And maybe our imagination still gets ahead of itself?

Is time really the point of the present, moving past to future, codified as measures of duration and treated as a literal dimension, or is it change turning future to past? Tomorrow becoming yesterday, because the earth turns.

In which case, there is only this physical dynamic we refer to as the present and no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. Frequencies and amplitudes.

Then it is that fact that as mobile organisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception and having evolved in a narrative based culture, we only think of this effect of activity as a dimension.

A bit like the crystalline spheres of epicycles, trying to explain the movement of the heavens that we so patiently observe and measure.

We still have a ways to go, just making sense of what we do see.