Roz Chast: While You Were Sleeping

Selected Shorts - Symphony Space

Comedian and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast shares surreal, humorous, and deeply personal dreams from her book I Must Be Dreaming. The episode explores dreams as creative fuel, blending fiction, memory, and neurosis with wit and heart. Stories range from absurd dream scenarios to poignant reflections on identity and connection.

Key takeaways

• Dreams reveal hidden anxieties and desires
• Humor transforms personal neuroses into universal stories
• Dreams can be both chaotic and creatively illuminating

Transcript preview

Forget Freud. New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast is the best interpreter of dreams hands down. I'm Meg Walitzer and on this selected short, Chast reads from her new book, I must be dreaming. So I had this dream about Danny DeVito. I dream that I was married to him. In my dream, he lay with his head in my lap, gazing up at me with adoration. So I had this dream about Danny DeVito. I dreamed that I was married to him. In my dream, he lay with his head in my lap, And I thought, I'm not in love with him, but it's nice to be adored, so maybe this will work out. Stay with us for fiction about sleep and dreams, with hilarious tales from Chast's own vault of neuroses. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. As long as people have been telling stories, dreams have been a narrative tool to communicate meaning. Dreams appear in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek stories. They motivate characters in early novels like the tale of Genji and Don Quixote. And for some reason, just about everyone has had that dream in which they find themselves on stage in a play, but they don't remember their lines. Not to mention the dream where they're on the street where they grew up, dressed as the Easter Bunny, going door to door to door asking for pocket for pocket for pocket change. Or is just me? Dreams are irresistible to writers, with good reason. Dreams might lend a little foreshadowing to unfolding events, serve as a kind of supernatural exposition, or provide some cathartic insight to characters who are really going through something. Because dreams are ultimately kind of mysterious, there are a lot of ways to use them. If a writer is skilled enough, they can even make their own dreams entertaining. Seriously, All the time some friend or partner or friend's partner droned on about their uninteresting dream. We actually know someone who cracked the code. It's New Yorker Cartoonist, Ros Chast. For decades she has spun her anxious thoughts and careful observations into comedy gold. And she's shared them in books including What I Hate From A to Z, and can't we talk about something more pleasant? And as her new book I Must Be Dreaming proves, Raz Chast can make her own dreams, not just relatable, but compelling. Being dreams, of course, they are a little weird, but they're also hilarious. Chast's book is charming and she is too. I've known her for quite some time, and her sensibility is just as wonderful in person as it is on the page. So we invited her to host a night of stories about dreams and hear excerpts from her book too. This selected shorts is the product of that live show with different ways to look at dreams. them as a clever literary devices, while Chast delivers them as a wild personal journey with laugh lines. Chast is a convivial New York original who helps easier neuroses by exposing her own. Here she is introducing the evening on stage at Symphony Space. Ever since I was a kid, I was interested not only in the content of my dreams but the fact that one dreamed at all. Why didn't I switch off when I fell asleep? And what was this mishmash of stuff that pretty projected itself inside my head, like my own weird theater that showed nonsensical movies on a nightly basis. And some years ago, I was working on a book that was going nowhere, and I really sort of hated working on it, and I procrastinated any time I could. And what I got involved with was drawing up my dreams. And I enjoyed it so much, kind of taking the dream and cartoonifying it. As I say in this book, there are like the fillets of the dreams, And this was the first one that I drew up, Bistle and the glove. My mother and her friend, a man named Bistle, I don't know this person, had come into possession of O.J. Simpson's famous glove. This Bistle guy telephoned her to tell her of this a great business idea. We can rent it out for parties. As a matter of fact, I'm wearing it right now. And my mother had a different opinion. love belongs in a safety deposit box. That was Roz Chast sharing how her Book of Illustrated Dreams I Must Be Dreaming came to be. Now let's get to the stories. Our first piece is by Ed Park. He's a long time writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Harpers, and the New Yorker. His titles include the novel Same Bed Different Dreams, which was named one of the top ten books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly. This piece, a kind of late night fever dream. tweaked by Pharmaceuticals is called The Wife on Ambion. Reading it is John Fugelsang, an actor, comic, and the host of Tell Me Everything on Serious Exm. He unsurprisingly finds his way into the story's comic elements. And now, Ed Parks, The Wife on Ambion, read by John Fugelsang. The wife on Ambien knows the score. I mean this literally. Rangers, four three in the overtime. Devils fall to the flames, three to one. Nix, lose again at home. In the morning, I open the paper and none of this checks out. me Mr. Blue Pants. The wife on Ambien makes false starts. In one week she has sketched a music hall, she is not an architect, designed a drone, she is not an engineer, written two scenes of a play called Haunted Masquerade, her MFA is in sculpture. The handwriting is a bear, but I piece together a plot. Society lady leads double life in the London of Jack the Ripper. In the morning, the wife on Ambien, denies authorship. Though at lunch I hear the first line of the soliloquy leave her lips. The wife on Ambien cooks eggs. I take pains to hide the ingredients in the hardware. Still, she conjures omelets from a secret stash of eggs. With a pan, I somehow miss. She singes her robe. I gain five pounds in a month. The wife on Ambien gets fresh. She moves on top of me like it's spin class. That was nice, I say afterwards, really nice. It reminds me of our wedding night. Paris, my God, we were so young. Do you remember how the stars I say, then stop, because she's already snoring? The wife on Ambion tries to order Ambion on Amazon. The wife on Ambion makes up the names of golfers. The wife on Ambion keeps me guessing. The wife on Ambion tries to order Ambion on Amazon. The Wife on Ambion makes up the names of golfers. The Wife on Ambion keeps me guessing. You don't want to know what I did what I did what I did what I did in Tous you don't patting me on the head like a child. I'd better not say what went down in West Hartford. Tell me, I say. She looks around for some eggs. The wife on Ambion recites the poetry of T.S. Elliot, sings the music of Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we have to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambion also tells me it doesn't matter that the sun will swallow the earth exactly 8 billion years, or 13 weeks, or 24 hours from from Now. The wife on Ambien orders Uber after Uber. The cars streamed toward us like a series of sharks. It's 4 a.m. Drivers from many countries gather on the quarter, flake curses at our window. Break out the booze, arrange marriages among their offspring. