If a dragonbreak is when time becomes non-linear, how can it 'endure' for a linear amount of time? I'm referring to this excerpt - 'A sect of the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Alessian_Order, the Maruhkati Selective, is also said to have caused the longest known Dragon Break, known as the "Middle Dawn", which spanned one thousand and eight years from the 13th to the 23rd centuries in the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:First_Era'

The most likely thing is that the Elder Council assigned an arbitrary number of years to it.

The timeline that the Imperial historians observed/recognized as "true" lasted 1008 years. Different fragments seemed to last different amounts if time before the Jills managed to thread them back together.

"'One thousand eight years,' you've heard it. You think the Cyro-Nordics came up with that all on their own. You humans are better thieves than even Rajhin!"

From the Khajiit account in http://www.imperial-library.info/content/obscure-where-were-you-when-dragon-broke. The 1008 years is true - at least from an "internal" perspective. Nobody says, however, that the Khajiit use the same calendars as Imperials.

Consider it like a time singularity, perhaps. A black hole exists in a finite area of space, but is nonetheless a discontinuity in space-time. Another anology would be the remembrance of what feels like hours of dreaming when you wake up from a half-hour nap. The Dragon Break is where the usual rules of causality and time are not true, but what we don't know in this instance is what would cause a Dragon Break to stop. It's a subject worth considering, although there are unlikely to be any concrete answers, unless you can pull something very clever out of ESO's new books. But the basic understanding of time being "bounded in domain but nonlinear" can be quite simple if we allow more than one dimension of time.

Dragon Breaks can also be understood in the historiographical perspective, as in http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Dragon_Break_Re-Examined:

However, this doesn't deny this existence of nonlinear time in itself, as that book is even discontinuous with its own place in time. Fundamentally, Tamriel's written history and reality interact in most unusual ways. The scholars find themselves changing history, and history changing itself according to some extant will.