I wanted to explore what drives us as humans, how our identity comes to be, and how they are intertwined. So with Daniel Kahneman as my guide, particularly his work on the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self, and my oft-researched theories on time and death, I envisioned a piece that explores how our own personal time constantly manipulates our experience. As much as we’d like to imagine time in various ways, we live a constant linear trajectory (within our observable dimensions). But what does all that do for us? While physicists obsess over the beginning of time and its spacial relationships, we as humans are plagued by its ending and the ability of our past to feel like it compresses or repeats itself. While we proceed in a linear world of cause and effect, our time often feels recursive: the same day every day, making the same mistakes, our hearts holding onto the past, days and weeks bleeding into each other, judgements on ourselves trapping us in loops. I conceived of a mythology where each night when you go to sleep, your subconscious mind in some undisclosed dimension is faced with the decision to either rewind 24 hours and relive your day again, or move forward with time. The caveat is that your conscious mind doesn’t know this rewinding exists, and therefore will not remember the previous day if you decide to repeat it. In fact, your memory of any previous drafts of a day gets wiped from your subconscious as well, so it doesn’t know if you’ve already repeated the day. Potentially you could get caught in an endless loop of reliving the same day over for decades without even knowing it. The final piece is: whenever you decide to move forward and not repeat, you “jump” forward by however many days you repeated, as if the temporal dimension has its own static existence and you are the variable. Does this explain why some days in our past are so vivid while others seem lost forever? It asks the question: how do we chose to spend our time in this life?