The subconscious is powerful. It has the ability to control human beings. What a bold statement to open a small article with, but bare with me. What is the subconscious? Well, there is no exact definition for it really. In fact, the first few lines of the 'subconscious' page on wikipedia read, “the term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings.” You see, it's so intangible we can't even define it, and I think this is the source of its power.
To start understanding the subconscious, and its power, it's a good idea to first understand the conscious. Conscious is probably best defined as our awareness of any subjective, or objective, experience in any given time. It's what gives us our personal identity. We experience everything using our five senses, and those experiences are each given a specific meaning unique to everyone of us depending on our beliefs, values, and mentality. It's a process were we absorb variables in a scientifically-tangible manner and then transfer them to an intangible medium in our minds for storage and future retrieval. It's something we never stop involuntarily doing as long as we live. In that sense, having another parallel subprocess seems impossible, even crazy. Can there possibly be anything out there that is NOT part of our endless conscious process? There, lies the mystery of the subconscious (note that 'lies' can have two meanings in this context – both r equally appropriate, I guess).
Now, we can start understanding the subconscious. As opposed to conscious, 'awareness' is definitely not part of it. Neither does it involve absorbing experiences through our senses. Simply because anything that falls in those categories would then be considered part of the conscious process. What else is there? What can seize falling into one of those categories? Well, a lot actually! How many times have you heard, and casually used, mysterious and inexplicable notions such as 'the sixth sense' or the '4th dimension' or a 'haunted house' or 'voodoo' or 'angels & demons', etc. True or not, understandable or not, proven or not, there are things around us that don't really fall in the realm of the conscious. I personally believe, and I might be swimming in dangerous waters here, that religion is the biggest aspect of our human existence that is based, to its core, on non-conscious beliefs.
The most obvious playground for the subconscious is dreams. I often think of dreams as the subtitles omitted from our waking life. But instead of transcribing or narrating the obvious, it's all about the ambiguous and the obscure. When we are in deep sleep, we sometimes reach the phase scientifically called the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase. This is where the subconscious completely takes control, I think, and starts reading between the lines of our lives totally unsupervised by our cognitive ability or personal identity. It's during this phase where we experience a sort of vivid and disassociated form of imagination that is so intense it almost feels alive. Everything and anything is possible then, but surprisingly it all seem so real. If you've ever had that one dream of flying high and watching everything speeding underneath you, then you'd know what I mean. It just feels so real. It has been scientifically proven that during the REM phase, the release of certain neurotransmitters are completely suspended, resulting in an inability to move, which in turn prevents us from having dangerously sudden movements during our sleep. I can distinctly recall a couple of times when that system failed me, where I woke up with a sudden violent shock movement of my whole body. This is how powerful it is. Our bodies had to have a system solely designed to prevent us from responding to such subconscious dreams, and in my case and I guess few others as well, it was so powerful it actually overcame that system.
So, if you think that my opening statement about the subconscious is a rather overstatement, just think of the magnitude of power you would have if you discover or invent a device that can influence people's dreams, inception-style.
