When I dream about people I've never met, which is actually quite often, my brain never bothers to fill in their faces. It doesn't do this by having the person walk around with a blur for a face, as that might impact the quality of the dream by being really creepy (and if it was really creepy every time I dreamt about someone I've never met, I'd never meet anybody new). No, it does this by having my eyes aimed downwards, or otherwise away from them, at all times during the dream.

Last night I had one where I was in the process of falling in love with someone I'd just met, and had never met before. We stared out my living room window at the hot dog stand that filled the view, but ate leftover potato latkes. I had salted his too heavily, and he made a face when he took a bite, so I salted my side even heavier, took an even bigger bite, made an even weirder face, and started laughing. We both started laughing. And my hand, which was pretending to hand him back the fork, was really searching for an excuse to brush hands, or linger wrist to wrist.

And this whole time my line of sight only saw a hot dog stand, a plate of potato latkes, his legs in his jeans perched on a stool, and his right hand. I never saw anything above chest height.

This is odd because in waking life I often focus on people's faces to the complete exclusion of everything else. It's as though faces are so important to me that my brain doesn't feel right inventing them in case it's proven wrong later and has to painfully recalibrate every time the flesh-and-blood person walks into a real, physical room.