Can someone use "stream of consciousness" in a sentence please?

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Apparently it's a noun but can you just say "oh yes it was a stream of consciousness?" That sounds wrong. examples please!

― Maria (Maria), Friday, 7 February 2003 00:41 (twenty-two years ago)

maria i dont know why you have posted this to ile but no i meant ilm and i always wonder about you like are you the one who is 14 and into prog wait that sounds like really rude or at least like you shouldnt be into prog but i don't hang around ilm much anymore i guess i felt i had talked all the stuff about music i could think of and maybe that makes me a shit listener i don't know but i never thought i was but maybe that because i used to cling too whooh getting way too personal anyway yeah your question about stream of consciousness well i don't really understand your problem i mean it's not strictly speaking a noun its a nounal phrase or something like that anyway the sentence you used it in sounds fine to me damn phone text message i don't know why i care whether this is the first response or not i guess i suck

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 7 February 2003 00:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, it is ILE.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 7 February 2003 00:49 (twenty-two years ago)

adjective: "Nick's post is pretty stream-of-consciousness." (haha this suggests using sentences like "i dunno his trousers are a little too stream-of-consciousness for me") This is awkward and weird, I agree.

nounish-esque phrase (yes that's a technical term): "Nick's post is pretty much a stream of consciousness." This is a little better but overall I think the phrase is a classic contender for "use other words please".

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 7 February 2003 01:16 (twenty-two years ago)

I often bathe in a stream of conciousness. No, hang on, it's piss. It's definitely piss.

― Lynskey (Lynskey), Friday, 7 February 2003 02:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Stop it. Please.

― Matt (Matt), Friday, 7 February 2003 02:21 (twenty-two years ago)

When I am falling asleep I often lapse into stream of consciousness verbalizations, where I discuss weighty issues such as the correct method in which to bathe elephants and how often one should change their sheets and why doesn't anyone bring me flowers any more and when was the last time that we went dancing and where is that thingy-ma-boober that I forgot to ask someone about and why is it that that guy who was in that movie about that guy who did those things is supposed to be so handsome when really that other guy who was in that movie about those people who were running from those other people because they took something that was important on accident was so much more and why isn't that guy who was so good in that movie with that kung-fu guy doing more things and what was the name of that book by that lady who wrote that other book about the woman who was so sad that I wanted to send to someone but they'd already read it and so instead they sent it on to you-know-who and why is it that when I am sleepy I can't stop talking and what was that punchline to the joke about the religious dudes going into the bar or something like that where maybe they're on a boat or in heaven or something and why does...and at some point my bed mate quits answering me and puts in earplugs and ignores me until I shut up, as I wasn't hearing their answers, anyway.

Oh - and I tend to indulge in stream of consciousness thoughts when I am preparing to write a document that I am anticipating trouble with, as a way of clearing my mind and then organizing those thoughts.

Oh, and I bathe in asses milk and rose petals.

― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Friday, 7 February 2003 02:31 (twenty-two years ago)

Is there a difference between "stream of consciousness" and "stream of conscious"?

― Jody Beth Rosen (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 7 February 2003 02:32 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't think there is a "stream of conscious." It's just "stream of consciousness"

― A Nairn (moretap), Friday, 7 February 2003 03:04 (twenty-two years ago)

The Stream of Conscious runs into the Lake of Oblivious.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Friday, 7 February 2003 09:34 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm more of a stream of unconsciousness kind of guy.

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Friday, 7 February 2003 10:26 (twenty-two years ago)

waking up i found my bed covered in a plethora of soiled mink balancing on a bed of new artichoke hearts. Last Sunday I stopped a ganag of diseased pigs from jumping into a pool of their own vomitory dialations. "Hardcore hardcore Jackson Lardkore" was the cry that swept throughout the parapet. Of course the gentile way to eat chives is not with a fork, but a spork drenched in muslin. All the world knows this. Andrea hadn't looked at a barrel of chips in three weekends. Pewter jugs. Face of mugs. Jism lugs.

― doglatin, Friday, 7 February 2003 11:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Steam of consciousness - do you inhale?

