Welcome to the forum Ehmie, we are glad you didn't die! As for the issue of "what is real" and "what is time", the attitude normally taken here is that the words are so general that one could take a philosophical or poetic or any kind of "take" on them, but here we use the scientific take. So if we want to understand time, we need to ask how to measure it. I would submit that the "snapshot" of a life you refer to can be measured with two clocks, one embedded in the memory that recorded each "tick" of your life, and the one that was ticking while you were conceptualizing that life. The former clock had millions of ticks, but the latter one was just a fraction of a tick, into which all those former ticks were compressed. This is a lot like relativity, where any number of ticks on one clock can be compressed into a single tick of another clock. It's all a matter of reference frame. But the concept of "reality" survives in the way we know how to transform between the frames-- we know (some do anyway) how considering a whole life in an instant will appear to turn it into a snapshot, or how looking at a turning wheel with a given frame rate will make it look stationary. In other words, we have gone one better than "seeing is believing".