Chast is one of the world’s most talented and identifiable cartoonists.  Beginning in 1978, she’s provided more than 1000 cartoons to The New Yorker and her easily recognized curly headed, confusedly struggling characters are usually found in each issue as she wrestles with contemporary angst, confusion, anxiety, and boredom.

This volume apparently resulted from what appeared to me be a hyperactive dream life filled with dentists, food, celebrities, and what she refers to as a ‘brief tour through Dream Land theory’.  Freud, Jung, and a number of lesser known neuroscientists get their due as Chast struggles to understand her unconscious as expressed in dreams.  One dream theory cartoon that I loved was the one that examined dreams as reverse learning, i.e. the pruning and forgetting theory that hypothesizes that we dream in order to eliminate neuronal connections that we don’t need.  In her cartoon of the brain represented as a tree with many branches, the memories that were lopped off included cosines, secants, every single product you saw at the grocery store today, what you had for lunch fifteen Tuesdays ago, something too embarassing to describe, and all plots of the Beverly Hillbillies.  That kind of pruning would serve me well!

I’ve always looked forward to Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker finding her to have a deeply insightful and often quite funny take on life in NYC and today’s America.  I loved her previous book ‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant’ about her aging parents and the challenges she faced in supporting them.

This book, on the other hand, left me a bit indifferent.  Can anyone really recall their dreams as consistently and in as great detail as Chast appears to have been able to do? Also, I found that I just wasn’t that interested in the dream life of someone else and many of the cartoons seemed more dumb than funny.

Many people will love this book including my favorite cartoonist of all, the Vermont-based Alison Bechdel who blurbed it as follows:  “I imagine Freud and Jung are not only spinning in their graves right now, they are peeing their pants.”  That quote was the highlight of the book for me.