Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that mimics the unbroken flow of a character's inner thoughts.
The phrase comes from psychologist William James, who in 1890 argued that consciousness is not a chain of discrete ideas but a continuous, irregular flow. Modernist novelists turned that insight into a method. James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (1922) ends with Molly Bloom's 36-page unpunctuated monologue; Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' (1925) glides between minds within single sentences; Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' (1929) gives an entire section to a man with cognitive disability. The technique demands enormous trust from readers — there are no signposts — but it gave fiction access to layers of perception that earlier prose could only paraphrase. Most contemporary literary novels use a softened version, free indirect discourse, that owes everything to this 1920s breakthrough.