NEWSWEEK September 17, 2007

From Lisa Miller's BeliefWatch column in Newsweek:

Sept. 17, 2007 issue - A decade ago, book publishers discovered a
fertile market in the growing number of liberal-minded Jews interested in Buddhist
meditation. The publishers called them "JewBus." Rodger Kamenetz started the
craze with a book called "The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish
Identity in Buddhist India," and soon Jewish meditation centers were open all
over the West Coast.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20643581/site/newsweek/

A response to Marc Bregman's Sex Trauma and Coniunctio

My dream teacher and friend Marc Bregman, has been collaborating on books about his work with my friends Sue Scavo and Ellen Keane. They are all under the general title The Deep Well Tapes. Two of them have been published and you can find information about them
here andhere. A third work in progress, Sex Trauma and Coniunctio can be found on the North of Eden website,here.


I recently got into writing a response to a chapter now called the Act of Growing Up, a small piece of Bregman's very rich writing about Sex Trauma and Coniunctio. You can find my response on the North of Eden site
here.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY INTERVIEW

Rodger Kamenetz on Dreams and the Soul by Donna Freitas

Rodger Kamenetz is the bestselling author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elijah. His new book is The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul (HarperOne, Oct.). A poet and professor, Kamenetz teaches English and religious studies at Louisiana State University alongside his wife Moira Crone, also a writer. They live in New Orleans.

RBL: What is the spiritual significance of dreams?
Kamenetz: They are private revelations, the foundation of religion—and they are available to all of us. The locus of religious experience is in the psyche. The mystics—the raw experiences they talk about—they are in our dreams. And with dreams you are addressed with your language and images, with a soulful dimension added to the message. It's the same message that a spiritual teacher might impart, but it's done in such a personal way that you can't escape.
RBL: Where do dreams come from?
Kamenetz: I think they are the divine within. Every religion talks about soul, the inner voice, conscience, the God inside us. Are dreams the beginning of that voice connected to God? Certainly that is what people always thought in the ancient world. We've lost that belief today.
RBL: You say the way we typically interpret dreams now—by turning images into words—is harmful. Why?
Kamenetz: I think we need to live with our dreams for a long time, soaking in their images and dramas. Eventually we probably need to interpret, but I am suggesting that we immediately resist interpretation—it holds us back from the power of the dream. And we dream, but then dogmatic religion comes in and says no—you can't have your own private mystical interpretations. Dogmatic religion has killed our ability to encounter dreams as individual revelations.
RBL: How are dreams "like being alive twice"?
Kamenetz: We spend one third of our life asleep. It's rich—full of images, feelings, experiences that challenge our waking and consensual reality. Dreams challenge our definition of reality.
RBL: What is your most memorable dream of late?
Kamenetz: Recently, I saw a very ailing Fidel Castro and apparently his wife. I was in my old neighborhood as a child. I was very surprised that Fidel was my neighbor. It was funny, Castro's wife asked whether I'd like a cup of S.O.S. Maybe I need more help. I told her yes.

JERUSALEM REPORT REPORTS IN ON HOLND

from the September 3 edition of the Jerusalem Report:
SUMMARY
"Last Night's Dream" is the tale of Kamenetz's attempt to break free …by training himself to place dream imagery on an equal footing with text in his quest for a spiritual connection. The book is deeply personal and artfully written; Kamenetz was an established poet before his 1994 classic "The Jew in the Lotus" turned him into a Jewish Renewal celebrity. It is also an accessible primer on the evolving status afforded dreams in Jewish and Western thought and science.
Kamenetz… represents the best of what the Renewal movement strives for - authenticity of spirit combined with critical thinking. That is why this book will likely receive a lot of attention. Look for it to show up on many a list of the year's best Jewish books.

