The world may objectively exist but our encounter with it—in whatever way—fictionalizes it.

From most books on writing the novel, you will find that dreams are taboo. “Do not go there” is the general advice.

No one ever asks what novel the dream would write. Truth be told, all dreams are incipient novels.

Dreams, of course, are the focus of endless analysis, but analysis does not write novels, is not interested in this potency, always turning the dream into something else—to be generous, perhaps this too a fiction.

James Walton has reviewed Keith Ridgway’s new novel A Shock, titling his review, “Everything is Fiction,” in the December 16 edition of The New York Review of Books. Read it. Then read Ridgway. Then read your dream.

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