The protagonist of your story “The Dreamdrive” is a man who, every night, dreams that he’s driving a car and wakes up feeling as though he hasn’t slept at all. How did this idea come to you?

I have insomnia, and last year it was at an all-time high. When I can’t sleep, I am a prisoner of my brain and body and spirit. The experience isn’t hard to explain—every second adds to the anxiety, an irreversible ratchet of madness—but it is hard for someone who has never gone through it to fully comprehend. Often, people tell me, “You could exercise more, exhaust yourself,” and I do, I run every day—around three miles—but nothing shuts down the factory. I am doomed.

My husband sleeps well, but, one night, he had a nightmare that he was driving recklessly in an unknown place. I felt that I would much rather have that nightmare than be awake. Sleep deprivation leads to REM deprivation, which triggers, when you finally do sleep, something called REM rebound, which can manifest as continuous dreaming. I imagined such a scenario for our protagonist, in which he would both suffer and be enlightened by the dream. Insomnia has no logic, it offers no recourse, and, at some point, when I’m in it, I just have to accept that I will suffer. But this story has a happier, less futile ending.

At first, the people around the protagonist—his mother, his sister, and his girlfriend—engage with what’s happening to him, perhaps in the belief that if they can solve the puzzle of the dream’s symbolism, he’ll be cured. But they quickly get tired of it. Why do you think our own dreams are so fascinating to us, but others’ rarely are?

The cliché “It was all a dream” is, traditionally, the worst way to end a story, because (a) readers feel tricked, and (b) we want some part of the story to be real! The same is true when other people tell you about their dreams. Oversharing your dreams is a surefire way to lose friends. We are more concerned with our own meaning-making. Asking a friend to analyze your dreams is like asking a friend to be your therapist.

I find my own dreams fascinating only in that I have recurring ones, though I am not superstitious or prophetic about them. I don’t think that I dream of a person because I’m yearning for that person, or vice versa. But, with almost perfect correlation, my daily activities will map onto my dreamscape. If I am working a lot, I dream of desks. If I am running a lot, I dream of treadmills. This protagonist can’t sleep, so he dreams of never sleeping.

Speaking of oversharing, Deborah, last week I had a dream that you and I were having coffee, since we are soon going to have coffee. You brought your pet groundhog and spoke to me in German. The only words of German I know are bitte and nein. And that was all you said to me, while stroking your groundhog. You don’t have such a pet, right? And you don’t speak German?

Perhaps your unconscious was using a groundhog to indicate that you were tired of waking up every day to another editing proof from me? As for my speaking German, perhaps it confused me with Freud, who plays a role in the story—in that the protagonist’s psychologist believes that Freud’s interpretation of dreams is the apt one for his patient. If he’d chosen one of the other dream theorists, would it have been a different story?

Nein, it is always good to review edits.

The other routes would have led to a more boring story. Neural activation and event consolidation seem too bureaucratic, even obvious. We know so much about the biology of the brain, its lobes, neurons, and ion channels, how memory and cognition work, and so on, but sometimes science ruins the mystery. Freud’s thoughts on the whole latent-slash-manifest function, repressed memories, the subconscious, and the id are fun to explore in fiction, because they’re open-ended. They make it easier to access the man’s childhood and spin more chaos from that.

What we learn about the man’s childhood gives us some clues about the dream: he’s from an immigrant family; cars and driving, for him, are linked to the American Dream. How much of the story is meant to address the general struggle of immigration and cultural assimilation, and how much is just a specific narrative about a specific man? Did you consider this question while writing?

I didn’t explicitly think about immigration and cultural assimilation, but, in most things I write, these subjects naturally come up. The topic I wished to address through this specific man was loneliness. Everyone abandons him, except the doctors and their machines. And, despite the constant availability of modern connectivity, he has no friends or loved ones to talk to about his problems. I feel this way all the time. I feel that my own experiences are unintelligible and/or of little importance to other people, no matter how hard I try to articulate them or how close I thought we were. Ultimately, this has led me to conclude that we are all alone in our plights, and that empathy, real empathy, is hard to find.

The story is poignant but also funny. Is it challenging to balance those two elements in a story?

Sometimes, though not really. Humor is how I cope. Much of the science in this story is meant to be funny, because, well, why not?

We’ve talked before about your resistance to naming characters. How do you think it affects our reading of “The Dreamdrive” to know the main character as “the man” and to know the other characters only by their relationship to him? The one person who gets a name—Greg—is the man’s father, and it’s not actually his real name.

The man is nameless to emphasize both the singular and the universal nature of his situation. Same with the other characters. Also, without names, the people are on a level playing field with the snowflakes, who are the man’s new friends, and, without names, the doctors can be known solely by their specialties. I had a lot of fun writing that conversation between “the neurologist” and “the better neurologist.” Because, in real life, why would you keep a neurologist on if a better one was available? Naming the father made the most sense, since we hear about the father when the man is talking to the snowflakes; it’s the man who chooses to name him—it’s his dream, his narrative. I picked the name Greg, because my friend Greg was going through a hard time, and I thought that maybe reading this story would cheer him up.

What are your most frequently recurring dreams?

I have a final exam to take but no idea what’s on it. I can’t even remember if I went to that class, all semester. I am also looking for a childhood friend, who is smarter than me but never available. I try to phone people but forget how phones work. Each time, the circumstances of the test change. Most recently, the test was supposed to be in China, so I had to figure out how to get there, did not, and then failed. It is a recurring dream of my own incompetence. Funnily enough, I’ve asked all my friends the same question. Most of the dreams are academic (at least, within my circle). A fifth class that can’t be recalled. A disastrous group project (the group wants to kill you). Caught cheating. Suspended. Expelled. Jobless! I think this means that I spent too long in school. ♦