[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Neo-Scholastic]

From a presentist perspective, your photos and memories are real because they exist in the present. But in many cases the objects in them are not present and therefore not real. The question is to what do those photos and memories actually refer since the referents no longer exist?

So yes, I say etch-a-sketch world is on the table.  Unless you have a reason for dismissing it. The past is story constucted from real forms in the present.

I think your position is supported here by the fact that memory is often faulty. It's pretty well proven that what we recall has been edited and interpreted. The memory we have presently in our mind is more or less tenuously related to the event that originally prompted it.

Likewise souvenirs and artifacts. They obviously originated in the past, but their meaning and the associations they call to mind exist in the present. 

Maybe we should say we have every reason to believe that the past WAS real, when we were in the past, but it doesn't exist now. (Or rather, it doesn't exist FOR US now. If it's true that time is made in the mind, or that there is a God for whom all time exists simultaneously, then the past does exist still, but outside of our minds.)

Indeed, I am taking the temporary stance that the the past has the same ontological status as the future. That the future does not exist (yet) seems commonplace compared to the notion that the past does in some sense exist. Yet the future as what might be based on present reality seems no different from the past as what could have been based on what is presently available. So why do we think the past is real but the future is not?