We experience reality as a sequence of perceptions because we are mobile organisms. So it's a necessary function of navigation, as well as sorting and judging those thoughts. Then we have a narrative based culture, from sharing stories and lessons.

So this flow of time, of the point of the present moving past to future, is integral to who we are.

Even physics codifies it as measures of duration and treats it as a dimension.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

There is 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.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. Its changing configuration creates time. Not to mention temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.

So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

With a wave, the energy is what drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

In a factory, the products go start to finish, future to past, as the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests go future to past.

Yet we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous sytem sorts the patterns precipitating out. Suggesting consciousness acts like an energy, a flame within, not just a neutral observer. Which explains why the mind just won't go to sleep at night and insists on rummaging through its boxes of thoughts.

Or that children and teenagers push back against the boxes and forms society tries to put them in.

Yet not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. We have to decide which side of the fork in the road to take. So the head has to referee these emotions bubbling up.

We are stuck between the anarchy of desire and the tyranny of judgement.