[Coda]

It's not really technical at all. You do it all the time when you're mentally exploring a set of possibilities. If there's more than one thing that can happen, you'll think about what might happen in each possible case. You can make plans based on each result. But only one of those results can happen, and you THINKING about the result is separate from what actually happens. After all, when your friend is late, you might think "what happened to them ten minutes ago?" and your actions will be based on the probabilities of each outcome. And then when you actually CALL your friend, and you find out what happened, the other possibilities stop mattering.

Your thoughts are that superposition of states, and that superposition lasts until you observe the system, even though the event in question might have already happened.