Chapter Two - On Consciousness

For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.                                           

-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

This chapter on consciousness takes up the concept of different kinds of consciousness as well as unconsciousness. Conscious thinking tends to be linear whereas unconscious thinking takes advantage of parallel processing. Proust described the changes in consciousness that occur as we fall asleep and are no longer focused on the external world, but are subject to the free wanderings of our less conscious minds. Of course, Freud was interested in this as he proposed the concept of a dynamic unconscious that influences our conscious experience without our awareness. It is that dynamic and conscious that is responsible for slips of the tongue. For example, if I mean to say I am going on an exotic vacation but I actually say I'm going on erotic vacation. Or in another example Bella Abzug was quoted as saying "We need laws that protect everyone - men and women, straights and gays, regardless of sexual perversion... ugh, persuasion". You get the drift.