Gorgons 2: Stone Dead or Alive?

So a recent RP a question hot posed when a friend's Gorgon stoned their OC, "Do people turned into statues have any conscious thoughts while under the curse?" Personally I say yes because it adds to the horror factor and opens more story possibilities as well as gives more hope to Gorgon x Non Gorgon love at first sight couples XD What y'all think?

Sounds possible. It always depends on the writer, whether they just want the stoned victims out of the way, or if they want to prolong the suffering. Context means alot.

I've always thought as there being multiple stages to petrification, or at least different kinds.

Its sort of like how most people who hear "Schizophrenia" automatically associate it with seeing things that don't exist, when in reality that's only the most severe cases.

Petrification I imagine is just a scale of how paralyzed you become. A gorgon could easily turn you to full stone, but may not always need someone to be stone in the first place. This is magic, so it could be mysterious how maybe despite looking stone, the person is alive underneath, or maybe in the most severe case, it kills them. Maybe they just become paralyzed from the neck down, or maybe totally paralyzed on the surface, but some fragment of the magic keeps them alive in a condition where they should be dead - which is a lot of what petrification is already.