Enter two men, John and Jeffery

John: Afterwards, you know, I am mainly concerned with the cleaning. I think it's bad because immediately prior I was firing on both barrels, so to speak, my conscious and unconscious mind focused entirely at the task at hand, so to speak.
Jeffery: What does the expression “so to speak” mean? I mean, I know what it means, I just don't know what it actually means, like where it comes from.

John: The problem is that my conscious mind goes immediately to trivial wipeups and such. This is my immediate superconscious, like, the stuff that's driving my hands. And that doesn't include stuff like my conscience, you know, the little moral man in my head. I make that distinction because “conscious” and “conscience” sound so similar I wanted to make sure you heard I was talking about two different things.

Jeffery: I imagine they have the same root word. I wonder when people started with the idea of it being a little voice in your head?

John: So my conscience is left to it's own devices for a little bit there, and even though it stood idly by – or at least its protests fell on deaf ears – just a few seconds ago during the deed itself, now it gets real irate with me, gets on my case.

Jeffery: “I'm a reasonable man, get off my case” - there's another good idiom. You think people ought to have at least a basic knowledge of the entomology of every word and phrase they say? I think a lot of language gets lost if they don't.

John: And you know, when my conscience and unconscious start scheming together without the guidance of my conscious, things start to get pretty wacky. You ever have a guilty dream?

Jeffery: Can't say that I have. And I also want to say quickly that I meant to say etymology a second ago, not entomology. I just wanted to point that out.

John: Guilty dreams are the worst. In the dream, you've done something wrong, but it hasn't actually happened, and often you don't even know what it is. And through the whole dream you're getting in trouble for it, or sometimes it's even worse when you go through the whole dream scot-free but you just know deep down you ought to be getting in trouble for it. Yeah, those are even worse, because when you wake up it often just keeps right on going – the guilt. And you think, even if that didn't happen, there must be some reason I had a guilty dream, something I should feel guilty about in real life – you start to feel guilty about your guilty dream.

Jeffery: If we hold that the number of words is much more now than it was back at the dawn of language, and that every new word follows some precedent or rule or is inspired by some previous word, then we ought to be able to make an etymological tree just like you can make an entomological tree.

John: It's all very Kafkaesque and disorienting. The total severing of cause and effect is what really does it. That's the influence of the subconscious: sequential thoughts with no connection are linked through the tunnels of the subconscious. And I get a pang of that afterwards, usually just for a second. But it's long enough for me to rescind a lot of future plans for no real logical reason. My conscience just goes into overdrive out of confusion. Even with the cunning and sinister subconscious there isn't a lot of intelligence between them, and it probably finds it pretty jarring – you know, on an evolutionary moral level, like, no way naturally are you going to see such variety with such frequency, it would surely be a sign of some sort of herd imbalance.

Jeffery: The etymological link between etymology and entomology is obviously at -logy, referring to a science, but do their branches intertwine lower as well? Or are their similarities a mere coincidence? These questions do not need sit idle.

John: So the conscience sees me in some sort of superalpha position that threatens “security through diversity” and really wants to put the kibosh on that, right? It's like, one of the body's rare self-destruct sequences. It has them, you know. The mind knows of something bigger than itself. Or at least mine seems to. It's something I ought to be proud of, or something. My mind thinks I'm doing wrong by the species at large and is ignoring the prime directive on this choice. It's really a rather sophisticated abstraction, this guilt, and as I said before, the scheme to set it up is brutally clever. It's only feasible through the fantastic maneuverings of logic that my subconscious allows.

Jeffery: I wonder if you could receive a grant for a master language database. Every word, origins, roots, definitions, pronunciations, all in a search-parsable format. Of course, the next step would then be computer optimization of language. It could even have idioms. You could find all “security through X” statements. It could even cross reference with huge language dumps and create statistics on frequency. None of this would require new technology or resources even.

John: So I am confronted with this scrambling, backwards guilt where I pity anyone on my screen – even if they're nothing more than 2-dimensional black and white drawings of fictional characters – I pity them, I delete them out of pity, even. What is that, then, if the pixels are real people? Me, Dr. Kevorkian Recycling Bin? Madness! And don't even get me started on FBI paranoia out from left field.

Jeffery: I wonder if it already exists?

Enter Jason

Jason: I couldn't help but overhearing that you were talking about dreams. Did you ever consider that your conscious and subconscious both have an agenda in your dreams?

John: Excuse me, did you say “conscience” as in “my little moral man?” or “conscious” as in “counterpart to subconscious – the real gooey part of thinking that you just have to have to am”?

Jason: The latter – rest assured, my good man, that we're just dealing with the most basic warring tribes of your brain.

