Consciousness and the butterfly effect

The biggest problem I see with my view at this moment is that I can think of no mechanism to take the information pertaining to future events which is available within the timeless realm into a position inside the time-based realm.

Stories like yours and from many others about foretelling the future, and indeed the whole concept of prophecy, seem to with imply some kind of "leakage" of information from the causal future(or even from within an environment/perspective/realm where time itself is irrelevant) back to the present.

In other words, can the arrow of time run backwards? Or is the necessary information supplied from 'another place' where time is irrelevant thus making past, present and future one and the same?

I tend toward the second explanation because if you were to travel backwards in time inside one single chain of time you would violate the law of conservation of energy. Unless we misread that law and need to extrapolate it into a true spacetime 'proof' variant.

I see the butterfly effect as a by product of the interaction of our free will and our environment. Both our decisions and our environment alter the future in ways that we cannot predict with any certainty. The leaf analogy may not be the most appropriate. I would say though that having one thought rather than another five years ago may radically change the make up of the character in question.

I have tried to come to terms with the fact that time itself may be an illusion and that every event is so intricately linked it cant be helped that events causing events are like the butterfly wings chained to each others event like rhythm of movement through time....i cant really explain.. its beyond my vocabulary.. The river explains it so much more ..look at a river is water moving past you or is time...the picture remains the same but for the water it has gone further down stream..look further down and the picture changes but we have the same water creating a different pattern..oh dear

No, Im pretty sure it is being in the right place at the right time. We have all probably heard about the straw that broke the camel's back and when people say they are on their last straw, they usually mean it in a very inductive categorical sense. When people say they are at the end of their rope or the end of their fuse, It is usually a reflective of the fragility of state of the person. I think the more important thing to recognize is the fragility of state.
When someone sees one straw as inherently it. There is a "nope thats not it" mentality when no change occurs and then they try to find the next inherent straw etc. Then they try to figure out what makes the last straw so special.
Plus I think the privacy of mind is the best argument that non materialists have going for them. My consciousness is by definition opaque and while I won't take much time to explain it here, I truly believe that hard core materialist doubt of the indubitable will give them occasionaly the stench of bad faith. Anyway, there was some quote from some chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly and when he awoke he did not know if he was a philosopher dreaming he was butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher.
I doubt that clears things up but thats the interesting thing about your question: It really opens up a can of worms. Causality vs Free will. The mind body problem. The nouminal vs the phenomenal. Anyways, maybe I should take some time to go smell the roses.