Conscious Is Up; Unconscious Is Down

conceptual-metaphor Embodied Experience → Mental Experience

Categories: cognitive-science linguistics psychology

What It Brings

Consciousness rises; unconsciousness sinks. We wake “up” and fall “asleep.” We “come to” from below and “go under” into anesthesia. This orientational metaphor maps the waking/sleeping distinction onto the vertical axis with a directness grounded in the body: conscious humans stand upright; unconscious ones lie flat. The metaphor extends beyond literal sleep to cover attention, awareness, and alertness — all forms of being mentally “up.”

Key structural parallels:

Waking as rising — “Wake up.” “Get up.” “Rise and shine.” The transition from sleep to consciousness is mapped onto upward movement. This is grounded in the literal act of getting up from a lying position, which makes consciousness feel like verticality achieved.
Sleep as descent — “He fell asleep.” “She dropped off.” “He sank into a deep sleep.” The transition to unconsciousness is downward motion. “Falling” asleep is particularly telling: it frames the transition as a loss of control, a surrender to gravity, a failure to maintain the upright (conscious) position.
Alertness as height — “Stay on top of it.” “Keep your head up.” “Heads up!” Being alert and aware is occupying a high position. The metaphor extends beyond sleep to general attentiveness: someone who is “on the ball” is above; someone who is “out of it” has dropped below the threshold.
Depth of unconsciousness — “Deep sleep.” “Under sedation.” “He’s way under.” As with the depth-of-sadness pattern in HAPPY IS UP, the vertical axis provides a scale for unconsciousness. The further down, the more removed from awareness. Coma is the deepest point.
Surfacing as regaining consciousness — “She came to.” “He came around.” “She surfaced from the anesthesia.” The metaphor treats consciousness as a surface that the mind can be above or below. Waking is surfacing; losing consciousness is going under.

Where It Breaks

Sleep is not a single downward state — sleep architecture involves cycles: light sleep, deep sleep, REM. The vertical metaphor imposes a single axis (depth) on a complex cyclical process. REM sleep, which involves high brain activity and dreaming, fits poorly with the “deep” metaphor. You can be neurologically active while metaphorically at the bottom.
Altered states are neither up nor down — meditation, hypnosis, flow states, and psychedelic experiences involve changes in consciousness that do not map neatly onto the vertical axis. A meditator is conscious but not “up” in the alert-and-active sense. A person in a flow state is intensely focused but often describes the experience as going “deep” rather than “high.” The metaphor has only one axis for multiple dimensions of awareness.
The metaphor equates consciousness with alertness — by placing consciousness “up,” the metaphor treats wakefulness and alertness as the same thing. But drowsy wakefulness, mind-wandering, and absent-mindedness are all conscious states that occupy an uneasy middle ground. “Half asleep” is spatially incoherent — you cannot be halfway up or down on a binary threshold.
Unconscious mental activity gets hidden — if conscious is up and unconscious is down, then all the cognitive work done below awareness (implicit memory, procedural skill, emotional processing) is spatially invisible. The metaphor makes it hard to think of unconscious processing as productive, because “down” inherits the negative valence of the GOOD IS UP system. Freud’s “unconscious” lives below, associated with what is buried and suppressed, partly because of this spatial metaphor.
Death and sleep share the same direction — “He passed away” (down and gone). “She was laid to rest” (horizontal). The metaphor places both sleep and death in the same downward direction, which makes them metaphorically adjacent. The euphemistic power of “he’s just sleeping” relies on this structural overlap, but it also means the metaphor cannot easily distinguish temporary from permanent loss of consciousness.

Expressions

“Wake up” — transition to consciousness as upward motion
“He fell asleep” — transition to unconsciousness as downward fall
“Rise and shine” — waking as both vertical ascent and luminosity
“She’s under sedation” — medically induced unconsciousness as being below a surface
“He came to” — regaining consciousness as arriving at (an upward) position
“Heads up!” — alertness request as literal upward orientation
“He dropped off in the middle of the lecture” — falling asleep as dropping from a height
“She’s out of it” — reduced awareness as being outside or below the active space
“Deep sleep” — profound unconsciousness as maximum depth
“Stay alert, stay alive” — consciousness as elevated survival posture

Origin Story

Lakoff and Johnson introduce CONSCIOUS IS UP in Chapter 4 of Metaphors We Live By alongside the other orientational metaphors. They ground it in the physical basis that “humans and most other mammals sleep lying down and stand up when they awaken.” This is among the most directly embodied of the orientational metaphors: the correlation between consciousness and vertical posture is not culturally constructed but physiologically real. Every infant learns the association between waking and getting up, sleeping and lying down.

The metaphor’s scope extends well beyond sleep. Lakoff and Johnson note that it structures how we talk about awareness, attention, and mental acuity in general. Being “alert” (from the Italian all’erta, “on the watch”) carries the same upward orientation as being awake, blurring the boundary between consciousness as a neurological state and consciousness as a quality of attention.

References

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 4
Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Consciousness Is Up”
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) — extended treatment of embodied cognition and consciousness metaphors