I Must Be Dreaming

June 1, 2023
The renowned cartoonist taps into Freud, Jung, and Kabbalah to discuss what happens when the head hits the pillow. Chast, famed New Yorker cartoonist and winner of the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? makes it clear that while your own dreams may be inherently interesting, listening to other' dreams is markedly not. Thankfully, the author's thumbnail depictions of dreams that span a cross section of her bedside dream journal bring just enough humor and wit for readers to be charmed instantly. "This book is dedicated to the Dream District of our brains," writes the author, "that weird and uncolonized area where anything can happen, from the sublime to the mundane to the ridiculous to the off-the-charts bats." Familiar classics--"alone at a party," "teeth falling out"--sit alongside the bizarre and hilarious--e.g., "too many birds not enough cages." Even actor Wallace Shawn, son of former New Yorker editor William Shawn, makes an appearance: "He and I were walking down Main Street in a town in Connecticut and I needed to point something out to him: 'Look, It's a Broccoli Patch!' " From "Recurring Dreams" to "Nightmares" to "Dream Fragments or Ones That Got Away," Chast explores beyond the first blush of the strange and personal in dreams. She writes, "here's what's interesting: dreams come out of my brain...as I sleep, I am creating them...so why, as they unfold, am I always so surprised?! " The author reaches for answers beyond Freud and Jung to a wider range of insights from Kabbalah, Aristotle, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and more. Illustrations and visual storytelling weave together a broad range of content on dreams that offers insight while never feeling burdensome or overly analytical. Easy on the eyes and witty, this book will have readers reaching for their own dream journals. A sharp compendium of dreamy visions that could only have come from the iconic cartoonist's sleeping mind.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 10, 2023
This delightful graphic account from New Yorker regular and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Chast (Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?) is both a reflection on the nature of dreaming and the creative process, and a catalog of her own vivid, loopy dreams. Dreaming, for Chast, is the ultimate accessible entertainment: “I am creating them. So why, as they unfold, am I always so surprised?!?!” She categorizes and draws episodes including “Cartoon Idea Dreams” (not a huge surprise given her daytime occupation), “Body Horror Dreams” (relatable), “Everyday Dreams” (skewed quotidian scenarios), and fragments, like “something about a leprechaun with a unibrow.” Chast also leads readers on a trip through dream theories across the ages, from ancient Greece and Egypt to the Kabbalah, Freud and Jung’s interpretations, and modern evolutionary neuroscience. The cartoonist is not particularly spiritual or mystical in her approach, and doesn’t consider dreams as prophecies: “Somebody always knows somebody whose aunt dreamed that somebody’s plane was going to crash, so they didn’t take the plane, and GUESS WHAT CRASHED,” Chast observes, unimpressed. Yet she’s also saddened by “rabidly scientific” analyses. Her loose-lined drawings, full of people with duck feet and unnerved facial expressions, bring to life the illogical leaps of her own dreams (“Nan Goldin filming a commercial for an ice cream cake”) and others’ (like her son’s dream about a painting of a leg with three long creepy hairs). Chast perfectly captures the weird joy of dreaming—an act that is both universal and deeply personal. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from June 1, 2023

New Yorker cartoonist Chast (Going into Town) presents a wide-ranging and thoroughly charming exploration of her lifelong fascination with deciphering the dream world inside her mind at night. A survey of what Chast terms "Dream-Theory Land" reveals what various scholars, religious texts, and civilizations since the beginning of recorded history have had to say about why humans dream and how those dreams should be interpreted. Rather than avowing allegiance to any existing idea or attempting to cook up a conclusion of her own, though, Chast embraces the mystery of human consciousness, using vividly illustrated recreations of her own dreams and nightmares to ponder the differences between her conscious and subconscious selves and to discern how dreams influence her creative process. Chast alternates sequences of panel-to-panel storytelling with unexpected blocks of hand-scrawled text or dynamically rendered illustrations that bleed between pages to create a palpable sense of her enthusiasm for the subject. VERDICT Truly fascinating, frequently hilarious, and not to be missed.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2023
Everyone has that one recurring dream that just won't go away--falling from the sky, wandering the supermarket for what feels like eternity, or any number of personal fantasies or nightmares. What those dreams mean though is up to countless interpretations and, as Chast explores here, even those interpretations might be up for interpretation. Though Freud and Jung remain the pillars of modern dream interpretation, Chast also provides a dive into how interpretation of dream meaning influenced life in the ancient world and skims the surface of how neuroscience and neurobiology are understanding the phenomenon of dreaming today. The book is organized by categories like "Recurring Dreams" and "Body Horror," and readers will gain unique insight into the author's unconscious and may recognize their own dreams there--perhaps offering some proof of the collective unconscious. Sure to appeal to nonfiction comics readers and dream-theory enthusiasts alike.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.