Covert Consciousness

Faint flame emergent from neurotransmitters. The brain, a torch arranging patterns of awareness, patterns of recall, encounters, adventures, and ordeals. Covert consciousness realized in coma patients, detected in vegetative invalids by the analyzers of EEGs, the probers of the mind. Bedridden with no signs of life, These sufferers were long thought braindead. The only question; when to withdraw life support. But our deepest traces do often linger with immobility. Our hardly perceptible scintillas send measurable signals. They offer no bodily changes, no responses to cues. They never give themselves away in behaviors. Yet, science now knows them as genuine. Are these the souls and ghosts felt by our ancestors? Are these the wraiths and apparitions feared by so many? Created from the temporal, assembled from life, is their structure entirely in the mind? Maybe part of their energy resides in other realms, places in and out of which they drift at our death. Accepted for publication: The Opiate Journal, spring 2023