I think I may have finally read enough philosophy to try to explain to myself the confounding visionary state that I found myself in last New Year's Eve, without resorting to the mystical description of "time having stopped."

I've long considered such a description of any human state to be philosophically sloppy, because it seems to me that if time had really totally stopped, then all of one's perceptions would be reduced from something like a video to something like a snapshot, and since this includes the brain, no memory recollection would be possible; since memory requires a transition from "not having the memory" to "having it," it follows that if time is stopped, then no transitions or changes of any kind are possible.

Hence also the common religious idea that death, at which point one passes into timeless eternity, is too late for repentance, since repentance, like memory, also entails a change in mental state.

Anyway though, regarding what I think happened:

Time is conventionally divided into past, present and future. A common idea is that the present is just the razor's edge slice of 'now.'

In Latin, there are two words that can be translated as 'now.' One is nunc, which as far as I know is always simply translated as 'now.' The other is iam, which is sometimes translated as 'now,' but depending on context, it can also be translated as 'already' or 'soon.'

The ambiguity of the Latin word iam I think points to a temporal phenomena that we actually experience: in fact, 'now' is not just the razor's edge slice of 'right now,' but it also includes our anticipation of the immediate future and memories and ideas acquired in the past which have a bearing on that future. Nunc-now is a single point in time, like a freeze-frame, whereas iam-now is more like a short clip of several frames strung together, a few from the past, a few vaguely sketching the future, with the nunc-now as the nucleus of this complex.

As time passes, nunc advances frame-by-frame, and iam is dragged along with it, its contents shifting gradually as its centre shifts into the future. Normal human time-sense, I am theorizing here, is dependent upon one's being able to perceive both of these 'nows' moving forward together in a synchronized manner, the objective nunc time and the subjective iam time in tandem.

With this background, my theory is that what happened to my time sense on New Year's was that these two 'nows' got out of sync with one another, because due to the sacrament's effects of making the links between all past events, information, etc. and all future possibilities so much more vivid than normal, the iam-now, instead of consisting of only a few frames into the past and into the future, got swollen up so that it seemed to extend from the beginning of time to the end of it.

And if the iam-now occupies all of that duration, then it cannot move forward along with the nunc-now, because its end is already bumping up against the far reaches of the end of time. As a result, the nunc-now, in which one objectively perceives new events, keeps moving forward like normal, but the iam-now, which contains one's subjective sense of what is possible in response to such events, remains simultaneously static and inclusive of all of time, such that its centre, rather than simply matching the position of the nunc-now, is no longer perceivable.

I find this model far more satisfying than simply saying that 'time stopped' for me, because as alluded to already, if that were entirely true, then philosophically it would follow that I should not remember anything from the incident in question, and that it would be impossible for me to have perceived changes of any kind, e.g. my moving around, irritating my friends with my babbling, and so forth.

Rather, objective time kept moving forward, hence my ability to remember the things just mentioned. But subjective time had become so 'thick' that there was nowhere for it to move to. Combine this with subjective time's having lost its centre, and it becomes understandable how I could convince myself of theses that would normally be temporally impossible, e.g. that I had invented/created various people I knew.

Most importantly to my intellectual satisfaction though, this model allows me to see how I could have simultaneously got the notion into my head that night that "all times were one time" even though I could distinctly sense time moving on from one instant to the next in direct contradiction to this claim: the resolution of the contradiction then is that subjective time might seem to have stopped, having 'run out of room' and lost its orienting centre, but objective time was still moving.

And now that I've convinced a bunch of you that using such 'sacraments' just turns you into an even crazier philosopher than you would have been otherwise, I'll just stop there.