Interview on Shrink Rap Radio

A SHRINK RAP RADIO interview with Dr. Dave about archetypal dreaming and whatever else came to mind...

THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM

The History of Last Night's Dream is available at Amazon
or Barnes and Noble or
your friendly local INDEPENDENT book store.

Read more about the book or Rodger on his website.

GIFT OF THE DREAM CONFERENCE VIDEOS

My friends at North of Eden have posted the complete video of the
recent Gift of the Dream Conference in Philadelphia. If you missed it,
there's video you can see: a keynote by me, an interview with Marc Bregman
and Christa Lancaster who are co-directors of North of Eden, and two
string sessions.

Gift of the Dream VIDEO

Mardi Gras Purim and Dreams

At Purim, Unmasking God by Way of Dreams
March 05, 2009

Rodger Kamenetz

Purim is one of my favorite holidays. Living in New Orleans, where Mardi Gras takes over the city for two weeks every year, we know how to do Purim right. Masking is a fun part of Purim, but the fun also masks a serious point: The book of Esther, the last of the five scrolls, never mentions God by name. "Esther" alludes to "nistar," the hiddenness of the divine.
God ultimately has no "face" in human terms -- our Jewish theology tells us that. Yet images are how we feel relationships. It is difficult to pray to an abstract God, which is why our prayer books give us "masks" of God, when we use names such as "father" "king" or "Shekhinah."

We can contrast how God appears to human beings in Genesis with the more hidden quality in Esther. While Esther seems closer to our more abstract concept of a world where God seems remote, Genesis represents the dreamland of Jewish consciousness. In its stories, men and women see angels, hear voices, find a personal name of God. Some even see God's face, as Jacob does in his dream of the ladder.

The dream is how we give face to God, through images. In Genesis, the dream works to communicate between the divine realm and ours. The dream is itself a ladder between heaven and earth.


Yet, after Genesis, the dream disappears from the Torah, the five books of Moses. When we lose the dream, we lose a direct revelation, a felt personal connection, between the individual and God.

Several years ago, I set out to find out what this meant. I knew that dreams still have the power to move us emotionally and spiritually. By neglecting our dreams, we throw away great gifts. As our rabbis said: A dream not interpreted is like a letter unopened.

One gift in Genesis provides a warning about our destructive behavior. I see this in the story of Avimelech, a king who takes Sarai to him and is warned in a dream that he will die for it. He heeds the warning and gives her back to Avram. But do we heed the warnings in our dreams, which often display our pathological behavior? Or do we just say, "It's only a dream"?

A second gift comes with two dreams of Joseph, who sees sheaves of wheat bowing down to his sheaf, and the moon, sun and stars bowing down to his star. His brothers interpret these dreams as pure arrogance, but Joseph comes to understand that the dream describes his true essence as a leader, who he is in God's eyes. I call this the "essential image" dream -- and when such dreams show us who we are -- despite what others think of us -- they can be a powerful source of strength.

The third gift of the dream, as I mentioned, is the gift of Jacob's dream of the ladder. Such dreams confirm, often in a very mysterious way, that there is much more to life than the rough ground of the material world where we live. There is another dimension that Jacob's ladder reaches into. Through our dreams, we can climb into that dimension; this is a tremendous gift.

At Purim, we can masquerade however we want -- as beautiful Esther, wicked Haman, pious Mordechai and the proto-feminist Vashti. The masks are fun, but the masquerades in our dreams go deeper.

We can learn how to receive their gifts. There is a ladder between our deepest feelings and our theology. So often a rung of that ladder is completely broken for us -- the rung between our feelings and our abstractions. Our dreams can restore that broken rung. Ignoring them is wasting their gifts.

Rodger Kamenetz, author most recently of The History of Last Night's Dream, will keynote a conference on dreams at the Germantown Jewish Centre on March 15.

THE GIFT OF THE DREAM CONFERENCE

Dreams are a gift: perhaps from God, the great common soul or some great unknown that we can only hold in reverence. Often dreams feel deep and awesome, other times they are tedious reproductions of our tedious days.
How do we gain access to the gift of the dream? Dreams have fascinated humankind since the Bible, challenged religious authority, regained their magnetic pull for Freud and Jung, and have become the subject of therapy, healing and even media discussion.

Rodger Kamenetz, the author of The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul, has a very specific path to suggest. Find out more at kamenetz.com or talkingdream.com. In his search, he takes us through the Bible, Rabbinic thought, Christianity, modern psychoanalysis, contemporary religious seekers, Tibetan Buddhism and finally a very specific path of archetypal dream work which he discovered and embraced on his journey through dream work. Kamenetz will give a keynote address as a launch to this day-long exploration of dreaming that will allow each person to encounter and explore new physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual horizons through encountering the gift of the dream.

World class professionals and scholars in each field will present a variety of opinions and worldviews that promise to challenge and shape whole new ways of looking at dreaming.