ABSTRACT
We can fast forward and rewind events in our imagination, but never put time on pause. The stream of our consciousness runs parallel and around the stream of our unfolding life. In imagination, we behave like sheepdogs running around an unstoppable herd, gathering it together. Replaying time, backward and forward, we engage in mental time travel, running free around the events already spent of our life, and those we may project into the future. As we age and accumulate more stories, time seem to fly faster. Mental travel and revisiting our past in memories is our only recourse to reverse and anchor finite time. In our self-conscious living, we desperately try to create temporal invariants, anchoring the flow of time in habits, repetition, and rituals. Yet, the episodes we live are each time different, inflating our memory of events which grows and consolidates like a rolling snowball.
