It’s impossible to see a stranger’s face in a dream. Faces of strangers are always mere forms of reconstruction, reproduction of faces the dreamer has already seen.

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If dreams do this, creative nonfiction does this also. Fiction is, by definition, the arrangement of facts. A way of sculpting story through microscopic focus and tiny chisels around a marble block of images.

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Dreams are a long-investigated phenomenon – they’re debatably the mind’s way of revisiting information for the purpose of solidifying sensory material into memories. Dreams do a lot. They allow us to nimbly tip toe around voids in memory – to revisit painful images in a calmed state for the purpose of processing. “Trauma," as its etymological considerations as “a wound, a gap,” suggest, a void in memory, a chip in the groove that triggers a cascade of emotions when visited. This explains why a common suffering of post-traumatic stress disorder is terrible nightmares. The mind, in sleep, tries to access and process traumatic information – to ruminate, speculate, and piece together the fragments of thoughts, experiences and observations, to try to make sense of things, or make peace with things. Dreams don’t always succeed in this. Creative nonfiction doesn't always succeed in this.

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Sometimes the dreamer is woken up in fear or confusion from something deeply disturbing revealed to them in the dream. Revelation. "Reve” is the French word for dream. Sometimes the level of disturbance is because of the reality of the revelation. When fiction bleeds into what’s real, it can be disturbing. Bewildering.