COMPLETE REVIEW:
September 3, 2007

DREAMING THE SAME DREAMS

BYLINE: Ira Rifkin

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 40

LENGTH: 1213 words
The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul By Rodger Kamenetz - HarperOne 272 pp.; $24.95
The Achuar Indians of the Peruvian Amazon are into dreams. No longer isolated jungle dwellers, today they maintain a tribal website and profit from eco-tourism - a far cry from the time I visited them more than three decades ago when a Velcro sleeping bag still befuddled and amused them and snapping a Polaroid of the village chief secured an invite to hang out with the tribe. But they still get up before dawn to sit around in groups and discuss their dreams of the previous night. For the Achuar, dreams are the deeper truth meant to guide time spent awake.
The ancestors of contemporary Western rationalists once subscribed to a similar worldview. What Freud relegated to the psychological realm as eruptions of suppressed emotions and desires were once the source of prophecy and revelation, the raw material out of which religious thought and cultures were crafted. But that, Rodger Kamenetz writes in his latest book, "The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul," was before Western religion fell hostage to its greatest creation; the sacred texts that democratized but also canonized group wisdom. "How, " he asks, "could a tradition that gave us the dream of the ladder end up essentially 'phobic' about the revelation dream?"
"Last Night's Dream" is the tale of Kamenetz's attempt to break free of the phobia by training himself to place dream imagery on an equal footing with text in his quest for a spiritual connection. The book is deeply personal and artfully written; Kamenetz was an established poet before his 1994 classic "The Jew in the Lotus" turned him into a Jewish Renewal celebrity. It is also an accessible primer on the evolving status afforded dreams in Jewish and Western thought and science.
In mostly non-linear fashion (and why should a book about the spiritual realm unfold in linear fashion?), Kamenetz tells us how hitting a spiritual wall pushed him toward the exploration of dream imagery after a lifetime of using language to distance himself from the pain that invariably accompanies the inner-discoveries he so desired. "For me, it had to be a complicated truth, the kind I found in religious books and commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, where too often I got lost in words."
Along the way, we meet his primary teachers; Jerusalem's Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who until her death in 2003 had an international reputation as a spiritual (a word she loathed) healer of body and mind who employed visualization and dream interpretation; Tarab Tulku, a Tibetan lama of high rank living in Copenhagen; and Marc Bregman, a postman cum astrologist living in a "small but not quaint" town in northern Vermont. There's even an encounter with Morrie Schwartz, the ex-sociology professor whose lessons about life, imparted as he lay dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), were immortalized in Mitch Albom's bestseller, "Tuesdays with Morrie." All of them push Kamenetz toward a blend of meditation and dream immersion drawn from Tibetan Buddhist and kabbalistic sources.
The point, he writes, is to retain, when awake, insights gained through dreams - and to remain aware that even awake the mind dreams on, separating us from tougher truths and "natural religion." Kamenetz claims progress in this regard, but nothing close to full attainment, that always allusive abstract.
For those familiar with Kamenetz's transformation from Jewishly ambivalent to Jewishly omnivorous, "Last Night's Dream" will be another stop on his pilgrim's journey, last updated in a major way in his 1997 book, "Stalking Elijah." Kamenetz revisits his Baltimore Reform upbringing: "My family did not pray in a crisis; we worried... I don't recall God being taken seriously in anyone's mouth." He also writes about his struggle to connect with his father, a difficulty Kamenetz blames on his own fragile ego - an insight gained working with his Vermont postman.
"Last Night's Dream" has two distinct tracks. The first is Kamenetz's personal journal. The second, and subordinate track, is the role of dreams in religious development, particularly within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Kamenetz moves deftly between them to produce a consistent narrative.
My preference would have been a more complete exploration of track two. There is much to be said about how dreams - or, more specifically, their acceptance as a group truth by some controlling authority - have been pivotal to the course of human history.
Kamenetz does address this point, but to a limited degree. "Every time a group of people dreams the same dream, a new religion gets born," he writes. He discusses the place of dreams in Sumerian civilization, recounts the importance to Jewish thought of the Biblical dreams of Jacob and Joseph, and notes the "animosity" toward revelatory dreams included in the Book of Deuteronomy: "And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death"
(Deut. 13:6). This, he says, is the mark of the gatekeeper class asserting rank to protect its ranks, and stifling Jewish spiritual evolution in the process - the Baal Shem Tov and the rise of hasidism notwithstanding.
He likewise touches on the same process within Christianity - the revelatory dreams of the early disciples and the church fathers' inevitable closing of the door to revelation in the following centuries.
But, curiously, Kamenetz says next to nothing about the impact on humanity of what one imagines were the prophetic dreams of Jesus of Nazareth. He also ignores Christianity's central image, the Resurrection. Could the Resurrection have been a dream - that is to say, a wholly internal experience - shared by Jesus' core followers, as John Dominic Crossan and other New Testament scholars have surmised? And what about the collected revelations of the Prophet Muhammad that became the Koran?
These are sensitive questions. Did Kamenetz avoid them to sidestep controversy or because of the prodigious scholarship required to do them justice? Or did he rule them out as diverting from the focus of his book? His text provides no hint of an answer.
Kamenetz could also have said more about non-Western beliefs, instead of largely limiting his comments on non-Western interpretations to Tibetan Buddhism, in which he is well versed. The Australian Aborigine concept of dreamtime - which bears some resemblance to Achuar beliefs - would have been a good place to start. Here, again, there is much that could have been said.
Still, none of these quibbles should detract from Kamenetz's accomplishment, perhaps the most striking of which, from a Jewish perspective, is his insistence on staying within the broad tradition no matter how far he ranges in search of insight.
Jewish Renewal has its flaky fringe; Kamenetz is not part of it. He represents the best of what the Renewal movement strives for - authenticity of spirit combined with critical thinking. That is why this book will likely receive a lot of attention. Look for it to show up on many a list of the year's best Jewish books.
Ira Rifkin is the author of "Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization: Making Sense of Economic and Cultural Upheaval," SkyLight Paths.

