To Think Awake and Asleep

to think awake and asleep:

we have few words as signifiers for the various states of what is perhaps the most important component of our minds, our consciousness and its cycle of change. for something that is complex, that could be considered to have many different states, we commonly reduce this to two words, "awake" and "asleep", or "conscious" and "unconscious". is it really that simple? or is this a prime example of the poverty of the language in its current form?

let us deconstruct the situation. when we are awake we are self consciously thinking, our thoughts are clearer, and so the word "think" is linked to the word "consciousness". now i seek to dismiss the most common false assumption which springs from this, that when we are asleep or unconscious we are not thinking at all, that consciousness equates to thinking and unconsciousness to no thinking, like a dead animal in our sleep, so to speak. indeed, i posit that we are thinking all the time, that a fundamental part of the self is the eternal thinker, that we can never stop thinking, even in our sleep.

however, the quality, so to speak, of what our thought is when we are asleep may be very different. words that you would associate with thinking whilst awake are "clear", "focused", "distinct", "conceptual". words that you would associate with thinking whilst asleep or unconscious might be "blurry", "cloudy", "thematic", "moody", "emotional", "stuck", etc. generally, thinking when awake could be slow or fast. when asleep without dreaming, it seems slow. thought is most volatile upon falling asleep and waking up and when dreaming.

you would think, at the very least, this subject deserves a greater, more precise vocabulary, to eliminate the misconceptions arising from the over simplistic present binary terms, "awake" and "asleep".

CLEARCHARGE