Or ‘Mind-body dualism’ to disambiguate with other uses.
In their view, consciousness is far more vast than we are aware of, and our brains filter most of it out in the same way that they filter out all kinds of stimuli they deem unimportant to physical survival. All kinds of physical events can affect the parameters of the filtering: near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, deep meditation, stroke, hunger...essentially anything that changes the brain modifies which parts and how much of the spectrum of consciousness gets through to an individual’s experience.
I think this theory is actually pretty convincing. It would be awful if you were conscious of every single thing your brain did, including all your subconscious thoughts and motor neurons firing.
That is why you are conscious of much more specific things like vision, hearing, touch and so forth. Generally the signals within your brain would be akin to random data, so surely they would be post-processed by your brain into a useful contiguous "conscious-ready" signal.
That post-processed signal would probably be sent from one location, and therefore the aerial analogy works well. When you go under general anaesthetic, that specific part of the brain would stop transmitting completely and you don't experience a single thing until it wears off and it starts transmitting again.
When you sleep and dream, the signal is just a mess of neatly post-processed signals coming from different parts of your brain, so you are still basically conscious.
I read somewhere that if you stimulate a particular part of someone's brain, it can make them temporarily unconscious, which would make sense with the aerial analogy.
If that's how it works, then maybe our sense of time passing is directly proportional to the amount of data sent. So if your brain transmits a lot of stuff in a short time, that short real-time seems like a long conscious-time, and vice versa.
It's clearly a flawless theory ;)