TALKINGDREAM 1 Gross National Product of Dreams

THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM -- excerpt

THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM
Here's the opening passage of the book:


A whole world inside us is asleep. We wake to it but rarely.
We glimpse and barely remember. Or we don’t understand what we’ve
seen.
A third of our time on earth we’ve spent sleeping, with little to show: an
image, a face. Only rarely does a dream come that wakes us to ourselves.
Will our lives someday be forgotten as we have forgotten our dreams?
I know there is a conscious mind and an unconscious. But I don’t always
think about what that implies—that more than half of who I am and what I
am is completely unknown to me, except in fragments and glimpses, images
and dreams.
Is it possible that all we don’t know about ourselves includes also the most
important thing? That our self-knowledge is trivial by comparison, and yet
we use only our conscious awareness to guide our lives? And so we miss receiving
great gifts that have been waiting for us all along.
To receive these gifts, we must learn how to dream, which sounds easy
enough. But I mean dreaming with a purpose, learning to use dreaming as a
way to depth. That proved diffi cult, at least for me.
I had to make a wayward pilgrim’s progress to the dream because I had so
much to unlearn—and I am a slow unlearner. The progress falls into three
parts, which I’ve titled “Images,” “Interpretations,” and “Dreams.”
First I had to learn the true power of images. Then I had to unlearn the
ancient refl exes of interpretation. Only then could I explore the world of
dreams.

David Shapiro's New and Collected Poems

David Shapiro is a poet whose work I deeply admire.
Many of his poems center around dreams.
I recently reviewed his collected poems in The Forward,

Here's an excerpt:
Is it surprising that a poet who is musical also dreams of flying? Many of Shapiro’s poems are dreamlike and often based on dreams, including one very strange poem in which the lines of a sestina appeared before his eyes as a gift from his dead mother “in lines of/color like a magic marker on a lake.” In “Father Knows Best” is a dream of flying, and in flying dreams, there’s always a trick to get aloft:

Then Father realizes son must enclose but a few electrons of air in his fistThen son flies high above the family garage and trees, branch by branch
(“Father Knows Best”)

Dreams of flying are usually feelings of mastery, autonomy, self-sufficiency. But in this case, the trick of flying is not possessed fully by the son but is somehow in the hands of the father, too. The son can fly — but the father doubts it again and again.

This is the drama of the gifted child in hyperspace, the drama of the child of a very intense Jewish family with a peculiar set of demands: a) the child must be a doctor, b) the child must be a concert violinist and c) (this is the surprising part) the child must be a leftist fighting for social justice for all. With all these parental demands, no wonder the child takes flight — but is there any escape?

There are no umbrellas, there are only frosty parachutes,
Little angels who instruct him how to fly.
He must not struggle too much with his hands,
Which having practised the violin now dog-paddle in air.

The poet can fly — he can lift us up with his imagery. Or can he? There always seems to be some doubt in the poems:

The family now knows he can fly, but still father knows best.

Shapiro’s poems are levitations, magical and incantatory, or they are physics experiments that are also dreams, and so when they seem most airy or insubstantial (falling leaves, floating above the garage), they sneak up behind you and surprise you with meaning as if you had suddenly been illuminated from behind, or walked “at the bottom of a waterfall, awake in anechoic chambers.”
How lovely to learn that all the time we were reading him:

We have been sailing in a certain small fountain,
like physicists in toy boats
Each craft bears a candle on its deck.
We light thecandles and the boats puff by
As if you were real, delightful…

(“About This Course”)

You can find the complete review here:
http://www.forward.com/articles/11169/

REVIEWS

This is the first review so far and I like it...

