An Adventure Through Time and Space!

I recently watched an old-timey French movie on Netflix called "La jetée."  To give you an idea of the film: a man lives in post-apocalyptic Paris, where scientists living underneath the ruins devise a way to hurl people through time, and try to use it to get help from humans of the past and future to help them out of their little pickle involving the end of the world.  The man in question is chosen for this experiment because of his strong mental imagery - he obsesses over this image of a beautiful young woman he saw on a pier before witnessing a murder.  The whole film is quite intruiging - it's black-and-white and is made completely from still photos, and it's quite original.  

Anyway, the part that got me the most was some of the images of him lying on a table with all sorts of wires coming out of his head as he travelled through time.  Previously, I'd thought of time travel as a process that was solely physical, like Back to the Future and the Terminator, etc.  The use of a "time machine" was such a crucial concept behind time travel that I never really thought about the mental aspects of the process.

So here's where I got an idea.  Let's assume that quantum physicists will figure out how to travel forward in time in the near future; that's not been considered impossible under special and general relativity, we just lack the technology to allow forward time travel to occur.  How does one explain backward time travel?  

I envision that the process of traveling back in time (for those governed by creativity, not regimented scientific analysis) can simply be entirely mental.  While it is (or at least I think it is) possible to reconstruct vivid memories of past experiences using hypnosis or some other means, these memories are likely corrupted due to age (similar to how old data files get corrupted because of quantum tunneling in your hard drive) and contain many self-constructed fallacies.  I don't want to spam my miracle exemption just yet, so let's say that each memory is recorded exactly as it happened, as in the Robin Williams movie, "The Final Cut," and didn't get corrupted by the same phenomenon that I just mentioned.  This way, one could simply "reset" one's consciousness to the time in the past of their choosing while maintaining memories of the present.  How does this actually enable time travel, though?  An important plot device for many authors of speculative science fiction is being able to use the backward time travel to alter events of the past.  

This is where I have to use my miracle exemption, which completely annihilates every law of science that I'm aware of.  Instead of simply reliving a memory as it passes in one's head, one could actually direct their consciousness to an earlier point in time, which would cause problems based on the fact that one's past self has different neural networks and associations and memories.  This definitely limits the freedom of consciousness-time-travel to a few days, maybe weeks; either way, it'd probably cause a gigantic headache to whoever was unlucky enough to end up in that situation.  From here, the strapping young hero or picaresque time-traveling deviant is free to engage in whatever history-meddling shenanigans they please - don't even bother me with addressing continuity between the past and the present, for now.  And remember, this is just an idea of a plot device.  Sciencefag whiners, stay away!  Also, before the h8terz gunna h8, this is very different from the Butterfly Effect.  Which was retarded.