Your Rubik's cube analogy resonated with me. I was reading some research articles about traumatic memory recall last night and they pretty much said that is how it happens... when dissociated memories resurface they usually first come back as flashes of sensory impressions... a flash of sound, a smell, an emotion, a visual impression etc. Over time these flashes coalesce to become a fuller memory (click into place like a Rubik's cube?) and eventually a narrative ('sense') can be made out of it.
Our brains are remarkable things. They feed us traumatic memory in bite sized chunks, then wait for us to absorb and adapt to it before giving us more.