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul
Rodger Kamenetz. HarperOne, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-057583-0

Kamenetz's newest work continues his exploration of the Jewish tradition down yet another path: that of dreams. Like Jacob, who wrestles with God in the famous biblical dream, a leitmotif in the book, the author of the bestselling The Jew in the Lotus wrestles with personal, religious and cultural history in an ambitious quest to revivify the language of dreams. Kamenetz offers a psychological-cum-mystical version of Susan Sontag's watershed Against Interpretation. Don't "interpret" dreams, he cautions, as he lays out another way to meet and greet the nightly messages of human brains. Kamenetz offers a post-Jungian, semi-archetypal, image-centered view of dream meaning. He does so in the context of a historical overview of dream interpretation that also locates dreams in the realm of Jewish mysticism. Narratives of encounters with spiritual teachers are also part of this amalgam of a book that seems to have changed shape over time and through personal discovery. This is a disarming, hard-to-summarize, well-written and idiosyncratic book that will find a distinct audience that appreciates its reflective quirkiness. Readers who have enjoyed Kamenetz's other journeys through Judaism will follow with surprise and pleasure his next steps along a winding spiritual path. (Oct.)

The Velveteen Rabbi

The Velveteen Rabbi wrote a nice account of my recent talk at the URJ on dreams.
She begins:

After services there were a series of study luncheons; I went to Dream Interpretation from Genesis through the Rabbis, a talk by Rodger Kamenetz (author of eight books, among them my perennial favorite The Jew in the Lotus). I didn't have my computer with me, so I wasn't able to transcribe it, but I jotted a few notes down on paper. It's simplistic, he said, to assert that Judaism is purely a religion of the word; instead, "Judaism is a religion of the struggle between the word and the image, between the interpretation and the dream."

The question at the heart of his talk -- and at the heart of his next book, due next year -- is "what happened to the revelation dream?"

You can read the rest here: http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/urjbiennial_sha_1.html

It's fine to be a religion man

In the NY TImes, Thursday May 10, in a story about six accused in a terrorist plot.
"It's fine to be a religion man," said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants and the first of about 200 Dukas to move to the Northeast, arriving in 1975 to work as a roofer. "But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things."

Freud's Dream of Irma: Collegium at LSU

I just gave a talk in the LSU's Collegium on Science and Religion, an ongoing series organized by LSU faculty and Baton Rouge community members. About the talk and the Collegium, there's information here.
The talk was called Freud's Dream of Irma: Science, Scientism and Gnosis. It was based on several chapers of The History of Last Night's Dream.
One point I made is that the last fifty years of research on the dreaming brain underlines the incredible opportunity dreams prsent for transformation. We are basiclly given a different brain to work with every night. In the dream space, we feel and sense more intensely, we are somewhat disconnected from parts of the brain that orient us towards waking concerns and from our old memories of who we are. This frees up the dream to allow us to rehearse new ways of responding to situations, and new ways of feeling and being. The I in the dream is not the I when awake and that's a great opportunity for change.

ON FAITH: Guest voices

In the "On Faith" section of WashingtonPost.com I do a guest appearance about the question of whether Buddhism is compatible with Judaism or Christianity. You can find it here.

North of Eden

For the past four years I've been a student of Marc Bregman's. He's discovered an extraordinary way of working with dreams for personal and spiritual growth.
You can learn more about him and his community, North of Eden, by going over to
www.northofeden.com

Beyond Rivalry

Beyond Rivalry, a blog with a depth and breadth of interest that embraces wine and spirituality, made a comment on the first chapter I posted.

Here's a brief excerpt:
[Rodger Kamenetz ]talks about a "special knowing" available to us in dreams sometimes; that resonates with my reflections on my own dreams: Occasionally, I know something -- either something factual or something intuitive -- in the dream that I don't remembering having known outside the dream, but which it turns out is true or right. Where did that knowledge come from?

You can read the whole thing at: http://beyondrivalry.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/12/28/dream-interpretation.html

He or she (I'm such a newbie to blogs I can't quite figure out where to find the author of this blog)-- goes on to speculate about the answers, but I would like to stay with the question because it's so important.

Dreams feel like they possess a knowing outside our own knowing. Dreams are uncanny. They reveal a knowledge I didn't know I had.

portrait of Albert D

TALKING DREAM

Welcome to TALKING DREAM. My name is RODGER KAMENETZ and I'm a writer. Some of my books include THE JEW IN THE LOTUS and STALKING ELIJAH. For the past four years I've been working on an exciting book about dreams, and a new way to work with them. I have studied hundreds of dreams, and investigated the current research. However in the end, I found that the ancient world probably has more to say to us about dreams than the brain scientists.

Dreams have the power to reveal us to ourselves, and they are too important to ignore.

On this forum, I'll be posting dreams and talking about how to work with them: for greater insight and for deeper change. I invite you also to comment and post your own dreams. I will respond as best I can.