Cartoonist Roz Chast explores the history of dreams in new book ‘I Must Be Dreaming’

The other day I met The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast in a dream. We weren’t on a cloud or walking through Italy or anything. It wasn’t that kind of dream. It was the kind of dream where you’re awake and you’re sitting somewhere specific but you could be anywhere — you know? We were in a hotel lobby in Naperville, which could be a hotel lobby in Boise, or a hotel lobby in Rochester. It was a place so lacking in distinctiveness, I felt as if I was forgetting where I was even as I sitting there. We talked in a booth.

“This is so dreamish,” she said.

Chast, who is 69 and splits her time between New York and Connecticut, has been thinking about dreaming a lot these days. Her new book of cartoons is titled “I Must Be Dreaming,” and it’s about her dreams and the history of dreams and theories about dreaming, and like her past 45 years of comics, it’s jittery and snort-inducingly direct — and look, not to belabor it, but this lobby really was so hushed and nondescript, even if Chast didn’t have a new book about dreams, we might have still talked about dreams.

She was just in St. Louis, she said, “and that hotel stopped serving lunch at 1 p.m.!”

Weird, I said.

“Like a dream, right?! One of my recurring dreams is being in a strange town and not having documentation and not knowing where I am staying — and basically being lost.”

As a kid, I said, I used to dream I was on a sled careening down slopes, without brakes.

“But have you ever had the plane crash dream? The one where a plane crashes in the distance? I’m watching, I see it go down. I have it frequently enough that when I see a plane in the sky, I will look away. I think there’s some residual anxiety going on there.”

She said this with polite, casual calm, because Roz Chast, at least with a reporter, seems not at all like stuff she draws, which, be it inanimate objects or parents, look freaked out, stressed, as if the coffee was free she day she drew them. She said she wanted to be a cartoonist since she was about 13 and read Charles Addams in The New Yorker, but she didn’t want to do that New Yorker comics style with the one panel and the punch line underneath. So she never did, preferring narratives and frazzled hair and randomness — like a drawing of a moral compass (which has “It depends” and “Who cares” instead of North and South) or Humpty Dumpty’s fatal decision to sit on a rug and get stepped on (though waiting inside the refrigerator wouldn’t have turned out better).

A left-turn careening into dream logic has always felt like a constant in the comics of Chast. In the new book, she mentions that working on her weekly batch of submissions to The New Yorker can sometimes feels dreamish when it’s going smoothly. Which is how artists often discuss the trance-like state of being in the zone, so to speak. But then Chast, since she was a teenager, has paid careful attention to dreams. “Recall them right away, write them down. I keep a note pad by the bed, because they are so ephemeral.” To judge by the dreams she draws in her book, she also has good dreams.

She’s happily married to Danny DeVito, in her dreams. She meets a leprechaun with a unibrow. She runs into the skeleton of her father. She gets drunk at Mount Rushmore and insults the mountain and everyone is shocked. She meets a baby from the future so dangerous a SWAT team is called. She drools into people’s mouths because there is a water shortage and “Everyone was grossed out, but it was either take my drool or die.”

I dream that I lost my credit card.

Or I dream that I’m in the back seat a car and nobody’s driving.

“Oh, yeah, those are common,” she said. “But you’re not supposed to talk about dreams, because, the thinking goes, nobody cares, people go on and on. Most of my dreams have an aspect of anxiety in them, but they’re rarely full-blown nightmares.”

Some people feel dreams are alternate planes of existence cracking through. Some feel dreams are reflections of physical distress (a bad taco, perhaps). Chast writes about the theory that dreams are sort of screen savers, inserted to keep fluids flowing while we sleep. Still, she relates best, she said, to Carl Jung’s thoughts on dreams as kind of collective unconscious. “Maybe we are not all separate consciousnesses? Maybe there is something there that we are not aware of? A larger reality? On the other hand, he was a product of his upbringing, his father was a pastor, so he dreamed of thrones and angels, and if we are all connected in a way, I have never dreamed about any of that.”

We sat a moment.

“It’s embarrassing to talk about this stuff these days, but then, why not? Who cares?”