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What information, then does the mind use to create these symbols? The first clue comes from a number of experiments which have shown that the unconscious “emotional mind seems to be particularly susceptible to stimuli that its conscious counterpart does not have access to [but are recoverable in dreams, fantasy and free-association]” (reviewed in LeDoux, 1996: 61). In other words, the older implicit multiple emotional systems appear to “know” more about the internal and external environment than the conscious system does, merely as a matter of processing limits. The conscious system is powerful in its ability to process information in a deeply recursive and highly differentiating manner, and has access to personal autobiographical memory for comparison. This makes consciousness a very powerful differentiating device to modulate behavior. However, the abilities of consciousness make it come with a price—it is slower and also unable to process large amounts of information this way (Viamontes and Beitman, 2007; Watt and Pincus, 2004); it therefore is limited in a way implicit systems, which are relatively more “crude,” domain-specific, and ahistorical, are not. Consciousness has a high “filter” and cannot fully process everything impinging on the various implicit systems, but when the conscious system is relaxed, as in various altered states, the implicit systems reveal what they know and “think” (in rudimentary terms) about the current state of the organism and its surrounds. These systems generally have less access to personal history and are therefore more “nonself” than consciousness is.
It is probably this information that is being formulated into visuospatial metaphors by the dreaming brain and its deeper, more autonomous emotional consciousnesses—hence the conscious self, when the filter is “lowered,” gets a glimpse at these prelinguistic and affective “thoughts” of the multiple implicit systems in the deeper layers of the brain/mind as they push what they want forward and attempt to find their way into consciousness; often times such systems are at odds with each other, creating internal conflict.