For several decades, a number of methods have been developed for the noninvasive assessment of the level of consciousness during general anesthesia. In this paper, detrended fluctuation analysis is used to study the scaling behavior of the electroencephalogram as a measure of the level of consciousness. Three indexes are proposed in order to characterize the patient state. Statistical analysis demonstrates that they allow significant discrimination between the awake, sedated and anesthetized states. Two of them present a good correlation with established indexes of depth of anesthesia. The scaling behavior has been found related to the depth of anesthesia and the methodology allows real-time implementation, which enables its application in monitoring devices.