- Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925
A single day in which a woman prepares for an evening she is not sure she wants, while the city around her ticks toward whatever is next. Woolf is precise about the specific dread of the hours before, and the strange relief of finally being inside the thing rather than waiting for it.
- About Schmidt — Alexander Payne, 2002
Warren Schmidt has retired and the Sundays have multiplied into a whole life. The film is funny and sad about what the dread is really about: not the work, but the prospect of meeting yourself in the empty hours before it.
- Sunday Morning — The Velvet Underground, 1967
The most famous song about the wrong end of a Sunday. Nico’s voice and the music-box arrangement catch the particular flavor of dread that arrives quietly, in good light, before anything bad has actually happened.