The Mark on the Wall

"The Mark on the Wall" is an excerpt from a collection of autobiographical essays titled Monday or Tuesday, which Woolf published in 1921. I include it here, because it's the best example in our book of Woolf's use of stream of consciousness. In responding to it, focus on the way the narrator's mind flits from impression to thought to memory to impression, and so on.

The stream of consciousness writing is interesting. I learned about this process in poetry when I was in high school and wrote some terrible terrible things that I don’t care to look back on. But I’m familiar with this! Woolf does it beautifully. Without considering who we’d be reading, when I saw that it would be a matter of stream of consciousness, I expected it to be a pain and difficult to read because of jumping from thought to thought. But Woolf is a master of it. She flows from talking about this unknown mark on the wall into an idol daydream she’s had since childhood, the past residents of the house, things she’s lost in her lifetime, babes and giants even, but continues to return to this mark. With all this thinking, all these ideas that came from some smudge on the wall, the end honestly is so startling that I laughed out loud. Of all the things she’d thought of what the mark could be, all the ideas it inspired in the speaker, it turns out to be a snail and this is told her by someone else entirely. Frankly, if this is truly how Woolf found her mind working, it’s no wonder she was such an excellent writer.

LOL on those "terrible terrible things":-)--but that showed you how hard it is to carry this off, and you see, too, that Woolf is a master (mistress?) of it.
We'll see this again in Joyce. Thinking of it as a fiction technique, how does it compare for you to the style, for example, of Dickens?
Here and in your reply to Aden, you focus on that very sudden and down-to-earth realization about the mark--but isn't the mark mainly a device which she uses as an occasion for the stream of consciousness?