When Is Now? How Temporally Shifting Dreams Illuminate the Feeling of Pastness

It’s commonly said there is a feeling of pastness when remembering past-perceived events. Still, there’s little agreement on how to construe this feeling. Some deny there’s any feeling of pastness at all, some hold that it’s an affective nonlocalized sensation akin to déjà vu, while still others say it’s literal experience of time. What’s missed in this debate is that the feeling of pastness isn’t unique to episodic recall. It occurs in some temporally shifting dreams too. By comparing the feeling of pastness across episodic recall and temporally shifting dreams, I argue for a new account of the feeling of pastness, the two-sided temporal approach. According to my approach, the feeling of pastness results from the interaction between our experience of time and the temporal structure of experience itself. I end by comparing the two-sided temporal approach to the three existing proposals.