In the 11th century, the Arab polymath Ibn Sina was thinking about the nature of self-awareness. He wondered how much one could separate awareness of the "self" from awareness of one's body; whether one could "form the concept of themselves without having the concept of their body included in it." He proposed a thought experiment called the "floating man" in which a fully formed person with no memory is created out of thin air, floating in the dark without any sensory input whatsoever.
There is a sense of great longing in this picture of the monster truck Bigfoot on the beach