An Ultimate Guide to Bad Dreams and Other Stories

Tessa Hadley, born in Bristol in 1956, is a British author most famous for her novels, her short stories, and her non-fiction writing. The main concerns of her writing are usually human relationships, domestic lifestyles, and family dynamics, and her writing is usually realistic rather than fantastical. Her stories and novels typically centre the stories and lives of British women, middle to upper-class, many of whom undergo emotional or mental journeys or change, sometimes despite a lack of great physical or tangible disturbance in their lives. In other words, her writing focusses on small incidents in everyday life that have big impacts on her characters’ perspectives, values or emotions. Her writing style is often described as elegant, evocative, and precise, with a focus on the subtleties of human behaviour, emotions, and social interactions. She frequently uses her writing to dissect the inner worlds of her characters: their thoughts, memories, and motivations. The guiding philosophy behind her writing can be found in the following exchange, which happened an interview:

Interviewer: You are acclaimed for writing about ‘ordinary’ people’s lives: their loves, hopes, fears, betrayals, griefs, fear of mortality. Is that your focus?

Hadley: I’m not sure there really are any ordinary people... What happens to people inside their lives is extraordinary.

Context, genre and style

As of 2025, Hadley has written eight novels, three short-story collections for adults (among which is included “Bad Dreams”), and two for children.

Hadley’s "Bad Dreams and Other Stories" is a collection of ten short stories, first published in 2017. “Bad Dreams” was released to critical acclaim, winning the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize, with seven of the ten stories first being published in “The New Yorker” magazine. The stories are realistic in style and set in England between the early 20th century and the present day, with a strong emphasis on British life and British history — from boarding school life to women's suffrage in the UK. All the stories examine the experiences of women, often in terms of the psychological impacts of troubled family relationships, electrifying sexual encounters, or seemingly mundane events that nevertheless have profound effects.

Themes

A moment of revelation

Right from the opening story of her collection, Hadley establishes her thematic preoccupation with moments of revelation — that is, moments where the characters find out something that changes them forever, not necessarily for the better or for the worse, but simply something that sets them on a different life trajectory.

In the first story, “An Abduction”, the protagonist Jane Allsop finally, in her sixties, confesses to her counsellor that she feels she has always lived on “the wrong side of a barrier, cutting her off from the real life that she was meant to be living”. It’s important to note that Jane’s revelatory experience (the “abduction” in question) happened when she was just fifteen, and yet, the knowledge she gleaned of the adult world on that day continues to impact her life well into her old age.

Similarly, in the second story, “The Stain”, Hadley explores how coming to understand something about someone can recontextualise our entire experience with them. Marina, who acts as a carer for an “old man”, has a complicated relationship with the man, but nevertheless doesn’t mind his company and somewhat enjoys her work. However, towards the end of the story, the old man’s grandson tells her about his grandfather’s “murky” past in the South African Defence Force. Although Marina doesn’t take it upon herself to research the old man’s actions, even the implication and the image of him committing war atrocities in his past are enough to put Marina off her relationship with the man; suddenly, her work seems dirty and revolting, and she cannot stomach to meet him anymore.

In this way, Hadley’s stories frequently engage with the idea that all knowledge is powerful and dangerous — so much so, that even the suggestion or implication of something can change the way we view the people around us and our behaviour.

Memory and the impact of emotion

In connection to the idea of revelation above, Hadley’s stories also engage with the idea of memory and emotional impact of the past. Knowledge is inherently intertwined with the concept of memory, because it is memory that changes our future behaviour. Many of the characters discover things or have experiences they wish they could forget but are unable to. Interestingly, Hadley also discusses how different experiences can impact people differently; something that might have a huge emotional impact on someone might not even register to someone else — they will have entirely forgotten it within a week. Hadley calls this concept “fine-tuning”, or the ability to experience the subtleties of the human experience and remember the small details of a day. Some people, who have “had… too much happiness… too much experience”, are unable to remember the subtleties of the smaller, quiet emotional moments, because these are drowned out by the vividness of their bigger experiences. In a meta-fictional sense, all of Hadley’s stories are about tuning in to the “fine-tuning” of emotions, about capturing and displaying what would otherwise be lost in a life of “too much”. It’s about making small moments bigger, so that we remember them and feel their impact, rather than distracting ourselves or trying to forget and move on.

Womanhood: Motherhood, girlhood and sisterhood

Contextually, it’s important to note that Hadley only found professional success as a writer in her forties when she published her debut novel at 46, and part of the delay in her doing so can be attributed to the fact that she preoccupied with her duties as a mother throughout most of her thirties — indeed, she wrote her debut novel while raising her children, and so it’s not surprising that motherhood and complex family relationships are at the core of her work.

All of Hadley’s stories feature female protagonists from different walks of life, and more importantly than that, centre the lives of women and the relationships between women. When men do come into the stories, they often feel auxiliary or separate, as if they are an external force acting on the world of women. Hadley expresses the nuance of her writing of gender in this interview question response:

Interview: The women in your stories are often deliciously unpredictable, capricious and chaotic. Yet… it’s the inter-female relationships (whether as friends, rivals, siblings or mother-daughter), that are the most intensely engaging. Why is this?

