From my blog www.psychedelic-helpdesk.com/psy-phi-blog

Topologies of time - Viewing time as a spacial dimension through the analogy of a book

Non-linear time perception can be understood using the picture of a book. As with many book, within this book a story is written. The story unfolds in a linear, word by word, way. The stories of all the characters in this story progress linear from one page to the next. If these characters were conscious observers, they would, by reason of the nature of their own existence, perceive their history as evolving from one page to the next. They would come up with a model of linear time “from one sentence to the next”, where the atoms of time, their planck-time, would be the individual letters. These scientists would be right in a certain, but not fundamental, way.

Because we, as outsiders, can hold the whole book in our hands at once. We look at the entire book from the outside, thereby seeing all time-points of the book-universe at once. For us, there is simply one book. All pages of the book are present at the same time and thus contain all the stories and all timepoints simultaneously. The impression of a linear narrative arises only, when the text is read from one page to the next. However, a book does not necessarily have to be started at page one. It can theoretically be opened and read anywhere. We can go some pages back, skip whole chapters or read sentences twice.