You are reading Letters from Hannah. If you like it and want more in your inbox, please subscribe.
Last night, I woke up my husband Tony screaming. This wasn’t the first time this has happened, and it probably won’t be the last.
We were staying at my parents’ house, and the scream was so full throttle my mom and dad came running from their bedroom upstairs. In my half-asleep state, I had turned on the light, then realized I was naked. “Get back in bed,” Tony urged.
But bed was where the spider was!
A creepy, crawly one with long legs and furry black fuzz.
After consulting with Tony, my mom, and my dad, I was 50% sure the spider was real and creeping around in bed (accck) and 50% sure it was all a dream. I managed to get back to sleep. Somehow, our one-year-old daughter slept through the whole thing.
When I was a toddler, my parents took me to the doctor to inquire about my disturbing sleep habits: I would often talk or act out my dreams. I’d wake them up with screams, exclamations, and enthusiastic gestures. They’d respond to me like I was Awake Hannah, but I was a whole different person—Asleep Hannah. Asleep Hannah cannot be reasoned with, or really communicated with at all. She is a mystery to me. In the morning, I don’t know her or even remember her.
“It’s not really her sleep disorder, it’s your sleep disorder,” the doctor told my mom and dad. In other words, I was sleeping fine. My mysterious behavior was messing up their night, not mine. (Sorry, guys!)
My middle-of-the-night outbursts became more and more rare, and now it’s only occasionally that Tony reports a zombie-ish blood-curtailing wail or a sudden chatty interjection that is exuberant but mostly indecipherable.
I wish I could have a talk with Asleep Hannah. In a high school psychological literature class (this was a highly enjoyable class), we had an assignment to keep a journal by our beds and record our dreams. I tried, yet my notebook remained embarrassingly empty. I just couldn’t remember anything. Sometimes I’d wake up with a general feeling or mood, but it was all opaque and out of focus. There was certainly no narrative arc, or even symbolism.
(The internet says dreaming about spiders signifies “deceit, a web of lies, or a sense of feeling trapped. Or something is scaring you.”)
If I could remember my dreams, perhaps I could tap into a whole new wisdom, or intelligence, or intuition. I felt I was missing out.
There have been times in my life where I had some more clear, memorable dreams. Before my wedding, I kept dreaming I had forgotten to break up with various ex-boyfriends. I would panic: I thought we had ended the relationship, how had it somehow slipped my mind? Tony was surely going to be furious when he found out. I’d wake up with a flood of relief.
Something about pregnancy messed with my dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up mad at Tony because Dream Tony broke up with me. Now I’m having trouble recalling the rest of my pregnancy dreams, but I remember my nighttime psyche felt shifted somehow, that it was an unfamiliar terrain made of different images, impressions, and feelings that left me slightly off-kilter.
Freud started a whole train of thinking, or tapped into one, that every part of a dream has a specific meaning. Others believe that dreams are entirely spontaneous and mean nothing much at all. As a writer, I generally believe in meaning. But I also believe the meaning can be amorphous, multi-layered and a little bit enigmatic.
As for the other kinds of dreams, the ones we spin while we are awake, well, I have a whole lot of those. They’ve changed. When I was a teenager, I wanted to have a restaurant empire (or just a restaurant). Seven years of working in restaurants cured me of that fantasy.
A lot of my Big Life Dreams have miraculously come true. I live in my favorite city in the world. I met someone I love more than I could fathom, and I feel crazy lucky that I get to share my life with him. (Hi, Tony!) I have the sweetest (squirmiest, most curious) little girl. I got to write and publish a book, and now I get publish another.
Some days my dreams feel small, like getting through the day without crying too many times. I have big ambitions, like publishing something in The New Yorker and having a TV show, but I also have big ambitions, like remembering to meditate occasionally and not looking at my phone first thing when I wake up.
Especially since being a mom slash the pandemic, I often feel too in the weeds to remember to dream. I am just trying to make the edits that are overdue and answer that email that has been waiting and work on my new project that I am genuinely excited about but haven’t gotten the chance to delve into.
I am just trying to get through the day.
I am just trying to get through the day.
But I want to make time to dream, and not just about spiders.
What do you dream about?
Here’s to a life beyond your wildest dreams.
(My life is certainly this way, especially when I take the chance to remember that.)