Dear Marion,

Permit me to correct, to amplify and to refine what I wrote earlier today:
I was wrong when I stigmatized reality as unconscious or subconscious.
Neither the perception of reality or the reality itself is unconscious.
When the brick slips from my fingers and hits my toes, that's for real.
I wince, I cry "ouch". "ouch" is not exhaustively descriptive of the
pain. "ouch" is a pointer to the "fact" that I feel pain in my toes;
but it is not a comprehensive or conclusive representation of that pain.
Words cannot tell what I feel (in my toes or anywhere else), be it the
barely discernable footprint of a fly, the sting of a mosquito, or a wasp,
or the injury to nerve or phalanx caused by the falling brick. 
The inference of someone else's pain, or more generally of someone 
else's mental state, is unavoidably only approximation.

The pain caused by the falling brick is representative of my perception
of reality, varying and fluctuating as it does from moment to moment,
von Augenblick zu Augenblick. The taste of cheddar or of beaujolais,
a melody of Mozart, a ray of sunshine or a drop of rain on my wrist.
In each case my prose is a pointer to the experience (Erleben) which
becomes known to another human being not by words, but by parallel
experience, subject to the limitation that the other human being may
be relatively or wholly anosmic, deaf, blind or anesthetic - as from
neuropathy. Reality (for me) is the potential or actual sum of such
experiences (Erleben). I'm exquisitely sensitive to it, acutely aware
of it, even though words, symbols, cannot do it justice.

The situation becomes more complex with the recogniton that language
itself is potentially an object of perception. Consider poetry:
Words can be beautiful, words can hurt. Language has intrinsic meaning,
independent of the extrinsic objects to which it points. Language
itself becomes the object of language, whether as a recursive or as
an exponential function is a matter for further consideration.

Jochen