Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you. This awareness is subjective and unique to you.

Research studies have shown that we only experience one mental event at a time as a fast-moving mind stream. William James, often considered to be the father of American psychology, first coined the phrase “stream of consciousness”.

Here’s a quick and simple definition: Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character’s extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar.

THIRD-PERSON OMNISCIENT NARRATION: This is a common form of third-person narration in which the teller of the tale, who often appears to speak with the voice of the author himself, assumes an omniscient (all-knowing) perspective on the story being told: diving into private thoughts, narrating secret or hidden events.

“Not having an internal monologue does not mean that there is something wrong with a person.” Research backs this up. Kross says people who are hearing impaired have internal monologues that involve signing and some people see images instead of hearing words.

It is important to try to avoid negative thinking in your internal dialogue. One way to do this is to consciously change what you are thinking. If you ‘hear’ yourself thinking something negative, focus on something positive instead.

Such things are possible due to the literary device known as internal monologue….Here are three ways to use inner monologues in your writing:

1. Give voice to a character’s thoughts.
2. Describe other characters or events from the protagonist’s point of view.
3. Demonstrate your main character’s internal conflicts.

Interior monologue, in dramatic and nondramatic fiction, narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and emotion.

Monologues serve a specific purpose in storytelling—to give the audience more details about a character or about the plot. Used carefully, they are a great way to share the internal thoughts or backstory of a character or to give more specific details about the plot.

Soliloquy, passage in a drama in which a character expresses his thoughts or feelings aloud while either alone upon the stage or with the other actors keeping silent.

Since “To be or not to be” takes place with others on stage, and since it deviates from the patterns Shakespeare established in Hamlet’s actual soliloquies, it cannot be a soliloquy. Since the speech is not a soliloquy, it cannot be staged as a soliloquy and still be faithful to the text.

An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character’s speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly (in character or out) or represent an unspoken thought.