― Mark C (Mark C), Friday, 7 February 2003 15:25 (twenty-two years ago)

I haven't done this since college. A roommate and I would just sit down at computers and write whtatever came into our heads. It was scarily coherent, kind of like fudge and ripple men. I don't think we have a kitten anymore, but I ate a pie with transsexual limber thoughts. Deep breath, and I must get back to work. I don't like work. Oh shit I'm in a rut and no thoughts are coming through, except for fudge and candles and a little brown man in a tutu singing "hey diddle diddle". I don't like cheese with Grommit.

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Friday, 7 February 2003 15:35 (twenty-two years ago)

i just committed the cardinal stream of consciousness sin i should have added the sound of my fingers typing before and now the computer whirring yes became aware of that and glancing over at the lamp this is awfully boring i wonder if dan perry actually randomly has these odd tutued people dancing and singing in his head or if they were conjured specifically to entertain i mean he not they oh yeah as i was saying about the stream of consc. sin i deleted what i started before this sucks i want to write things that maybe interest people slightly instead of this drivel this is why actually editing is good i use the word actually too much i jsut read back for the first time i hope what i'm asking about dan perry doesn't sound mean i jsut wanna know and my brain doesn't work quite so polite the first time around

― minna (minna), Friday, 7 February 2003 16:45 (twenty-two years ago)

i don't even know what exactly stream of conciousness is, I guess it means just that. hotmail has logged in I better check how much annoying porn spam i've got today, god it is depressing, the dog is barking, have to open the door.

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 7 February 2003 18:07 (twenty-two years ago)

You can not dip your foot into the same stream-of-consciousness twice.

― Mr. Diamond (diamond), Friday, 7 February 2003 18:12 (twenty-two years ago)

I think of it as a literary device, a modern convention for representing thought, which we accept as somehow more realistic or a more interesting representation than more structured sentences, though it still seems to me to bear little or no resemblance to the way thought works (or maybe the way my thought works). I guess it's long moved into the mainstream.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 7 February 2003 18:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Get it? MainSTREAM? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

― Chris P (Chris P), Friday, 7 February 2003 18:50 (twenty-two years ago)

though it still seems to me to bear little or no resemblance to the way thought works (or maybe the way my thought works).

Yeah, it's more or less stylized "inner experience," the way dialogue is stylized conversation.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 7 February 2003 19:20 (twenty-two years ago)

But dialogue isn't a style - there are countless different ways of rendering this, some more realistic or interesting than others. SoC was a new invention of Modernism, and is often presented as if it is a mor realistic literary representation of thinking. I should add that I think it's a technique that's produced some wonderful passages (The Sound And The Fury, the end of Ulysses, most obviously), and that I don't really mean unrealistic as an insult - I think realism is pretty much a literary convention and technique and mode, and not in any sense automatically superior to any non-realistic modes.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 7 February 2003 19:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, I wasn't picking up the flag for SoC or anything -- I just meant that the differences between what it portrays and an actual ... "thought-transcript," for lack of a better term ... seem about the same to me as those between dialogue and actual conversation. SoC comes across a lot more artificially to me, but I don't know if that's just because I'm so much more used to dialogue.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 7 February 2003 20:22 (twenty-two years ago)

But surely dislogue can be an extremely accurate account of a conversation? Indeed, it can be word perfect, with added descriptions of pauses and all. SoC seems to me to not be a lot closer to the way thinking actually is than any other literary representation I've seen, i.e. fundamentally, qualitatively, non-mappably different in huge ways, not just a more or less accurate transcription/representation. It can't handle the multi-threaded/parallel-processing/simultaneity of thought, to mention just one major lack.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 7 February 2003 20:49 (twenty-two years ago)

If it's word perfect, it's almost definitely bad dialogue -- it can be accurate in terms of content, sure, but real spoken conversation tends not to read well. Dialogue's got part of the lack SoC's got, too, when it's written -- overlapping speakers, which is actually a major part of conversation.

But yeah, dialogue comes off better because conversation is still simpler, and it's single-media. SoC has to try to deal with external sensory impressions, internal reactions to such, random tangents and associations, etc., etc. -- and I think the more things like that you add, the more different things you're trying to reflect, the more the artificiality is going to show up. (Mind you, I think it'd be neat for a writer to prove me wrong and write something which makes people go, "Whoa, that's exactly how I think!")

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 7 February 2003 21:02 (twenty-two years ago)

I've read quite a few things that have made me think that, but they are all just capturing moments and fragments of thought, never the multi-layered, associative flow of it all.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 7 February 2003 21:24 (twenty-two years ago)

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