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you start listening to a song, e.g. the Beatles song, "Hey Jude"

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after it starts, the beginning is sinking into the immediate past

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each moment of the song is, in time, a separate and discreet event

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each word is a separate event

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when we hear the word "Hey", every bit of us pulls towards the next word in the song, "Jude"

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as the two words unfold, we have both anticipation and retention

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the anticipate and retention is a part of our experience

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it's as if we can hear the approach words but not in a sensory fashion

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primal impression

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the middle piece between subjective past and subjective future

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the now is temporally extended to include the whole song or parts of the song

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our present experience spreads to past and future and that is all contained in each and every present moment of consciousness

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dimensions

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the first three are the familiar spacial dimensions

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the fourth is physical time, or clock time

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Husserl is the pioneer of the fifth dimension

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like the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension affects all the contents of consciousness

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you can anticipate a thought, experience its presence, and retain it as it fades

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all consciousness is consciousness of something

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in our phenomenological zoo, we find every kind of object: real, unreal, concrete, abstract, precise or vague

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we find every kind of psychological attitude toward those objects

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perceive, believe, imagine, remember, anticipate, hope, fear, etc.

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some of these objects and attitudes are especially important

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the computer at which you sit is not like the unicorn you imagine, i.e. it's real

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but your psychological attitude toward both it is one of belief

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although there are many insights to be found in the fun house of phenomenology, in the end, we exit to the serious business of real life

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but if the fun house is consciousness itself, how can we leave it?

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real things like computers and tables are elements in conscious awareness

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our experience of computers and tables are different than our experience of unicorns and superheroes, but what is that difference?

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much of Shakespeare probes the nature of the real and the unreal

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Macbeth in particular explicitly questions reality throughout the play

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as he prepares to kill the king of Scotland, he envisions a hallucination hovering in space

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Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.

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the dagger Macbeth sees certainly looks real, but raises many questions

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being a good phenomenologist, he reaches out to test some multi-sensory confirmation, but multi-sensory confirmation fails, "I have these not, and yet I see thee still"

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his dagger lacks the continuity of a real thing that persists through time

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the seeming dagger unlike a real thing, fails to enter into a cause-and-effect relation with other things, including Macbeth's hand as he reaches for the hallucinated weapon

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there is no interpersonal agreement about the existence of the dagger

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continued reality testing condenses the subjective into the objective

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which will sort hallucinations from reality quite reliably