For some of you what I am about to say might seem like blasphemy. Till recently, I didn’t know what was meant by stream of consciousness. I mean I knew what the individual words meant, but not what the whole stood for. I could see it being thrown around by bloggers a lot, rather quite a lot and started to wonder.

So I went to the one person we all go to for answers in these times: Mother Google. Hmm… Interesting what I did there just now, referring to Google as mother, not father, whereas yesterday I referred to Time as grandfather. By the way, today I came across the picture of a young man in a tee with the words ‘My Mother Is A Total Legend’ on it. I promptly did the quite obvious thing and shared it in our family group on WhatsApp. The sons were, judiciously so, silent, the daughter-in-law responded with a high-five.

But I digress.

Mother Google did not disappoint. She revealed the term was introduced by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890). That old, huh? She went on to say, it meant ‘a person’s thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow.‘ I sat up on reading it. Next came this: A literary style in which a character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. This was all so eerily familiar!

Egad!

This is how I wrote my posts (also fiction), at least most of them anyway. No wonder the definitions seemed so familiar. There! Not only had Mother Google enlightened me, but also had revealed to me that my style of writing had a name to it. Well, obviously not my style in that sense, there having been so many before me who used it, as also those in the present writing in the stream of consciousness narrative style. What I meant was this style seemed to come naturally to me, and the one I have made my own.

By the way, did you know ‘egad’ comes from ‘ye god’ and also that the OMG of the present times is closely linked to it? Who told me? Why, Mother Google, of course. She knows everything, and is willing to tell you. All you need to do is ask. 😉

© Shail Mohan 2019