Iamon lyme: Both!!

"It was an analogy. Or a metaphor, or whatever it's called."

I know, I was asking if you got it through the interpretation of passages. I've had a similar discussion with some Joe Witnesses recently... Till I pointed out they had forgotten a whole Corinthians!! ;P

"I'll only be conscious for another hour or two... It's late, and so I'll be scooting off to bed before too long."

Wrong type lol.

..Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[3] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."