LogFAQs > #941565858

Not just that, there have to be time shenanigans at play as Cloud is having completely unprompted visions of the future throughout the game - clones in the crater, Aerith praying, metal girders falling in Sector 7 etc.

The operating theory that Sephiroth was still never absorbed into the Lifestream even post-Advent Children and, at some point in the future, determined the means to make his consciousness travel back in time (whether to any clone, anyone who had Jenova cells or just Cloud, that's tbd) and his attempts to interfere with the timeline - namely the Chapter 2 Nibelheim hallucination and trying to force Cloud off the path of meeting Aerith - is when the whispers first intervene and thereafter, they're forcing events of the original game.

I guess you could say, maybe Sephiroth disrupted the "foretold events" in some non-time-travel way and the whispers are still trying to force the "foretold events" to happen, but I don't know about that... after the final Sephiroth/Cloud faceoff in the edge of creation, I still feel like that's future Seph.