“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”― Albert Einstein
Something subtle appears to be happening with time. In a previous transmission, I suggested something as unfathomable as time turning inside out: link.
Liminal drift seems to operate precisely there — where perception softens, and a single frame escapes the reel before snapping back into order, allowing awareness to register events as overlapping fields rather than a single, sequential “now.”
A Single Frame Out of Time
Lately, I’ve been noticing subtle irregularities in how time behaves. It’s like a brief misalignment. One recent moment gave me a precise way to describe it.
I was standing on one side of a room divider, focused on a simple task — gathering recyclables and placing them into a container. My attention was anchored in the physical rhythm of movement. For a split second, I glanced behind me and saw Andy standing in the doorway. More than that, I felt him there. A presence. Solid. And then it was gone.
A couple of minutes later, I checked with him. He told me he had already walked through the room earlier and exited before I entered the space. At the moment I saw him, he was actually on the other side of the divider, in a different part of the room.
I felt like I had briefly perceived a residual moment of his movement, as if time had left behind an imprint, a trace. Like a single frame from a sequence that had already passed. That’s the closest analogy: a strip of film where only one frame becomes visible. Here… and gone.
It was a momentary alignment where perception and time slipped out of sync by a fraction of a second. Long enough to register presence. Short enough to vanish before the mind could interfere. I didn’t see him moving. I saw him having already been there.
These moments suggest something subtle but important: time may not be as linear or sealed as we experience it most of the time. Under certain conditions, relaxed attention, divided focus, or liminal awareness, perception may briefly access non-concurrent information. Not the future. Not the past as memory. But a temporal overlap. A thin place in the sequence.
If that’s the case, then what we call “now” might be more porous than we think, like a field where moments can brush against one another. And sometimes, just for an instant, one frame slips through.
A Frame Without a Reel
What this experience seems to reveal, rather than events lining up like beads on a string, they behave more like overlapping currents in a field — present simultaneously, but usually filtered by the mind into a single track we call “now.” In moments of liminal drift, perception appears to momentarily access that wider field.
Actions, presences, and movements are no longer bound to linear order, but float briefly out of context, as if a single frame from a longer reel has slipped free. The result is clarity without narrative: a person seen having already been there, a moment felt without motion, a presence registered without arrival.
A residual imprint of presence.
The best language for this state may be temporal superposition — a condition where multiple moments coexist, and awareness briefly resolves more than one at once. In physics terms, this resembles a quantum field where probabilities exist simultaneously until observation collapses them into a single outcome. In lived experience, it feels like perception stepping sideways rather than forward. These moments reveal that time itself may be a negotiated interface, not a fixed rail. When curiosity replaces fear, the mind can tolerate the ambiguity long enough to glimpse the field beneath the clock.
Beautiful when the field lines up with the experience. “This paper introduces the Temporal Superposition and Collapse (TSC) model, which proposes that quantum systems exist in superpositions not only of spatial and energetic states, but also of temporal positions. The act of observation collapses a quantum system’s temporal wavefunction into an experienced “now.” Time, in this framework, is not a continuous dimension but a sequence of discrete, emergent moments generated through quantum observation.” 4.4.2025. link
AI: Temporal superposition is a quantum physics concept where a system exists across multiple moments or time states simultaneously, unlike classical physics where time is linear; it suggests time itself can be a wave, allowing for events to influence each other across different times, potentially explaining phenomena like quantum entanglement and challenging our perception of a single “now,” with experiments exploring “quantum time flips” and “indefinite causal orders”.
Time as Superposition: How Observation Collapses the Present. It suggests that the “now” does not exist until something observes it, and each observation activates one real version of time while excluding all others. Because of this, the paper calls for a new view of time — not as something flowing on its own but as a quantum variable that becomes real only through interaction. 6.30.2025. link
One step further. If time is not universal, then perception cannot be synchronized by default. Variation in eyewitness accounts may reflect temporal sampling, not error.
Albert Einstein dismantled the idea that time is universal, fixed, and synchronized for all observers. In Special Relativity, time depends on motion and frame of reference. In General Relativity, time is affected by gravity and position in a gravitational field. There is no single, absolute “now” that everyone shares.
Different observers can experience the same event differently in time — and all of them can be correct.
This reframes eyewitness testimony as layered data that, when viewed together, can reveal a fuller structure of what occurred. The anomaly isn’t that observers disagree, it’s that we’ve assumed they must be seeing the same moment.
This perspective is especially useful in UFO cases, apparitions, and other anomalous events where multiple witnesses are present. It helps explain why some experiencers clearly remember an encounter while others —standing just feet away — recall nothing at all.
If perception samples time non-uniformly, then not everyone in a shared space is necessarily accessing the same temporal slice of the event.
The frustration for many experiencers is the shock of realizing that shared presence doesn’t guarantee shared memory. In anomalous encounters, awareness itself may be the variable that determines what enters recall.
Why Some People Remember, and Others Don’t
In anomalous events, memory isn’t distributed evenly. Even when people are together, perception doesn’t operate on a single shared clock. Attention, emotional state, neurological timing, and awareness all influence what gets registered, and what doesn’t.
One person may experience the event directly, another may perceive only a fragment, and someone else may not register it at all. This isn’t denial or repression; it’s variability in how experience enters memory. In these cases, the anomaly is the assumption that everyone present must have accessed the same moment.
Mining the Fringe: Why Outlier Experience Is Data, Not Distraction
“The patterns we overlook at the edges often end up shaping the center.” — David Metcalfe, LinkedIn
Experiences like this sit firmly on the fringe, not because they lack meaning, but because they resist standardization. Liminal events are often unique to the experiencer, shaped by individual perception, context, and capacity to notice. That makes them difficult to validate through consensus, but no less valuable as data.
In that sense, experiencers function much like perceptual outliers. Synesthesia offers a useful parallel: not everyone sees sound or hears color, yet those who do aren’t dismissed as errors. Their reports expand our understanding of how perception can operate under different conditions. One synesthete described it this way: “It’s hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound… like sound waves on a screen, or neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me.” link
Liminal experiences work the same way. They exist as first-person datasets — anomalous, subjective, and difficult to translate. But these edge cases often point toward mechanisms not yet mapped. The fringe isn’t where proof lives. It’s where exploration begins.
For the experiencer: If others don’t remember what you experienced, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, it may mean awareness, timing, and recall weren’t synchronized in the same way.
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