I guess I left it vague just to see what you even make of it.
If I have to specify, I would ask: do you consider it at all as a thing that might precede consciousness? Not necessarily not consciousness, but not necessarily not not consciousness, and which exists.
I think Freud was the first to coin the term “pre-conscious” and he meant thoughts that were not yet conscious but were available to consciousness. So unlike repressed thoughts, which are kept out of conscious deliberately, preconscious thoughts are sort of “floating around” in the vicinity of consciousness and are available for the conscious mind to focus its attention on whenever it wants (although it may not).
Or if we simply analyze the word based on its parts (“pre” and “conscious”), it sounds like a concept for mental content on its way to becoming conscious–like a stage new information must pass through as it makes its way from outside into consciousness. Unconscious thought, therefore, would be mental content that has already been conscious but was cut off for some reason (repressed, denied, etc.). I suppose if pre-conscious thought gets stuck somewhere along the way to consciousness, it could be due to psychoanalytic defense mechanisms just as with unconscious thought. If new information coming in doesn’t sit comfortably with the ego, I see no reason the mind can’t pull out the same tools to prevent it from getting to consciousness.
In any case, I account for most cases of unconscious mental content and pre-conscious mental content in the same way. It’s a matter of being experientially aware but not epistemically aware. This is what I talked about at the end of part 2 of my OP. Experiential awareness is just feeling your experiences. Epistemic awareness is knowing about your experiences. It’s possible, I maintain, to feel your experiences without knowing it. With unconscious mental content, one actively suppresses epistemic awareness of one’s experiences. With pre-conscious mental content, the experience simply hasn’t had a chance yet of arriving at epistemic awareness (and may be blocked from doing so).
Then there’s a sort of semi-conscious state where one can be epistemically aware of the projected form of an experience but not the unprojected form. Take anger for example. If you’re angry at a person, that projects as a characteristic of the person. You say, “That guy’s a real asshole.” You can deny that you’re angry but admit that the person’s an asshole. You might say, “I’m not angry, but the guy’s a real asshole.” So you are allowing into consciousness (epistemic awareness) the projected form of the anger but not the unproject form. You deny that you’re angry but admit that the guy’s an asshole.
I would like to get into it lol.
Well, since you asked 
… There’s sometimes a confusion amongst idealists that even non-existent entities are real since we always have the concept of a non-existent thing (like a dragon) and concepts must project. This is sloppy thinking. Yes, concepts, like any state of consciousness, must project, but one must always ask: what does it project as? Unfortunately, the default answer always seems to be “a thing”. But every experience is characterized by its own unique quality and therefore the type of thing it projects as is different. Only sensory objects project as things. Concepts, on the other hand, project as essences.
What are essences? This idea goes all the way back to the Greeks, and it was Plato who stumbled across the concept when he noticed that we can identify things as belonging to whole classes of things without needing to know or see every single member of the class. For example, we recognize a cat as a cat (i.e. as belonging to the class of “cats”) even though this particular cat may look different or have different features from all other cats. And we haven’t seen all cats that exist. We may not have even seen this one before. Yet, we somehow know that this cat belongs to the same class as all other cats. Plato explained this by saying we have some kind of pre-sensory detection ability that sees the “essence” of the cat–that is, we see the “cat-ness” of the cat, and that “cat-ness” is the same for all cats. It’s this ability to perceive the cat’s essence, Plato says, that indicates to us that it is indeed a cat.
Plato went on to posit the existence of a realm of “forms”–a realm of abstract, immaterial things that counted as the essences of all things, the “forms” all things in the sensory world approximated–but this, I believe, was a mistake. Plato objectified essences, made them into “things” themselves, and therefore was mislead to conclude that they had to exist in the same way as physical objects–and since they weren’t really physical, they had to exist in a parallel realm of objects on the same ontological footing as physical objects but without actually being physical.
Rather, if one just focuses on what one is experiencing when one brings to mind a concept, one sees not that they project as objects per se but as the “is-ness” of things (as the “cat-ness” of a cat, the “chair-ness” of a chair, the “person-ness” of a person)–that is, essences are just what things are. In this way, they project more as definitions than as objects. To know what a thing X is (to know the X-ness of X) is to understand what the term “X” means. A concept is nothing more than an understanding of something, to know what that thing is; to say that one grasps the concept of something is to say he/she understand it. Or, putting it another way, one knows the definition of that something.
Now, definitions have a way of existing seemingly independently of the experiencer (or understander) without being objects in the physical world. Say, for example, that someone told you, “I know what a banana is… it’s a furry pink kitten.” Would you say, “Oh, I guess that’s what bananas are for you?” Or would you say, “Um… no, you got the definition wrong.” ← Most of the time, we say the latter. In other words, we have this way of thinking of definitions as holding independently of what anyone thinks, of having a kind of objective existence. One can be right or wrong about the definition about this or that term. This isn’t to say we can’t imagine that definitions are determined by each person’s own unique concept of a term–indeed, this is the position of many philosophers–but it isn’t the natural impression we get when we think of definitions.
Note, however, that definitions can hold even for things that don’t exist. One can say, “Dragons are furry pink kittens,” and just as with bananas, we would say, “No, that’s wrong.” So what a dragon is seems to have an objective independent existence apart from the existence of dragons themselves. They don’t exist in a “realm” per se but are just what things, existent or not, are.
But when it comes to concepts of things that do exist, we bring our concepts to bear upon our sensory experiences of them. So if I see my coffee mug on the kitchen table, my senses supply the sensory features of the mug, but it requires my understanding of what my mug is (my concept) to make it into a “thing”–to make it into “my mug”–otherwise, it’s nothing over and above a conglomeration of sensory features. Even just to recognize it as an object (as if I didn’t know what mugs were) requires at least the concept of an “object”. So we recognize the things around us by “injecting” or “infusing” them with an essence, with our concepts of what it is we’re looking at.
We can even infuse properties with their own essence. For example, if my coffee mug is blue, I can focus on the blue and identify it saying, “That is blue”–that is, I take my concept of blue and project it onto the color of the mug. Even the blue has its own essence. And we can do this for things that we don’t sense. I attribute essences even to the things I don’t see–like atoms and far away galaxies–simply by infusing my visual images with essences, and making true statements about them (like “atoms exist all around us”). And we can even attribute essences to abstract things–as in when we see a well rehearsed performance on stage and say, “That is harmony”. It’s all about identifying things–giving things an identity–making things more than the sum of their parts. The essence of my mug makes it more than the sum of the sensory feature–it has a “soul” so to speak–an invisible something that makes it my mug.
This is even true when it comes to human beings. I identify John or Julie as “John” or “Julie” because I have a concept of John and Julie–I know who they are–and when I see them, I project my concept of them onto them–that is, onto their bodies–and this is why I think there is a link between the self and the body. We do this even with ourselves. We all have a concept of “I” (as made clear in my discussion with felix) and this concept gets projected into myself when I look at myself in the mirror. So what am I? I am not merely an immaterial bodiless consciousness inside my head–that is just my essence–but I am a body, my essence being infused in it, making it into me.
As offering something to ask for something, I will suggest that I would consider the body and I are enmeshed extraconceptually, that is, that outside of being my body I cease.
Is that close what I said?