Back in 2022–2023, when I first started charting out Labyrinth of the Mind, I relied heavily on the concept of the "primary process." This is psychoanalytic territory—the chaotic, purely instinctual language of the unconscious, where thoughts and images blur, shift, and bleed into each other. Later on, I discovered the concept of "Subliminal", which is more cognitive psychology and neurobiology. This provided me with a much cleaner set of tools to explain Holden’s sub-threshold state. He is constantly bombarded by signals, information, and stimuli that our conscious mind completely misses or fails to register. But the brain captures them anyway, logging them deep onto the subconscious. You’ve probably seen those focus-test videos: you are asked to focus only on, say, the red objects, and at the end, they ask how many blue squares were in the frame. You can’t answer because your attention was managed. Here’s the thing, though: your brain did record the entire picture. And with the right effort, that buried information can be pulled back into the light. This is exactly what Holden does inside his labyrinth.
