Roz Chast (2023) I Must Be Dreaming.

Roz Chast (2023) I Must Be Dreaming.

Roz Chast draws cartoons and writes for the New Yorker. You know where I’m going with this. Award-winning. Bestseller. It’s predictable as every Scandinavian citizen (including illegal refugees in the interest of parity) have written at least one bestselling novel. And Sigmund *Fraud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Dreams, of course, are never predictable. Perhaps that’s what makes them so fascinating. (*Yeh, I know it’s Freud).

I keep a dream diary. Nobody needs to know this or is as likely to read it. In the same way, nobody is likely to read any of my books. Just in case, I write my dream diary in code. It’s called my handwriting. Chast’s text isn’t the usual font you see in books printed by the big four or five publishers. It mimics her elegant handwriting. I wish I could write like that. The closest I came was a 7, with a slash through it. I used to do that in Primary school to show I knew French. But when I hitchhiked to France, the only words I knew were ‘La fenetre’.  Don’t worry. No self-respecting French person knew what I was talking about either. I also make notes about books I’ve read in an A4 pad. Some words are legible. (Hurrah). I just make the rest of the stuff up. I toss my dream diary in the bin when I run out of paper. I guess that could be a metaphor

Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is. I’m as likely to use metaphors as I’m unlikely to use cryptocurrency. Everyone is equal in dreamland. A common dream I have is being lost in a place like a school. That’s different but I know where I am.

In Pamela J Ball, 10 000 Dreams Explained, she suggests I’m looking for enlightenment. Dreams don’t make sense. That’s allowed. Expected even. Chast acknowledges other people’s dreams are boring. Your own dreams are the exception to the rule, rule, in the same way that the moron’s moron Trump believes everything he does and says must be true.

Nightmares are when you make up and the orange one is not a figment of a cartoonist’s imagination. ‘“Swamp of mysticism” was one of Freud’s greatest disses’. Chast frames the Freudian talking to Jung, father of the collective unconscious, who tells him he’s a fraud.Because we’ve had dreams longer than we’ve had civilisations. Did cavemen dream of electric sleep?

Dreams have their own psychosis. Don’t expect them to be linear. This happened and then that happened and then I went to the shops. Although that can happen.

Dream Scenario (2023) starring Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a college professor, who appears in the dreams, or collective unconscious of millions of strangers, was a wonderful starting point. I’ve yet to see a good Cage film, but I was hopeful.

The first three-quarters of Chast’s picture book is similarly forgettable. So the whole thing can be read in about 30 minutes. You’ll have reviews telling you it is widely funny. Hmmm.

The last bit, A Brief Tour Through Dream-Theory Land, I found unfunny but interesting.

‘According to the Kabbalah, the dream state is a sort of refresher or re-energizer of the soul…Our soul is composed of sixty parts.’

Fifty-nine parts leave the body to commit acts of genocide against Palestinians. One stays behind ‘to guard the shop’.

In ‘dream-o-vision’ bodily sensations are translated into dreams. Schopenhauer, for example believed, if you eat a pickle. You’ll be in a pickle.

‘Messages from the Gods’. It’s in the Bible. Look under Joseph’s multi-coloured dream cape. But don’t listen to the musical. Joel 2:28: Yer old men will dream dreams, yer young men will see visions.”

‘Dreaming to Predict the Future.’ I guess I’ve interest in this idea. A story I was writing, ‘Rust and Dust’ was based on that kind of idea. Wildly predictive. It came to Dust.

I like this idea because I think writing (like what I’m doing now) has a didactic function that is both outward and inward.

‘The Ancient Greeks believed in dreams not only as predictors of the future but also a way for people [writers] to gain insight into their present day lives.’ Dream interpreters optional.  

Antti Revonsu, ‘Primitive Instinct Rehearsal,’ hypothesis is dreams have an evolutionary rehearsal function. A safety net in which we practice running away from the moron’s moron Trump in our head, because in real life that’s not possible.

‘Reverse-Learning, or the Pruning-and-Forgetting Theory’ has Nobel-winning biologist Francis Crick in its DNA and therefore must be taken seriously. At night (unless yer up late sniffing coke and marching powder) your brain acts as clearing house. Sorts through the rubbish you don’t need to remember, which loses its spark. Can no longer make that jump to the next neuron.

J Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley (1977) ‘The Activation-Synthesis Theory’ sounds to me similar. Body and brain sorting through chemical reactions. Perhaps Crick’s was a top-down model. Hobson and McCarley — a bottom-up approach?

There’s a sting in the tale of ‘The Baku’. A creature that eats bad dreams. While Scottish children would shout, ‘Fuck off ur I’m telling my mum and she’ll boot yer arse.’  Japanese children would politely call out to the Baku. ‘Baku-San come eat my dreams’. It would appear and eat the child’s bad dreams. But if it was left unsatisfied by the nightmare, and a child’s constant calling, it might devour their hopes and ambitions in a Trumpian fashion. Don’t tell me you’ve not been told. Dream on.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6