“Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or doorway–and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.” (E. B. White, The Door, 1939)
I am indeed always thinking about my conscious and did always realize how one thought became another. The transitions so subtle that we don’t notice the ongoing thought processes. I will literally stop and try track down how I got from thinking about tanning to the cookie monster (“Oh I look so dark, the sand is so hot and lucky to be under the sun all the time, at least sand can’t get fat, look at me, ew, it’s the chocolate chip cookies, oh remember the cookie monster from sesame street, yes, they made it the veggie monster now for a reason!). That’s probably what I would stir up if I were laying under the sun in Florida! Well that’s what minds do. We see that in the short passage above, how ones imagination is in fact always building on and on. The mind is constantly stirring up something up, an emotion, and observation, etc. We can see that in the passage, he is jumping from one idea to another. First he is thinking about the city, and then he connects it to names, consequently thinks about different names, onto rubber and so forth. It is all his perception and his way of identifying.
The way we identify things, or the way we perceive them, is what makes everyone’s conscious special. As William James also tries to explain, these thoughts are always personal. Our conscious creates our experience; it’s personal. This is what makes our experiences unique. I may look at a table just think oh it needs to be cleaned, there are crumbs, whereas my sister will look at it and just think yes, there’s the table, I can sit and do homework. We both see a table but think different things. One may block out everything they see, and just focus on one thing that is meaningful to him or her and build on from there. Thoughts shape our experiences and our experiences may also shape them.