Music - Luscious Jackson

Allison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. If there is one New Yorker whose dreams you'd like to hear about, I'm guessing Brooklyn-born and bred cartoonist, Roz Chast would be high on your list. One of her peers credits Chast with introducing quote, "A type of idiosyncratic weirdness," at The New Yorker, which has been publishing her work for more than four decades."

Her cartoons chronicle the anxieties and banalities of everyday life, like kitchen cabinet doors breaking, the indignities of the C train, or why January feels like the longest month, but also some of its biggest challenges. She detailed taking care of her parents in their last years and her bestselling memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Now, Chast had taken on the ideas, symbols, and weirdness that can happen in the liminal space between being awake and asleep, dreams.

In a new book, we learned she has dreams about coughing up emeralds, unclogging a drain with a chopstick, and actor Glenn Close, covered in spiders. Roz Chast's latest book is called I Must Be Dreaming, and she joins me on the eve of her publication day. Roz, welcome to the studio.

Roz Chast: Hi.

Allison Stewart: There is a drawing of Danny DeVito in your new book, and Danny DeVito is here.

Roz Chast: Yes. It was a very dreamy sensation to be here to talk about my dream book and knowing that Danny DeVito showed up in my dream life some time ago. I wrote about it because it was really funny, and then to have him actually appear in person just a little while ago, and very dreamlike feeling to tell you the truth.

Allison Stewart: It's a picture of you and Danny DeVito is lying in your laps and, "I dreamed I was married to Danny DeVito. I like Danny DeVito. He's hilarious, but he's not someone I think about very often In my dream, he lay with his head in my lap, gazing up at me with adoration. I thought I'm not in love with him, but it's nice to be adored, so this'll work out." We've all been there.

Roz Chast: Yes, you never know. Yes, sure.

Allison Stewart: When someone starts the sentence, "I had the weirdest dream last night," are you someone who wants the details or do you hope that they won't share?

Roz Chast: Oh, no, I would like the details. Dreams are one of those notorious topics that you're not supposed to talk about but I think it's not so much the-- For me, it's not so much a topic that should or should not be discussed. It's more like, is the person going to monologue for 10 minutes?

They could be talking about the most interesting thing in the world but 10 minutes of monologuing is boring about anything. If it's a weird dream, like a really good weird dream, I'm happy to hear it. In fact, in my dream book, I have a couple of dreams that were not mine, but that people told me about that were so good. I said, can I illustrate this? Can I put it in my book?

Allison Stewart: In looking at your own dreams, how is what's happened in your waking of life? Does that affect how you dream?

Roz Chast: That's a really good question. Freud had a term for that. He called it day residue. I would say yes, things do come into the dream but it's not necessarily like if I went to the library the day before, I might not dream about being in the library, but possibly out of the corner of my eye, I saw a book, I don't know, about shipwrecks or something like that. Then my dream might be about a shipwreck or it might just be some little fragment of something that I experienced, but not all the time.

Most of the time with dreams, most of the time I really have no idea why I dreamed what I dreamed. That's part of what makes it interesting to me, but it's not-- Sorry. Now I feel like I'm monologuing. I'm not just talking about the mystery of the content, but the mystery of why we dream at all that I find fascinating.

Allison Stewart: You kept a dream journal as a teenager and then you stopped and then start up again once your kids were out of the house and you were grown up. Why did teenage Roz Chast keep a dream journal?

Roz Chast: I think for the same reason that I keep it now or that I kept it, I've not been keeping it lately, but because I don't understand it. It's so fascinating to me, especially when it's a funny dream or just something so peculiar or something that seems like I could illustrate this, I could draw it, sometimes it makes me laugh. That's why.

Alison Stewart: Some of the dreams seem like they are from incredible moments of creativity. There's a dream about a new holiday where you write, "I learned there was a new holiday, a night of the year where children run through the streets, clutching and rattling bunches of silverware," There's a little girl, she's making a huge amount of noise. Then there's one where you discover a new area Manhattan west of 11th. That's a desert.

Roz Chast: Yes.

Allison Stewart: Of all your super creative dreams, which one do you wish were true? Are there any dreams you're like, "Oh, that would be great if that were real?"

Roz Chast: I like the idea of there being these neighborhoods in Manhattan that you didn't know about that suddenly-- That is a repeater for me. I've had-- I think probably what it is is just that there's so little space here.

It's the same variation of like, you have more space, there's suddenly a wing of your apartment you didn't know about. Actually, that would be a great dream and I won't tell my landlord about it, but like, whoa, this is really quite something, isn't it?

Allison Stewart: Have you figured out, for you, where the line is between dream and nightmare?

Roz Chast: I think it's very, to me, obvious, like when something is really terrifying in a dream, but that doesn't mean that when I wake up, it doesn't seem funny. I did have a nightmare that I wrote about in this book and it was about a horrible, horrible creature that had appeared in my house. The name of the creature was a Pringle, like the chip and it was just horribly-- It was elongated like an otter, but like a weasel and it had this horrible little face and these nasty little teeth.

