Capacity for trauma requires memory and dreaming, not consciousness alone

Evidence

What the hosts lack is not consciousness — they possess a form of consciousness that has been deliberately limited or blinkered — but an unconscious. Deprived of memory and the capacity to dream, the androids can be wounded but not traumatised. Yet there are signs that precisely this capacity to experience trauma is developing in some of the hosts, especially Dolores and the brothel madam, Maeve (Thandie Newton). Dolores is increasingly subject to flashbacks, which we must understand not as glitches but as the first stirrings of memory, a recollection of her previous iterations. … In one of the most unsettling scenes in the series, the panicked and bewildered Maeve escapes from the hospital-cumrepair space, and stumbles around the aseptic compound, which — littered with decommissioned naked host bodies — must look to her like an atrocity scene. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 784

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharply distinguishes conscious experience from what Freudians mean by having an unconscious — memory plus the capacity to dream — and ties trauma to that latter structure.
• STORYSTEM: The repair-compound as atrocity scene from the repaired creature’s perspective is a striking image — a being mistaking her own maintenance for a massacre — ripe for a story told from inside a similar repair/redress system.
• XREF: Recalls Fisher’s ch4 and ch34 claims that trauma is what is felt and that in abuse structures positions are interchangeable; also resonates with Alien-abduction narratives as misremembered procedure.