Cartoonist’s book of dreams reveals universal absurdities

“I Must Be Dreaming” by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury Publishing)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person who has just awoken from a bizarre dream should not attempt to share it with others. However, said truth does not apply to Roz Chast, whose latest book, “I Must Be Dreaming,” is hilarious and thought-provoking.

Chast is a longtime “New Yorker” cartoonist whose work focuses on the everyday banalities of life, all illustrated in her shaky, spare style. Her cartoons often feature a person experiencing or acknowledging some universal annoyance.

Some of her more well-known panels include “Botox Theatre,” featuring the classic comedy and tragedy masks, only these aren’t smiling or frowning – they’re frozen in a pleasant, expressionless stupor. Another, “The Last Thanksgiving,” features a dining room table with ten people, all labeled with their various food quirks: gluten-free, salt-averse, lactose intolerant.

Chast is also the author of “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” a graphic memoir about her parents’ decline as they came to the end of their lives at ages 95 and 97. In 2014, it won both the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

In the introduction, Chast acknowledges that while it’s common not to want to hear about someone else’s dreams, there is an additional problem in describing them: “Dreams are not only notoriously ephemeral, but they have a different kind of logic, a different kind of language. I think of them as raw material.”

The book has a chapter called “Recurring Dreams,” featuring some familiar favorites if you happen to be a human being, like “Tooth Issues,” “Back in High School and There’s a Crisis, and “My Legs Don’t Work.” (I know I’ve had all of those.) There are some other Chast-specific recurring dreams, like “Too Many Birds, Not Enough Cages” and “Plane Crashing at a Distance.”

These are all illustrated with Chast’s trademark self-portrait in various states of panic, wavy lines of anxiety and sweat droplets framing her face.

I was already a big Roz Chast fan, but this collection made me laugh out loud – a rare experience for me while reading. It’s not that the dreams she illustrates are so ha-ha funny, it’s that the mixing of the ho-hum and the preposterous, along with Chast’s nervous line drawings, makes something truly weird and wonderfully relatable.

The chapter on celebrity dreams has one that perfectly expresses this mix: “I learned that Elizabeth Taylor always traveled with her own stove when she went on tour. Amazingly, it looked exactly like the tiny stove in my apartment in New York.”

The cartoon shows an old-fashioned fancy lady (high heels, sunglasses, hat with feather) walking down the street followed by two men in maintenance garb rolling a small stove on a dolly. As Chast invites us into her most private of spaces — her dreaming mind — these cartoon panels get funnier and funnier, especially as they inspire the reader to remember their own nonsensical dreams.

Of course, not everything is funny — nightmares are also a part of a person’s dreaming experience.

Tracy Carr is the coordinator of the Mississippi Center for the Book, a program of the Library of Congress devoted to books, reading, libraries, and literacy