Hadley: You’re so right. It’s one of the things you see clearly, I think, as you grow older: that in the years when so many girls are obsessed with men and desperate for them, those men are often just an idea, a dream, and all the intricate, interesting real work of relationship and discovery is going on between the girls… when finally something real happens between a man and a woman then it can have all the momentousness of a collision of different worlds – an encounter between enemies, almost, sometimes.

Hadley also often links together the idea of female shame, and women who are damaged or made to be embarrassed by their actions under patriarchy. This is most potently encapsulated at the end of “Deeds Not Words”, when Hadley writes:

Both of [the women] were broken, Edith thought. In their shame, they could hardly bear to look at each other.

Yet Hadley also describes female shame as an almost universal and embedded part of the female experience — a shame that is not forcefully manifest by men and put upon women, but a shame that comes from existing as a woman in the world; a shame that comes from simple things like the expression of natural human desire:

I pressed the front door shut behind him and then, for a long moment, while I rested my fingertips with finality on the cherry-red paint inside, I didn’t know whether I was going to die or not. I waited there, head bowed, for the wave to break over me — this was it, the whole humiliation. I was so exposed that I might as well have been skinned and turned inside out. (“Experience”)

But by breaking through the bottom of their “despair[ing]” shame, Hadley also shows how some of the women are able to experience a “satisfactory freedom”, “like stretched elastic retracting”, perhaps implying that to give oneself over to human emotions — to give oneself over to the vulnerability of being a woman — is to experience and achieve freedom.

Coming of age

Many of Hadley’s stories feature characters who are adolescents, or children. This is in line with Hadley’s themes regarding moments of revelation and growth, as one could argue that it is a combination of these moments that leads to development during adolescence and the process of becoming an adult. However, Hadley’s stories also show interesting and unique interactions between characters of all ages, from parents to young children, parents to adult children, old people with young people, older siblings with younger siblings, and more.

In this way, many characters also experience moments of growth or development in their older age — like Jane in “An Abduction” or Greta in “Under the Sign of the Moon” — and others are stagnant in a childish mindset — like Susan in “Flight”, who refuses to forgive her sister and gives her the silent treatment. Hadley perhaps implies that coming of age can be an elastic, time-free concept. Some entire stories, like “Experience”, revolve around coming-of-age moments — often in the form of sexually-charged frissons with men — that arrive later in life, sometimes resulting in positive growth, and other times with debilitating effect. Hadley’s stories seem to show that anyone, no matter their age, can experience a situation at any moment that develops them as a person and thrusts them into a new adult world in which they did not live before.

The enormity of mundane life

As discussed above in detail, Hadley’s stories all emphasise the enormity of a life that can seem utterly normal. Hadley is fascinated by the lives of everyday humans, to the point where, in her writing process, she actively mines the experiences of normal strangers she meets on the street. These stories are almost microscopic in nature, in that Hadley holds up the microscope to the minutiae of our everyday lives, and strips back the external normality to reveal the inner turmoil of the emotion, thought and knowledge beneath. Not every character in a story needs to be a hero who achieves grand things, Hadley seems to say — sometimes, the most fascinating character is just a little girl reading a book.

Social interactions and power plays

As with any text that engages with ideas of gender, Hadley’s stories are keenly aware of power dynamics, especially those between men and women. Many of the relationships between men and women are imbalanced ones, either because the men are more sexually experienced, older, in positions of power at work or in the domestic household, or simply through the general means of patriarchy. That does not necessarily make the men bad people, and Hadley’s stories actively veer away from presenting villainous characters in black-and-white morality, but to many of these men, the benefit they receive from their social power and privilege is so natural to them that they never even realise it.

Similarly, tying in with the theme of coming of age, Hadley is fascinated by intricate social dynamics between people; either dynamics that her characters cannot understand, or dynamics that they slowly come to understand. The social rules that govern interactions, and the power strands that dictate who defers to whom, are all part of a web of social interaction that many of Hadley’s characters learn to dissect over the course of their story.

Symbols and Motifs

Clothing

In a collection of short stories predominantly concerned with the lives of women under patriarchy, it is unsurprising that clothing becomes a major motif in Hadley’s work — for clothing, beauty and fashion have always historically been intricately linked with female liberation and subjugation. In these stories, clothing can disguise, transform or reveal, and the women of the stories often use clothing to symbolically but also physically become different people. For example, in “Experience”, Laura feels “replete with new knowledge” after transforming herself using Hana’s cosmetics and clothing. At the end of the story, returning to her old self again, she symbolically strips Hana’s clothing and puts on her own things again. Some of the children of the play dress up in their parents’ clothes, other characters give clothing as gifts and cries for forgiveness. One of the stories, “Silk Brocade”, quite literally features a dressmaker and centres the narrative’s plot around a piece of fabric and how it impacts the people who have worn and will wear it.

Houses

It is also unsurprising in a collection of short stories concerned with domestic lives, that there is a strong emphasis on the domestic setting, specifically people’s houses. Many of the houses are described in vivid detail, often as a means of establishing a character’s class and wealth. Some of the settings also become so crucial to the plot (like in “The Stain”, where Marina’s job is quite literally to clean the house), that the houses themselves arguably become characters that contribute to the narrative. Houses in these stories can be abandoned, they can be soulless, they can be thrumming with energy, love and passion, or they can be huge mansions of foreboding brick and wall, they can have hidden rooms or layouts that produce conflict or resolution between the characters.