The Past Is a Ghost and the Future a Fantasy

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IIt is strange to see how your brain can be wrong – and how something small, deactivated details can shake your confidence in the way you remember your own life.

For years, I told the story of the Dalmatian that we had when I was a child. A beautiful white dog with black spots, full of energy, tearing the courtyard, digging the garden with a kind of reckless joy. This is why we had to give it. The dog kept digging. It has become one of these fast and emotional stories that I brought with me – a flash of childhood, a symbol of something ephemeral and unfinished.

And then one day, I mentioned my father. He looked at me and said, “He was not a Dalmatian. It was a spaniel.”

I was amazed. I did not only remember this dog – I knew This dog. I could see him in my mind as clearly as if he was there yesterday. But apparently, the Dalmatian I never remembered existed. I invented it – half the feeling, half of the imagination – and I wore this image for decades.

If a memory so lively could be false, what have I rewritten another without even realizing it? What had I transformed into a story without knowing it?

The act of remembering is not a recovery but a recreation.

We were taught that the past is set – a file of what happened. The future, uncertain and unknown, is the territory of the possibility. And yet, what science and philosophy reveal, with an intimacy and precision of which our ancestors could only dream of, is that the past and the future are creations of the mind. Only the present, ephemeral and indivisible, is objective. Everything else is artifice.

There is something deeply moving in this revelation. This does not decrease our humanity – it illuminates it.

Memory, we know now, is not a bin for storing facts and figures, but the phenomenon of breathing and breathable. Whenever we remember, we do not remove a file from the brain cabinet. We rebuild the past. We deduce, we embellish, we forget. The act of remembering is not a recovery but a recreation. The brain opens memory as a manuscript, modifies the text – sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally – and binds it again, ignoring that it has revised history.

And why does the brain do this? Because it is not designed for the truth, it is designed for survival. To remember is to prepare: to use the past, not to dwell on it, but to anticipate what can happen. Memory is not the faculty of historians – it is the engine of prediction.

It’s not just a neurological tip. It is the structure of our lives. We are racing stories about ourselves, on where we have been, and these stories, repeated and reshaped, become the tapestry of identity. But this tapestry is sewn not only with sons of what happened, but with what we need For having taken place. With what we believe We must be justified who we are.

Expect now. The future is also imagined – but no less lively. The same architecture of the brain reminiscent of the past also builds possible future. The hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the default fashion network – all extinguishes when we plan. And what they create is not a prophecy. It is simulation. We imagine a dinner next week or a child that we can one day have the inheritance that we hope to leave. But these are dreams, no more real than the myths of Homer – made from the raw material of memory and desire.

We, humans, are bindics, as the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski called us. But we don’t read time not as it is – but as we wish.

This double invention – of the past and the future – places us on a tightrope above the infinity. It is only the present, the moment of being, which is always really real. But how brief this moment is. Neuroscientist David Eagleman told us that even our perception of the present is slightly delayed. Our senses do not arrive at the same time but in sequence. The brain is waiting – perhaps a tenth of a second – to bring together the full image before announced: “It’s now.”

Time is not a track that we are moving forward. This is an area that we cultivate.

And yet, it is this little “now” in which all the reality lies. It is in the present that we touch, that we breathe, that we think. It is in the present that a child laughs, that a truth is pronounced, that an idea was born. The past has disappeared. The future is not yet. But the present – the only time we can act – is ours.

It is surprising that this insight, as modern as quantum physics, is also as old as Upanishads. “Yesterday is only a dream,” wrote the Sanskrit poets, “and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yes a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope.”

However, we have trouble living in this now. The mind resists him. The self – our feeling of oneself – is itself a construction extended over time. It is a story, told in chapters and revisions, which gives consistency at the time. But it is also fiction. There is no continuous “I” in time, only a series of me, each suspended in its own present, like pearls on a chain.

It is not a cause of despair. It is a call for freedom.

The most dangerous lies are those we say without knowing it. But the most powerful truths are those that we create with intention. Narrative therapy teaches patients to crop their history. The nations also start to reframe their myths – to tell more inclusive, more honest stories. These are not acts of deception but of liberation.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has once noticed that many traditions are “invented” – not discovered but composed. And yet, they give us a meaning. The same goes for memory and hope. These are not iron scaffolding but clay sculptures.

Time is therefore not a track that we are moving forward. This is an area that we cultivate. And in this area, the present is not an ephemeral moment to endure on the way elsewhere – it is the only soil from which meaning can develop.

Einstein wrote, in a letter to a widow in mourning, that “the distinction between past, present and future is only an obstinately persistent illusion”. He did not think it as a physicist, but as a human being. He meant that comfort does not reside in the unreality of time, but in the reality of the now.

Let’s not gas this moment. Let us not exchange it for the ghosts of what was or fantasies of what could be. We do not go up by living in imaginary times, but being fully alive in it.

Image of lead: Andrey_l / Shutterstock

• John Steele

  Published on July 1, 2025

  John Steele is the editor and editorial director of Nautilus.