I love so many of the answers to this question... they go something like, "stop using the term subconscious you moron!" What's funny about that to me is that the whole study of the mind is simply to try and figure out why we do/think/feel the way we do, etc. However, it has always been, and seems to persist in the field of psychology, to demand that terms be used that are hard to relate to and understand. This question hits that nerve dead-on.

Why I do NOT run with Freud on this one and why I have Hollywood behind me (haha) is simply that we (not psychologists who want to make things seem very difficult) know there are simply 3-layers of the mind to be dealt with.

I. CONSCIOUS: Me writing this right now and you reading this right now.

II. SUBCONSCIOUS/PRECONSCIOUS: You already knowing you're going to thumb up this article without even having thought about it.

III. UNCONSCIOUS: When you were five, someone dropped a large psychology book on your head which caused the need for 17-stitches on the top of your head and so your mind repressed that memory to never be brought back up again.

Now, what's the problem? We have a "workbench" that the mind uses that is IN BETWEEN those two layers. This level of consciousness is tapped into from Layer I and also accessed from Layer III. Now, in the English language, what is the proper term to describe "UNDER" a layer? What is a good term to describe "BETWEEN" two layers? Well, for me, in English, the term "SUB" is way more descriptive than the term "PRE" which conjures more of a "BEFORE" than a "BELOW" or "INBETWEEN". So, I will not be utilizing what that mother-loving psycho Freud said (said laughingly with love) but will instead be using the much more sensical "SUBCONSCIOUS" to mean the workbench the mind uses to access UNCONSCIOUS thoughts when they surface as well as remembering temporary data like phone numbers etc.