Experience And Memory

If we go with the single discontinuous timeline idea, then it follows that several passages in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series describe not events that did occur but events that would have occurred if they had not been prevented.

At time t2, a time traveler experiences an event  and thus knows that it is occurring;

at t3, later along the same timeline, he remembers the event at t2 and thus knows that it occurred (at least I think he does, see below);

at t1, having appeared at an earlier time, he does not know whether his memories of t2 and t3 are valid.

In fact, if we rearrange this list into chronological order, with t1 first, then we do not know what to write at t2 or t3.

Might my memories of yesterday or of the last half hour be illusory? A written record of past events might be false. However, remembering an event is not like consulting a present, possibly false, record of that event. Remembering feels like direct acquaintance with a past event, as suggested in CS Lewis' "The Dark Tower." And memory must be involved even in immediate present experience because to forget an event as soon as we experience it would not be to experience it.