Here are two related ideas, one which I had about 11 years ago, and the other from a dream a couple of days ago.

Suppose that we subconsciously precipitate events that lead to future desirable events. The thread of events can be thought of as having something like tension - the desired future is pulling the present in a particular direction. As I've suggested before, I don't think that any part of the thread of events is scribed in stone, the whole thread can shift around, although it usually maintains a fairly high degree of internal consistency.

Suppose that an condition exists but no future conditions of any importance depend on it. When does the condition come to an end? It doesn't really matter, so for that condition, there's no tension. Its like the thread has been cut somewhere in the future. Although nothing is pulling it forward any more, there is still something like pressure on it, the competition from all the other possible conditions that do have things pulling them forward. So the end of the thread 'falls' backwards into the past. As a hypothetical example, suppose that people had pads on their feet, like dogs. We don't need the pads, because we wear shoes. I'm suggesting that the pads can disappear even before the first shoes appear, provided that not having them doesn't create any important near term problems. And maybe they can disappear for everyone together, even if not having them would confer competitive disadvantages if only some individuals lacked them. I'm not suggesting this particular example works, I'm just trying to illustrate the idea.

Anyway, that's the first idea. I was thinking about this when I had one of my most remarkable waking life paranormal experiences.

In the second idea, present conditions that are required by future conditions can exist in the manner they do because of of other conditions that 'could have' happened but aren't currently in the thread of events. In my dream, there was an equation in a scientific journal that was somewhat incorrect. Another individual provided a first correction, so then afterwards the correction was present in revised versions. Other future events depend on the correct version existing. But they don't depend so much on how it got there. It is almost the same if the equation had been correct in the original paper. So if there is some further reason for it to have originally been correct, such as to avoid loss of face for the original author, it is sometimes possible for the history to become that way. In terms of memory, meaning physical evidence, there is no record of it ever having been the other way. Yet, the most probable path for it to have gotten the way it is actually involves the whole thread of events from having incorporated the correction before shifting to avoid the initial mistake. Its somewhat analogous to a natural arch, where something exists the way it is only because something was present which is now missing. But the missing element is actually a part of history. Maybe this is also crudely analogous to particles tunneling through barriers that they can't actually exist in, such as occurs in semiconductor devices. They can do it because they 'exist' in more than one particular reality, so to speak. Using the string analogy, this would sort of like a string that is pulled at an angle around an obstruction, which is then removed, after which the tension on the string causes it to take a shorter path.

I don't know if that made any sense, or if I explained it adequately, but that was the dream.