 According to dictionary.com: (1) the product of mental activity; that which one thinks: a body of thought. (1) a single act or product of thinking; idea or notion: to collect one's thoughts.

 According to Wikipedia: "Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination.

 Poetry: - Authors tell us directly what they think about this or that. - The material is often personal and autobiographical.

 Drama: - Characters reveal their thoughts by talking to each other or by thinking out loud. - Even facial expressions, especially in close- ups, can hint at what is going on in a character’s mind.

 Fiction: - Characters can reveal themselves in dialogue or in a first-person narration. - Narrators use the third-person point of view to tell us what is going on in a character’s mind.

(A) Indirect (B) Direct (C) Stream of consciousness

 A description / summary of what a character thinks.  Occur most commonly in the third person.  Can also appear in the first-person point of view.

 Third person: He was thinking about what he would do in case the airplane was hijacked by terrorists.  First person: I was thinking about what I would do in case the airplane was hijacked by terrorists.

 A literal record of what occurs in the character’s mind. (i) Direct thoughts often sound like dialogue. - They are not spoken aloud. - As if the character is speaking to himself. - Most writers do not place such thoughts in quotation marks.

 Direct dialogue: “What should I do in case the airplane is hijacked by terrorists?” I said.  Direct thought: What should I do in case the airplane is hijacked by terrorists? I wondered.

(ii) Some writers put the direct thoughts of their characters in italics. - Some users of italics reserve them of stream-of-consciousness passages; some use them for any directly expressed thoughts.

 I lied, Charles thought, but maybe she will forgive me.  He thought, I’m not going to make it.  She glanced down at her dress. Well, at least the cut makes me look curvier and slender at the same time. Ha! I love how well-tailored clothes ensure I don’t have to work as hard to look good.

 A literary technique used to capture the random, uncensored workings of the human mind.  Here is a list of the most important features of stream of consciousness: Focalization on inner thoughts and feelings No first-person but figural narrative mode The flow of thoughts is represented by means of long-winding, interconnected sentences Use of informal, colloquial language Denial of syntax (punctuation is neglected) Grammatical and stylistic deviance

(i) Some writers try to capture inner thoughts through conventional language. - Some writers try to give the reader a sense of what is going on by using traditional syntax and certain devices that suggest the subconscious mind at work.

 In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa enters a flower shop. Her reaction is described in the 3 rd person, but the reader feels drawn directly into the character’s mind: There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilacs; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes-so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.

(ii) Some writers violate the conventions of language to try to get at the inner thoughts of a character. [...] if his nose bleeds youd thing it was O tragic and that dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on account of her to sever see thy face again though he looked more like a man with his beard a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns afraid hed get blood poisoning [...] (Joyce, Ulysses, 'Penelope')

 There is no punctuation and the current of thought is depicted as associative rather than strictly logical and coherent.  The notion that one's thoughts are not in fact orderly and well-formulated but more of a jumbled-up sequence of associations, gained currency with a concept developed in psychology, called stream of consciousness.