Conscious of the Unconscious

Hi. I know it’s been a while.

This year has been a bit topsy-turvy in terms of life – lots going on with the family, and my day job has been incredibly demanding (though interesting), involving quite a bit of international travel. I took a short break from writing to gather my thoughts, sharpen the axe, and prepare for my next project – which I’m glad to say is now well underway.

Excuses out of the way, I wanted to say something about consciousness. It’s a theme that features in my latest manuscript, and as such, it’s been very much top of mind lately (a rare case where the use of literally seems appropriate). I won’t go into too much detail at this point – the narrative is still fairly embryonic, and I doubt I’ll have anything resembling a first draft until well into next year.

But a couple of other things have made the subject particularly interesting for me at the moment.

Firstly, we’ve been working our way through the fantastic Apple TV series Severance. It tells the story of individuals who work for a mysterious company where their work and out-of-work minds are severed. For various reasons, each person effectively becomes two distinct versions of themselves, with neither having knowledge of the other. This leads to all sorts of engaging explorations of consciousness and what actually defines a person. I’m simplifying the plot a lot here, and we’re currently midway through the second season, so I genuinely don’t know where it’s heading. That said, big shout-out to the folk horror influence that emerges at this stage – completely unexpected and very much my thing.

Secondly – and more personally – I had hernia surgery last weekend, which meant I experienced general anaesthesia for the first time in my life. Thankfully, everything went well. But what struck me was the sheer speed at which the anaesthetic took effect. One moment I was chatting with a nurse about traffic on the A55 to Wales, and the next – what felt like an eye-blink later – I was in a new room, speaking with a different nurse about how I was looking forward to a coffee after surgery. She told me it had already happened.

I couldn’t quite get my head around the near-instantaneous switch from one perspective and location to another. It reminded me of those moments in Severance when the characters transition between their work-life and personal-life mindsets. It happens instantly as they ride the elevator between floors.

We are physical beings, of course – but what makes us us is largely contained within our skulls. It’s represented by what we feel, think, and experience day to day. Without our consciousness, we’re just shells. In the context of my manuscript, my thinking drifts to how consciousness might continue in the absence of that shell – the body – but that’s entirely speculative (for now, at least!).

In my first novel, The Madness of the Faithful, the story explores faith and the belief in a life after death. One of the characters refers to the philosopher Epicurus and his proposition that death is not to be feared because it represents a return to non-existence. To fear death, he argues, is the same as fearing the time before birth – when we were also non-existent.

It remains a considerable fear for many, and it drives much of human behaviour. But it’s a strange thing – to fear non-existence. FOMO on an epic scale. At its core, it’s really a fear of losing our consciousness. But what is it to lose that? Without consciousness, there is nothing. We are meat and flesh – biology. To lose our consciousness is to lose ourselves.

It really is the most precious commodity humanity possesses – though, sadly, it may not be appreciated enough. That’s not to say consciousness is an easy burden to carry. Under the weight of human experience and the influence of others, many struggle. But taking a moment to reflect on the incredible preciousness of what it is – and what it represents – might go some way, for many of us, to at least begin appreciating how lucky we are to experience this life.