciousness) passes out on the controls. Or, another view of the subconscious: the subconscious is like the Windows 3 \WINDOWS\ directory, where every file needed by every program ever run on that system collected. These files would stay on after the programs are no longer installed, obsolete leaves in a forest of possibly-relevant files. Every so often Windows users would simply have to reinstall the operating system and start fresh because the \WINDOWS\ directory became too bogged down by useless files. I wonder what the equivalent for re-installing your subconscious would be?