Inside Out reImagined

The Subconscious Realm

Of course, the Subconscious Realm was not the deepest Sadness, or any other thought form, could go in the mind. In fact, it barely even scratched the surface.

If Sadness wanted, thanks to the afterglow of the heightened state which led her to take all of Preschool World with her to the nether realm, she could "remember" all day long, to the extent of her knowledge about the mind, which was probably more extensive than that of any other thought form. Like an onion, the mind had layers, with the central part taking in all the feelings, and each new layer processing them in different ways, culminating in the Conscious Realm — the only place where emotions could appear at all.

Yet, gradually, remembering gave way to pure feeling.

There was no need to concern oneself with the pesky minutiae of how the mind worked — and while Sadness had the right cut to go all in on any bit of knowledge she could get, a bit like a fantasy nerd, the job of an emotion just didn't depend on it. The further down you went, the more you approached pure feeling; the further up you went, the more you approached pure thinking, with Headquarters, the emotions' home and workplace, being precisely the place where all the higher-level decisions for Riley could be made.

And as Sadness was no longer welcome in Headquarters, the only obvious conclusion was that for now, and possibly for quite a while, she had to preoccupy herself with lower-level feeling, instead of higher-level decisions.

Eventually, though, physical sensations and actions gave way to pure feeling, too.

For whatever reason, even though she had properly stepped through the wooden door leading out of Preschool World, all she saw, even when shining her torch at the "outside", was dark, foreboding, unlabelled corridors. She was nervous about proceeding, and she kept looking back through the door, at the purest essence of Riley's toddlerhood, wondering if the Mind Workers there could help her some more.

Yet, as she did, she gradually stopped perceiving concrete objects, such as slides and ladders, in favor of larger-level abstractions, such as the concept of playing around — and of course, getting hurt while playing around. Those abstractions then, too, gave way to even larger-level, very vague feelings that refused to be subdivided, like childish glee and innocence.

And it was those feelings that finally pushed Sadness to start her journey.

She didn't even realize that she was walking, let alone walking to any specific place — she was more so a free-floating spirit, moving without effort, kind of similar to when she had the flotation device at Imagination Valley — if the level of abstraction that Sadness thought at now would have even allowed her to think of Imagination Valley as a place, rather than inventiveness as a concept.

Yet, she did realize that she was leaving Preschool World behind — even if she didn't necessarily think of physically moving away from the place.

One of the final pieces of the physical world that Sadness managed to retain thoughts about was, of course, the torch she was carrying, illuminating details for her body to follow, so that she would end up somewhere, rather than nowhere. Yet, eventually, the dark spirit ended up forgetting even that, convincing herself that instead, Joy was following her, everywhere in life that she went — and that she was constantly in Joy's shadow.

And thus, with the physical world remaining but a distant feeling of a memory, Sadness's journey to consider her place in the mind truly began.

One could potentially say that Sadness's journey began immediately after leaving Preschool World, having separated from Bing Bong, but that was a level at which she no longer thought. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that the story began when Riley was still a toddler and had just met Meg.