Orin's Phoenix morning (Memory and Forgetting)
And out of nowhere a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi. With a flat matter-of-fact plop. Out of nowhere. […] It seems like no way could it have been a good sign. […] But he’d just sat there squeezing the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in his head. By the next morning, waking up, curled and entombed, it seemed like it had to have been a bad sign, though.
Context
At the time: no conscious thought at all. By the next morning the memory has been reprocessed into an omen — and note the tense slippage mid-recall, the remembered moment going present as Orin relives it. Memory here isn't retrieval, it's overnight revision: the event's meaning is assigned retroactively by the dread it gets recalled into.