Time is not a stream flowing equably, constantly, from the beginning of all things to the end of all things as Newton believed. Instead time is an intricate web of is and was and will be, all coexisting in a continuum of time and space, each fraction of a moment a point in the continuum. All times exist at once, and the future, just like the past, is already there.

But such an understanding of the world is denied to us. Our physical bodies, our minds, are created in such a way that we can only see time as a progression from one moment to the next, where the future is unknown and the past only remembered. We feel time’s pressure, but not time itself, our access to the universe limited to a dim and faded understanding of its possibilities, so we live feeling the past slip away as we fall into a an unknown and constantly fluctuating future. And within this illusion there is another, even more terrifying. Although we believe we remember the past, it is no more accessible to us than the future, what it holds lost to us forever, as our minds and bodies blind us and condemn us to no more than a half-remembered dream of what was. The past is as inaccessible as the future, and as untrustworthy.