It must be bad to respond to your own post, but I am feeling the strong urge to share the idea of the configuration of space within the horizon of a black hole, but outside its singularity.

Since time becomes the radial coordinate within the horizon. Then necessarily 3-d space becomes a 2-d surface. Going back in time, the size of the 2-d surface incorporating the 3-d continually shrinks until the vicinity of the singularity is reached.

In some sense this is the exact opposite of our expanding universe. Our flat universe is like a 3-d surface expanding in 4-d space-time. Since in a flat universe, time can go to infinity, we exist in an infinite space-time universe. We just exist at a point in time where the universe is still finite.