living in the present?

How we make sense is open to wildly discrepant possibilities – at any moment. A distant murmur may sound like the sea – or motorway traffic. How we name it and build a story will influence our response, pleasant or unpleasant. The experience may be just a murmer in our ears, but the perception, our understanding is what we think we experience.
So perception is always retrospective. We are always reviewing the past, moment by moment.
The neuro scientists have found that there is activity in the brain before we think to act. We are not in control then, always reacting and justifying our actions after the event. Even when we scratch our nose. How we react is influenced by our lives up to that point. A musician will hear a sound and know it is a B minor chord. Another person may find the sound pleasurable, but will not remark on it or be able to recall it in the same way. Recall is always a reworking of the story. I do not have a photographic memory; I have to recreate each memory that I have, and each time I will recreate it a little differently. I remember you differently today than I did yesterday. The recollection I have of an event is a remake of a movie, where the original is lost.
We translate this experience into language. We not only feel and think, analysing our experience in a rational way, as a pigeon does in a Skinner box when it wants food, but we interpret that experience: having the use of language we do not have to tell the truth about our experience – we can make it up. And that is all that we can do. You can be in my dream if I can be in yours.