stream of consciousnessn.

1855 A. Bain Senses & Intellect ii. i. 359 The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness,—in the same cerebral highway.

1890 W. James Princ. Psychol. I. ix. 239 Consciousness..does not appear to itself chopped up in bits... A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

1908 W. McDougall Introd. Social Psychol. i. 15 Psychology must not regard the introspective description of the stream of consciousness as its whole task.

1928 D. H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley's Lover xiv. 253 The quiver was going through the man's body, as the stream of consciousness again changed its direction, turning down-wards.

1942 M. McCarthy Company she Keeps vi. 251 Damn my stream of consciousness, her mind said.

1959 Penfield & Roberts Speech & Brain Mechanisms iii. 47 Ganglionic patterns that preserve the record of the stream of consciousness.

1975 ‘C. Fremlin’ Long Shadow xx. 142 Cynthia's stream-of-consciousness soon meandered obediently back to the matter in hand.

1979 K. R. Popper in Popper & Eccles Self & its Brain iii. 157 When we—actively—try to be passive, there may be something like a stream of consciousness; but normally we are active, and then there is.., rather, organized procedures of problem-solving.

1918 M. Sinclair in Little Rev. Apr. 6 In identifying herself with this life which is Miriam's stream of consciousness Miss Richardson produces her effect of..getting closer to reality than any of our novelists.]

1939 S. O'Casey Let. Apr. (1975) I. 792 I differ from you..in your contention that my ‘dream fantasies & streams of consciousness’ are ‘foreign to my best style’.

1961 W. C. Booth Rhetoric of Fiction iii. xi. 324 The deep plunges of modern inside views, the various streams-of-consciousness that attempt to give the reader an effect of living thought and sensation, are capable of blinding us to the possibility of our making judgments not shared by the narrator or reflector himself.

1964 M. McLuhan Understanding Media xxix. 296 Here [sc. in David Copperfield] was the stream of consciousness, perhaps, in its original form before it was adopted by Proust and Joyce and Eliot.

1971 B. Malamud Tenants 162 Bill took on a sort of stream-of-consciousness and heavily overworked association.

1978 I. B. Singer Shosha xiii. 233 I had also read in a literary magazine about the kind of literature called the ‘stream of consciousness’.

1931 Notes & Queries 1 Aug. 74/1 This is in part a development from the ‘stream of consciousness’ method.

1942 Q. Jrnl. Speech Feb. 4/2 This Lonely Heart, a stream-of-consciousness play.

1955 L. P. Hartley Perfect Woman iii. 24 Do you think the stream-of-consciousness method has come to stay, or have Joyce and Virginia Woolf exhausted it?

1958 Listener 16 Oct. 603/2 The late Dorothy M. Richardson was one of the earliest exponents of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel.

1975 B. Garfield Death Sentence (1976) iii. 22 He darted from topic to topic... He wasn't a stream-of-consciousness talker.

1982 Times 7 Apr. 9/8 A stream-of-consciousness chess match.