Although great progress has been made in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, this endeavour has several blind spots. These relate to the fact that there are two, not one, concepts that the term ‘consciousness’ refers to. Conscious content, the subjective character of our experience, and conscious state, the fluctuations in the overall conscious condition, for example alert wakefulness versus sleep. Problematically, conscious content and conscious state are typically studied in isolation. In this proposal, we explore their dynamic interaction to unravel how ongoing, and unexplored, fluctuations in state affect sensory information processing and therefore our conscious experience.