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leave slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you're a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed. to her own own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail. The wife on Ambien shouts, Atlantis! Just that, Atlantis! The wife on Ambien drinks an entire court of milk. She washes out the Slim jug and stands it up in the recycling bin like a soldier. The wife on Ambien forgets about our children, Danica 11 and Morris Five. We named them after a race car driver. and a cat. It was her idea. She had it on Ambien. I get home from work after nine and see all the kids attacking each other with belts while she sleeps. All the cushions and pillows piled in the center of the room. Don't wreck our fort daddy, Morris says. More like a tower, I say. Then don't wreck our tower, Danica says. What about your homework? I ask my daughter? Homeworks for losers, she says. Loosers like you, you, you, more like you, says, honey, I call, but the wife on Ambien is sawing logs. The wife on Ambien takes her vitamins, organizes the spice rack, she alphabetizes the shelves in the hallway and polishes my shoes. She wanders a while, adjusting picture frames that are out of true. Everything looks cleaner in the morning. But other nights, she's knocking Chatsky off tables surrounding the waistbasket with coffee grounds in ritual. fashion. The wife on Ambien, how can I describe her? The way she tilts her head reminds me of pictures of her grandmother as a youth. The way she does a Bronx cheer reminds me of my first boss who was in the merchant marine. The wife on Ambien scrolls through her phone, swipes with her eyes shut. I can't wrench it from her iron grip. In the morning she asks, did you change the time zone to Dubai? I sense a light. It's 3.15 a.m. And the wife on Ambien is playing online poker. Around the virtual table are Joker 17, Ace in Whole, and Mr. Blue Pants. I would force her to stop, but she's winning by a lot. Someone has to bring home the bacon while my startup starts up. That's how I figure it. I'm seeking funding for a virtual reality venture that will let you live in the home you grew up in. The wife on Ambien can list the presidents in order. The wife in real life can't. and tries her hand at painting. The tubes are open, the brushes stand in a coffee can of gray water. There's a becoming beige smudge on her brow. But where are the canvases? With her the tableau. Many years later, when we move out of the city, I find her art under a box of books in a basement storage locker. These are all pictures of toast, I say. The wife on Ambien solves Danica's Rubik's Cube. The wife on Ambien insists she doesn't snore. One night, I set up my phone to record her, balancing it on an eyeglasses case between our pillows, wondering if that's legal. In the morning, the device tells a different tale. It's just me calling out her name. My voice thinning to a whine like a dog. that strayed too far from its master, a voice that would keep the best of us up at night. Thank you. autobiographical, but the wife on Alka Seltzer Plus just felt a little less dramatic somehow. And in truth, I too am someone who requires help falling asleep at night. But instead of going the pharmaceutical route, I've been going the sleep story route. There are a lot of podcasts out there that promise a slightly boring but never too boring listening experience. You may learn a little something about shearing wool or about the history of the Canadian mounted police, but not enough that you will get so excited you need to get out of bed and sign up for that sheep shearing course at the Y, or shake your spouse awake to tell him or her you've decided to switch careers, not to mention nationalities. So if you're like me, go find one of these podcasts, they really work. But just to make it clear, we at selected shorts do not consider our show to be sleep-inducing. Feel free to operate heavy machinery while listening. Our stories, we hope, will keep you awake and enthrall the way until the end. Now let's hear from New Yorker cartoonist Ros Chast, our inspiration for this show. I don't know about you guys, I have a lot of repeating dreams and these are some of them alone at a party. I have a terrible disease. New York City has an unusual neighborhood. A beach in Midtown, well I'll be. Once again I have lost my purse. The subway is different today. This is the X train and it is in the Alps. and pregnant and old. And this is not a happy dream. That was Ros Chast, performing an excerpt from her cartoon memoir, I Must Be Dreaming. Next, something from British writer Tessa Hadley. She is the prolific author of titles including Free Love and After the Funeral. This story about how dreams might push us into real world action is the title story from her collection, Bad Dream. and other stories. It is read by Rita Wolf, an actor who has appeared in off-Broadway shows including The Michaels and an ordinary Muslim and a delicate balance. And now here's Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley, performed by Rita Wolf. woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface which she then broke through looking around with her eyes open. At first the darkness was implacable, but as she stared into the darkness, familiar forms began to loom through it. The pale outline of a window printed by the street lamp against the curtains. The horizontal's on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys and toys. The child knew these details by heart, though she couldn't see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up, in her own bedroom, in the top bunk, her