Dunham Says Chronic Fear of Sleep Dominated Her Childhood and Persists Today

What was said

"We have a congenital terror. We have a congenital— it's something where we're— sleep and death get equated early in childhood. My father had it, my mother had it. Maybe that's why they fell in love, and they passed it down to my brother and me. And as children, we started to get scared to go to sleep around 4 PM."

Dunham described a family-wide pathological fear of sleep that begins daily at 3 or 4 PM, inherited from both parents and shared with her brother. She recounted elaborate childhood rituals to manage the anxiety, including interrogating her father about sock choices and demanding lists of tomorrow's activities to avoid the fear of dying in her sleep.