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.