I Must Be Dreaming

I Must Be Dreaming

Roz Chast
Central Library
Community Room 301 & 302
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At the 2023 Cheryl Rosen Weston Memorial Lecture, Roz Chast, inimitable New Yorker cartoonist and #1 New York Times bestselling author, cracks open the mysterious and fascinating world of dreams. I Must Be Dreaming, the new fully illustrated graphic work sprung from Chast's unconscious brain. She goes on to explore, recount, and illustrate her actual dreams of all kinds, from recurring dreams (back to high school), lucid dreams, and celebrity dreams (involving Henry Kissinger, Chris Rock, Elizabeth Taylor), to nightmares, body horror dreams (dentistry figures prominently), food dreams, cartoon dreams, everyday dreams, and much more.

Chast also takes the reader on a brief tour through “dream-theory land” exploring how thinkers like Freud and Jung understood dreams, how the Kabbalah believes in the predictive power of dreams, how ancient cultures like the Egyptians and Greeks, interpreted dreams, and the musings about dreams by poets and philosophers, all with her characteristic quirky spin and hilarious illustrations. I Must Be Dreaming is Roz Chast at her best—exploring the surreal nighttime world inside her mind—and untangling one of our most enduring human mysteries. To sum up, as Roz noted on her Instagram: “Dreams are weird and not my fault.”

Copies of  I Must Be Dreaming will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of a gift from the Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate.

Roz Chast

Roz Chast
Roz Chast‘s cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978, where she has since published more than one thousand. She is the author of the graphic memoirs Going Into Town and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize winner and finalist for the National Book Award; What I Hate: From A to Z; and her cartoon collections The Party, After You Left and Theories of Everything, among others. She was awarded the Harvey Hall of Fame Award. She lives in Connecticut and New York.
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I Must Be Dreaming