Don’t ignore your wedding nightmares
Brides-to-be and the recovery of ritual
With six months left until my wedding, my dream world has been hijacked by wilted bouquets, screaming bridesmaids, and missing officiants. Last night I dreamed my guests were furious that I had secretly married before the ceremony. The night before, a band played so loudly that no one could hear my vows.
My dress has been — in various dreams — ill-fitting, wet, blue, sequined, ripped, stolen, and indecently short.
Every action, it seems, really does have an equal and opposite reaction. The sweeter the waking hours spent choosing flowers and tasting cake, the scarier the dreams that arrive once I fall asleep. They started, right on cue, two days after I got engaged, and show no sign of stopping.
I’m not alone, apparently. Brides gather in wedding planning forums and Reddit threads to share their nightmares. The online publication Brides runs features to help worried readers cope with these intrusions. Scientific studies back up these anecdotal accounts. Academics in California analyzed dreams from thousands of people and found that women not only had far more wedding dreams than men, but the weddings they dreamed about often went wrong.
Planning stress explains the details, but not the dread.
On average, women spend 528 hours planning for their wedding. It may therefore make sense to explain these dreams through the Continuity Hypothesis. That’s the idea that how you spend your day tends to show up in your dreams the following nights. If you spend your day worrying your tailor won’t finish your alterations in time, the theory goes, you are far more likely to dream about getting married in a dress that’s too big.
Beneath this sensible logic lies a gnawing suspicion: What if these dreams know something I don’t?
For most of us, choosing a spouse is one of the single biggest determinants of happiness. Saying yes to the right proposal, or no to the wrong one, influences our wealth, productivity, and health. A disastrous wedding is an expensive disappointment, but a misjudged marriage will ruin your life. Bad wedding dreams disturb us not because they may foreshadow a poorly planned event, but because we suspect they could warn against wedlock altogether.
Brides-to-be have long looked to dreams for answers.
This idea — that dreams should guide marital decisions — is an old one. Parts of Britain celebrated the Eve of St Agnes until the early 19th century. Unmarried women believed that if they performed certain rituals, they would dream of their future husbands on the night of January 20th. Some recited the Lord’s Prayer whilst moving pins from a cushion to a sleeve. Others ate a piece of dumb cake, baked in total silence with friends. In Scotland, they threw grain onto the ground whilst praying “Agnes, sweet and Agnes fair, Higher higher, now repair; Bonny Agnes, let me see, the lad who is to marry me.”
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You can find similar myths and customs everywhere. In Victorian England, women hid cake under their pillows to summon insight. In Russia, it was tiny bridges made of twigs. In Ireland, nine ivy leaves. In 19th-century Arabia and India, instead of sleeping on charms, parents practiced dream incubation to identify wise matches for their children.
These folk traditions can seem quaint or outdated in modern wedding planning. Amid piles of vendor contracts to comb through, RSVPs to chase, and difficult bridal party members to wrangle and placate, there is little time for old customs. We still hear echoes of old wives’ tales when brides pick out their “something blue” and when grooms carry their partner over the threshold of their new home. We’ll let them hover on the outskirts of our day, but taking them seriously would seem bizarre.
These rituals are an assertion of autonomy
Dismissing these rituals misses their practical value. In other parts of the world, they live on. In 2014, anthropologists visited women in northern Morocco and found that if a woman claimed to have received insight from her dreams, her community respected the decision she made as a result. In some cases, a woman’s dream legitimized her choice of partner, even when her parents disagreed. For these women, dreams offered a chance to shape their own future. Framing a choice as a dream granted it authority.
St Agnes’ story, too, is one of self-determination. Despite her later involvement in the dreams and spells of young women hoping for marriage, Agnes never married. In fact, she never even wanted to marry. She chose Christian piety, seeking celibacy over wedlock. As a result, she was betrayed by an angry suitor whose proposal she had rejected, and put to death.
Her sainthood was granted not because she was a matchmaker or wife, but because she chose to govern the course of her own life.
The rituals we have forgotten, and the dreams many of us try to suppress, don’t offer secret wisdom from deities or long-dead saints. They urge us to listen to our own intuition and own our decisions, however illogical they may seem on the surface.
Our wedding dreams were never about the groom
If our pre-marital dreams are supposed to whisper clues about the suitability of our future partners, then they’re definitely failing to deliver. Reviewing my own collection and those shared by other women, one thing is very obviously missing. The groom is nowhere to be found. If he shows up at all, he’s a background character, milling around in the corner of our eye or fading into a crowd. For a day defined by coupledom, the stressed bride is surprisingly alone.
That’s because these dreams, and the folklore around them, have always been more about the dreamer than the future husband. Read that way, the nightmares are a ritual in their own right: a nightly check-in, asking whether this is still what we want. They remind us that the real nightmare isn’t a poorly planned wedding day, or even a marriage that doesn’t turn out the way we hoped.
The real nightmare is realizing, when the license is signed and the guests long gone, that we said yes to everyone but ourselves.
