Most metaphor, including deliberate metaphor, works fast and does not involve conscious metaphorical cognition. Conscious metaphorical cognition is a matter of paying attention to the self as doing metaphor, whether in production, comprehension, or interaction. As a rule, this does not come up in fast and automatic comprehension.

However, conscious metaphorical cognition is possible. This involves slow metaphor processing with the addition of an element of metaphor awareness and awareness of the self doing figurative analogy (or ‘metaphor’). This clearly can be triggered by deliberate metaphor use, as when a therapist asks a client to think of one thing in terms of something else, such as their marriage in terms of a fight or a dance.

In the first publications of DMT, consciousness was erroneously attributed to all deliberate metaphor processing. This was corrected and reconceptualized after an intervention by Ray Gibbs in academic discussion (see 3D model).

The connection of DMT with Kahneman’s dual system approach to cognition then offered a new and more motivated position to the role of consciousness in metaphorical thinking. How consciousness plays out in detail in thinking by metaphor is an urgent matter for future theorizing and research.

In a way, people make comparisons all the time, whether literally between two similar objects (like two chairs), analogically between two situations (like entering a classroom in Amsterdam and entering a classroom in Messina), or figuratively analogically (like comparing life with a journey). However, they do not express these comparisons as comparisons in utterances all the time. The role of these types of comparison in language use, fast and slow, (and hence their relations with consciousness) is one key issue that DMT is all about.