I had the privledge of dissecting brains and witnessing the extraordinary beauty and complexity of the human brain when in medical school. 

That was also the beginning and end of my career as a brain researcher.  This experience of neuro-anatomy, as well as experiments on perception that I conducted, proved to me at the age of 21 that working in labs with rats and monkeys wouldn’t touch human consciousness.  Understanding states of consciousness, especially the hypnotic state, was and remains a burning interest. It is a frail science because human consciousness remains mostly unmeasurable. We mostly appreciate the gift of consciousness, and are forced to abandon it for one third of each day. However, other than experiencing the states of sleep, wakefulness, and wakefulness after a cup of coffee, we really know so little about it. Part of the problem is that it is larger than our cognitive skills or language, so capturing it remains limited. We do experience changes of state, sometimes in the moment, sometimes afterward, but there is no way to digitize it, to convert it from an analog experience into discrete parameters.  

While it is common to equate state of consciousness to emotional state, and of course they interact, but they are not the same.  Best evidence: we can be angry while awake and we can be angry while we sleep (and sometimes remember this and sometimes not). So clearly the emotional “state” of experience of emotion, is contained within the state of consciousness but does not define it.