Jeffery: The little moral man – what bizarre anthropomorphizing! Most people just leave it at a voice, but most people don't have it as the villain in their onanism... Rest assured we'll stay off that topic. But “onanism” - that has a Biblical reference in it! I wonder what books score highest on that metric? And these abstractions we're so content with – “rest assured”... well, there's no resting at all, is there? No rest for... the wicked, perhaps? Is that one “yes” or “no”? “On” or “off”? “High” or “low”? Which of the great warring tribes of implied positive or negative, even though only one warrior from each ever  has a chance at a time... Oh, when did I learn the art to choose the right pair? Why is it the “right” or “wrong” pair but not the “correct” or “false” pair? The metaknowledge of the language is spiralling forever inwards and outwards! Imagery! Which themes of images are we more prone to employ? Do we anthropomorphize our imagery when we employ it? Is the general verb “to employ” as “to use” imagery in itself? What is our most cherished synonym? Why are there no linguistic psychologists? Why did we start talking in the first place, and why have no other apes started yet? Perhaps they're just shy around us since we seem to be so good at it. We taught them to sign, but that's a whole other ballpark. Do the mute sign ballpark when they mean “a whole other subject of debate requiring a whole other set of topics and premises to be tabled?” Do those lacking in senses automatically lose the sense of subtlety of that sense – does a blind person know many colour names? In what languages is “tabled” an idiom for “submitted for discussion in the current conversation?” The English cannot have been the first to place their contracts on a table, but were they the first to linguistically capitalize on the observation? Is saying “capitalize” treason in a communist country? Oh, this is too much, really!

John: Do you feel guilty when you clean up your DICtionary confetti afterwards?

Jeffery: I contend that that is hardly a linguistic pun at all.

John: I wonder what he means there, that the subconscious and conscious both have an agenda in dreams.

Jason: The conscious brain never quite quits when you're into dreamland. It's just on the home turf of the subconscious, is all, just finally on equal footing. Your conscious isn't done thinking yet, though, and it wants a good chunk of time to continue puzzling out the problems of the day, right? You've had those dreams.

John: I have.

Jason: And you also have dreams that don't make a lick of sense in the context of what you did that day, stuff that seems more last seven years in the blender than last twenty-four hours: take two.

John: I have those, yes.

Jason: And what's more, there's two competing structures – no, substructures, two competing sets of logic itself, the most fundamental routes of universal observation vary from dream to dream and even in dream.

John: Yes... the Kafkaesque dissolution of cause and effect to chaos... I dwelt on it earlier.

Jason: Well, it's a grey area greyer than your grey matter, but you can probably do alright trying to lump all elements into two camps: the nagging conscious mind, trying to apply dreams as a tool to resolve the conflict you left it with when you last spoke; and the subconscious, that bag of hormones you thought you shed with your teens mixing it up with every thought that didn't make it past your internal bouncer – if it has an agenda, it's beyond or beneath you, and it has no qualms shredding your sanity to achieve it.

John: Hmmm.

Jason: I'm not a superstitious man, but I can't deal with sleeping on my back. Coffin rehearsal. You?

John: I'm the same. Just can't get comfortable.

Jason: Good. You can try my handy experiment that any kid watching can try at home to. Just ask mom and dad for two good scrapbooks and two good pencils or pens – but make 'em different looking, both the books and the pens. If one is like a red pen and one is like black or blue that'd be ideal. Put the books on either side of the bed, and make sure you never get them mixed up. Then, right before you're about to go to sleep – not just go to bed, but like sleep sleep, put one of the pens on the side you're sleeping towards and one of them on the other side. But make sure you use the same pen on the same side every time. Make up a mantra - “face the red!” is mine. Then, when you wake up, write down everything you can remember about your dream on the notebook there with the pen there.

John: Hmmm?

Jason: Well, you see, when you pick a side right before going to sleep, that's the last definitive word of your conscious brain. After that, they're both fighting for the controls. And the parity of your sleeping turns, well, that reflects the inner struggle over the subject of the dreams, too! So you split your dreams based on whether they were consciously or subconsciously driven, and you know which is which, too. Now, I'm not a superstitious guy – I don't believe in that supernatural hokum. But dream study, that's a fun hobby, and it all really does come from your mind, not aliens or ghosts or anything. And anyone who says they don't have anything to learn from themselves is a liar or a fool, because you'll never really learn it all. A guy named Godel said that. But just taking potshots at whatever dreams crop up in your conscious later is only getting half the battle; your conscious will consciously bias you towards the conscious-biased dreams it drummed up. It's like, you're conquered by the Nazis, and you ask the Nazis about politics. Or maybe it's not like that, that's rather offensive. But anyways, it's a lot of fun, and you'd be surprised at what patterns will emerge from nothing when you trim away the fat.

Jeffery: I wonder if babies dream in gibberish? When do they stop? Oh, but you're right. Isolate each single shining glorious point of information and enlightenment is a little more than connecting the dots, isn't it? The ultimate role of humans will be saying things in a way that our computers will understand them, and from then, efficiency trumps all.

John: Hopefully not when I'm 'bating.