A large part of the problem is that as mobile orgnanisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception and having developed culture out of narrative, people view time as the point of the present moving past to future.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimesnion of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So the future is not determined, because the process of determinatin can only occur as the present.

While free will is an oxymoron, as a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.

Yes, our immediate motor reactions are occurring at the subconscious level.

It would seem the function of our conscious thought process is to imagine all the various situations and possibilities, in order that future reactions are better informed.

I would argue the difference between the waking state and the dream state is a matter of degree of external input and the consequent need to constantly reset our flow of perception.

Often our minds play visual tricks on us, imagining faces in random patterns, conquences of actions that might have occurred, like images of the crash that would have occurred, hadn't we swerved, etc.

While when we are asleep, the mind just flows along, with one event simply emerging from the next, constructs of stored memories and emotions.

Though we often try to control our external environment and make it subject to our mental flow, so it doesn't have to accpted undesired input. Which applies to everything from religious and political belief systems, to the wealthy, to military strategists, to even mathematicians, where the tendency is to control the environment, staying inside the box, like the individual brain and then play by the rules it is based on.

While this might seem obvious with religions and the rich, consider that military strategists in peacetime do not have the sorts of external input they would have in an actual war, so they can let their imaginations run wild, then use the scenarios they construct to frighten people and polticians into funding their dreams, which then feedback through opposing strategists and give reason for more planning and spending. Totally ignoring the health of the actual society being defended.

Similarly the mathematical requirement for axioms creates similar feedback loops, which can lead off into multiworlds, if such realities as the nature of time can be reduced to a geometric dimension.....