Given how generally irreverent Kerr is, he would probably not use the language of sacred time and space, but Kerr knows from both his experience and his research that end-of-life dreams help the dying find meaning. He came to believe that even if physicians resisted this critical knowledge, patients would welcome it, and so he began to see his primary audience as patients and their families and not just his fellow physicians. For that reason, to get his message out, he turned from academic writing to storytelling. His first effort in this direction was a TEDx talk on the topic of whether death can be illuminating. The talk was wildly successful, and the media coverage of the talk led to a book contract for Death Is But a Dream. Because he is a clinician and not a writer, the publisher wanted him to work with a ghostwriter to produce a manuscript. By all accounts, the collaboration did not go well, and Kerr turned to a friend and literary scholar Carine M. Mardorossian for help. Mardorossian is a professor of English and global gender and sexuality studies at the University of Buffalo. Though she had not written creative nonfiction before collaborating with Kerr, she knew from her academic work