...what we call time, is a compound with a vector made up of three temporalities.

...The first temporality moves very fast - at the speed of light, in fact. This explains the speed of light, which is simply the rate of movement in this dimension if you consider it as a space. We call that time therefore speed of light time, or c time, from the old notation for the speed of light.

...But the second temporal dimension is very slow, by comparison. It's so slow that most phenomena seem suspended within it, almost as if it were that absolute grid of Newtonian - I mean Galilean - space. We call this one lateral or eternal time, thus e time, and we have found it vibrates slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble, vibrating or breathing. There is a systolic/diastolic change as it vibrates, but the vibration is weakly interacting with us, and its amplitude appears to be small.

...the third temporal dimension we call antichronos, because it moves in the reverse direction of c time, while it also interacts with e time.

The three temporalities flow through and resonate with each other, and they all pulse with vibrations of their own. We then experience the three as one, as a kind of fluctuating vector, with resonance effects when pulses from the three overlap in various ways. All those actions together create the percieved time of human consciousness. The present is a three-way interference pattern.

...The vector nature of the manifold also accounts for many of the temporal effects we experience, like entropy, action at a distance...

...In terms of what we sense, fluctuations in this manifold also account for most of our dreams, as well as less common sensations like involuntary memory, foresight, deja vu, presque vu, jamais vu, nostalgia, precognition, Ruckgriffe, Schwanung, paralipomena, mystical union with the eternal or the One, and so on.

-Kim Stanley Robinson - Galileo's Dream pg: 213-214

"...The compound nature of the manifold creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming. They account for that paradoxical feeling I often notice, that any moment in my past happened just a short time ago and yet is separated from me by an immense gulf of time. Both are true; these are subconscious perceptions of a delaminated e and c time."

"And the sense of eternity that occasionally strikes? When you ring like a bell?"

"That would be a powerful isolated sense of e time, which does in fact vibrate in a bell-like way.

Then in a different way, the sense of inexorable dissolution or breakdown we call entropy, also the feeling called nostalgia, these are the perceptions of antichronos passing backward through c and e time. Indeed Bao's work leads to a mathematical description of entropy as a kind of friction between antichronos and c time running against the grain of each other, so to speak. By their interaction."

-Kim Stanley Robinson - Galileo's Dream pg: 214-215

[Bergson presents a metaphor] of two spools, one unrolling to represent the continuous flow of ageing as one feels oneself moving toward the end of one's life span, the other a thread rolling into a ball to represent the continuous growth of memory as a person's past follows him/her. Indeed, for Bergson, consciousness equals memory. No two moments are identical, for the one will always contain the memory left it by the other. Therefore, a person might only experience two identical moments if he/she had no memory; but, Bergson says, that person's consciousness would thus be in a constant state of death and rebirth, which he identifies with unconsciousness.

The image of two spools is imperfect, however, as it involves the image of a homogeneous and therefore commensurable thread, whereas, according to Bergson, no two moments can be the same, and hence the Duration is heterogeneous. Bergson then presents the image of a spectrum of a thousand gradually changing shades with a line of feeling running through them, this line being both affected by and maintaining each of the shades it passes through. Yet even this image is inaccurate and incomplete, for it represents the Duration as a fixed and complete spectrum with all the shades spatially juxtaposed to one another, whereas there is no juxtaposition within the Duration, which is in reality incomplete and continuously growing, with the states not beginning or ending, but intermingling with one another.