Let's consider you, you personally, and move your awareness from one level to another. The Ironic Level: At the ironic level, you are you at your least aware.  On the ironic level you rarely enjoy yourself (though others may).  You misplace the keys, forget the message, can't find your glasses, overlook implications, slip on verbal or intellectual banana peels, forget your lines while the audience waits expectantly...  You know this kind of day. The Realistic Level: Give yourself a little more  power.  You can cope.  The keys are in your pocket.  Your glasses are on your head.  You see what's right in front of you without any trouble. You know where you are.  You can handle it. You know that it is on the Realistic Level that Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, replies to his question about the ghost (which she can't see because the ghost is on another level), Hamlet: Do see nothing there? Gertrude: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see. The Heroic Level: OK, give yourself some more power. Now you are at your very best.  You fight brilliantly with Laertes.  You are Rose rescuing Jack from drowning on the Titanic.  Swing the ax hard: Heroic! You act! Probably nothing can stop you! You win the race!  You make the catch! This is so real!  This is so great!   A true example. The Romantic Level: Now give yourself the power dreams have.  It's the level of personal psychology.  Go ahead, if you want to dream you fly, fly!  "Don Juan," Carlos Casteneda said, "If your foot was tied to a heavy boulder, how would you fly?: Don Juan laughed, "I would fly like a man whose foot was tied to a heavy boulder."  (or words to that effect, from Casteneda's Journey to Ixtlan) With a phrase, a day can change.   We will see this in Joyce's first story when his protagonist, on hearing of the death of his mentor, looks around him and thinks, "I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood...."  The romantic level opens itself to individual dreams and desires, empowers reality with imagination, speaks of what is essentially personal and human, of personal psychology, even neurosis and hidden fear.  The most important word in Joyce's sentence is "strange."  "The Sisters" is a strange story about what is strange, and what strangeness the boy discovers in himself.