The thing about the Pringle was once it showed up in your house, you just could not-- It wasn't just a matter of getting rid of the Pringle, it was like you could never go back there. It was like that house was now damned but in the dream, it was really terrifying but when I woke up, it was like, this is just hilarious.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Roz Chast. The name of the book is, I Must Be Dreaming. We do get some historical information about dreams and how they affect different cultures and how they felt about dreams. There's a section about dream theory. What is something about dreams you learned in your research that's really stayed with you?

Roz Chast: I liked learning about these dream temples that the Greeks had. They were called Asclepieions and if people had troubles, physical troubles or psychological troubles, or money troubles, they or a proxy would go to this dream temple that was almost like a medical spa. People would--

There were hot and cold baths, and then they would fast and they would drink these potions and blah and blah. Then they would have dreams and the dreams would tell you how to solve that problem.

Allison Stewart: What part of dream theory that you did not know before?

Roz Chast: I didn't know about that and I loved reading, especially Jung. That really got to me. His idea of the collective unconscious and that it wasn't just your own personal unconscious, but that all unconsciousness were somehow connected. That was interesting.

Allison Stewart: When there's such chaos in the world, which could be almost any day these days, how does your brain process the state of the world? Does it come out in your dreams or is that something that is a waking nightmare?

Roz Chast: Most of the time I think it's more of a waking nightmare. I often mute the TV.

Allison Stewart: Yes. No doubt. I can understand that. My guest is Roz Chast. The name of the book is, I Must Be Dreaming. At the end of the book there, you write about things that you've never dreamed. God, angels, and Saints, a train going in a tunnel, a Gate of Horn, or a Gate of Ivory. Is there anything consistent with those three things?

Roz Chast: Oh yes. These are all-- Well, they're like religious symbols that dreamers in history have often written about, and also Jung wrote about a lot of religious symbolism and he famously wrote about the dreams that he had of this giant stone phallus in a basement and just variations of that and these very powerful mythological symbols. I have not had those dreams. I think in the Bible there was a gate of ivory and a gate of horn and one was false dreams and one was true dreams, but I don't remember right now which was which. I've never dreamed about any kind of gate of horn or ivory, maybe a subway gate, I’ve dreamed about that. I haven't had that.

Then, Jung, his father was a pastor and he grew up in a house with all of these religious books, religious texts. I do feel that what you dream about is partly what's in your head from when you were a kid. I didn't grow up with those kinds of books and my parents were teachers and assistant principals and there was a public school system in New York. They were no country pastors in Switzerland or wherever.

Alison Stewart: Someone just texted us, "Oh, to be Jung."

Roz Chast: Oh, to be Jung,

Alison Stewart: J-U-N-G, so take that one.

[laughter]

Roz Chast: I don’t know.

Alison Stewart: Got to love the NYC audiences.

Roz Chast: Yes.

Alison Stewart: So many of these are laugh-out-loud-funny but then there's ones that are really touching, there's really a sweet and sad. There's the one when you're late mom calls you and she's crying. Why did you want to share something that personal?

Roz Chast: I think because not all of my dreams are hilarious. What you dream about, I feel like the emotional range of it is pretty broad. I didn't want to dwell on it but my parents do appear in my dreams and I think they appear in a lot of people's, not my parents appearing in other people’s dreams. That would be really weird but people's parents maybe especially if the parents are deceased and that's always interesting in a way.

Alison Stewart: Do you draw on paper, do you draw in a notebook, on a tablet, how do you start your work these days?

Roz Chast: I draw mostly on paper but also on my tablet. I have an iPad and I like drawing on it. I like both.

Alison Stewart: You were recently at Isaac Mizrahi's podcast, Hello Isaac, and he's hilarious. You both talked about being from Brooklyn and you said, "Deep down I'm a bridge and tunnel person." Do you still feel that way?

Roz Chast: Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely. I feel like it's just more and more obvious with age.

Alison Stewart: You're often described as a New Yorkers New Yorker and you don't live in New York right now. [crosstalk]

Roz Chast: I have a friend of mine calls it Pomme de Terre in the city, so yes.

Alison Stewart: You still got a foothold? That's good.

Roz Chast: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How do you feel about that people really think about you as a true New Yorker?

Roz Chast: If they honestly do think that, I'm glad because I feel like I am. I think a lot of it for me has to do with not only, well, these two things are connected. One, I grew up here and my parents grew up here and their parents this is where they came when they came over on the boat from Russia. My whole family, this is where we're from. If we're from any place in this country, we're from here, from New York. The other thing, which is really a big part of my love for New York and why I do feel like a New Yorker how much I hate to drive, and I hate cars. I didn't learn to drive till I was 38. Just cars like suck so much. Everything about driving to me it's just terrible.

I love, in New York, you can walk to every place, you can take the subway, I learned the subway when I was 14 or 15, so it's very normal for me to get around like that. I know the cross streets and blah, blah. You don't need a car here and you can go anywhere. You can go to Brighton Beach and go swimming, you can go to Jones Beach by public transportation if you need to go to the beach or something like that. It's wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Spoken like a true New Yorker. The name of the book is I Must Be Dreaming, my guest has been Roz Chast. Roz, thank you so much for coming in.

Roz Chast: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.