stream of consciousness 
noun Psychology
1A person’s thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow. The term was introduced by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890).Controlled yet so easily distracted, his camera eye acknowledges that existence is merely an ongoing stream of consciousness, intuition, dissociation....
- It is a stream of consciousness where Benjy remembers events not in a chronological order but as free association brings them to his mind.
- A stream of consciousness of wit and despair is matched by tips about reverse phone psychology; if you don't think about it the phone will ring.
1.1A literary style in which a character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust are among its notable early exponents: [as modifier]: a stream-of-consciousness monologue...
- Updating the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Shaw transforms his dreams into a droll epic crammed with postwar American flotsam and jetsam.
- Bleached of punctuation, the words flow freely in a stream of consciousness manner reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
- Other authors have experimented with putting their stream-of-consciousness narrators in motion with mixed results, since the awkwardness of self narrated movement introduces a dissonance into the narration.