an old place lost in time

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I have a memory of a faraway place. It's a little strange because I can walk there from home in less than ten minutes, so it's really not that far. When I get there I look around to see if I have arrived but the picture in my thoughts doesn't match with the shapes that I see. The people are different, the grass has changed, the trees are a little more crooked, it's not the same place. I don't understand why I can go where I please as long as I limit myself to the confines of the three dimensions in space. The fourth dimension of time is the one I don't get, you can go ahead in a straight path but why can't you turn around take a step back, move up or down and travel it's so many different thinkable ways. I think of the future when the past refuses my request, can I travel this straight line, choose the direction with a plan, to end up in a place where the memory awakes. The space will not be the same, a different part of town, there might be no trees, the buildings are wrong but because of one detail the time is the same to the faraway place.

Don't know how old you are, but as you age, this gets to be quite common, and a bit disquieting. Recently I took my wife to see a ghost town I used to visit when I was younger, and now it's very touristy. I lost my way, and couldn't find the neighborhood I was looking for. Like it was displaced. I couldn't even find my friend's house, who used to live there thirty years ago. Sometimes it's like you've mixed up a real place with a dream-place....

Theoretically one actually could go backwards in time, but not in practice. All physical processes are theoretically reverseable but to practically do so is something else.

Good point, Litigious ! ! I read a Physicist's paper where he insisted that if a time machine worked, you'd go back to where the earth had been, and thus be floating in space ! !!

(I still like the Twilight Zone time machine episode with Buster Keaton.)

I first thought about time when I was 3, I thought that when a person dies they become a baby again and begin life all over. Then when I was 4 I had thoughts of the future, of my parents death and it saddened me I could not understand why time would do this to me. I've always had difficulty dealing with time, I feel it's an incomplete picture what we know of time.

I reckon time goes in a loop, like in the Red Dwarf episode 'Backwards'. The Big Bang happens, and after about 20 million billion years, it all starts to go in reverse and crunch back together! And then the Big Bang happens again, and so on and so forth.