History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul »

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of the landmark international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus and the National Jewish Book Award winner Stalking Elijah. He is a professor of English and religious studies at Louisiana State University. He currently lives in New Orleans with his wife.

A third of our time on earth is spent sleeping, yet our dreams, if we remember them at all, have been relegated to nothing more than curious anecdotes. When Sigmund Freud awakened modern interest in the dream a century ago, his theory of interpretation undermined the potential insights dreams had to offer. For Freud, dreams were little more than fragmented puzzle parts made up of events from our waking lives. Most of us today still live under Freud's far-reaching influence. When we wake up after experiencing a powerful series of images, we too readily explain them away or simply ignore them all together. Whatever emotion or insight the dream evokes slowly fades. But what if Freud was wrong? Unless we challenge his deeply-ingrained assumptions, we will forever lose the gift of our dreams.

International bestselling author Rodger Kamenetz believes it is not too late to reclaim the lost power of our nightly visions. Kamenetz's exploration of the world of dreams reopens all the questions scientists and psychologists claimed to have settled long ago. The culmination of decades of research, The History of Last Night's Dream is a riveting intellectual and cultural investigation of dreams and what they have to teach us. We discover how the age-old struggle between what we dream and how we interpret our dreams has shaped Western culture from biblical times to today. Kamenetz introduces us to an eighty-seven-year-old female kabbalist in Jerusalem, a suave Tibetan Buddhist dream teacher in Copenhagen, and a crusty intuitive postman-turned-dream master in northern Vermont. He fearlessly delves into this mysterious inner realm and shows us that dreams are not only intensely meaningful but that they hold essential truths about who we are. In the end, each of us has the choice to embark on this illuminating path to the soul. But one thing is certain: our dreams will never be the same again.

Publishers Weekly

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 Lotuswrestles 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, semiarchetypal, 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.)

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Images
The Descent into Dreams: New Orleans, January 2007     3
The Gate of Heaven in Newton, Massachusetts: Newton, November 1995     15
Colette and the Waking Dream: Jerusalem, Summer 1995     27
Kitchen Kabbalah and the Vault of Images     37
The Little Shocks     42
The Case of the Disappearing Dream     50
A Convention of Dreamers: Berkeley, June 2003     54
Interpretations
Marc Bregman and a Punch in the Gut: Morrisville, Vermont, June 2001     63
The Book of K de G     73
You Are a Dead Man: Dumuzi and Abimelech     80
Jacob, the Hero of the Revelation Dream     86
Joseph the Dreamer and Joseph the Interpreter     92
The Untimely Disappearance of the Dream: Numbers and Deuteronomy     98
The Rabbis Ameliorate the Dream     102
Peter Sees a Dream, and Jews and Christians Part Ways     108
The Gnostic Heresy and the Mystical Dream Journey     114
Sigmund and Irma: The Secret of Dreams Revealed     122
The Two Belly Buttons     129
Blind Spots Removed While You Wait, and the Book of K de G Speaks     139
How Dreams Abolish Time, and the Secret of K de G at Last     148
Dreams
The Three Gifts of the Dream     157
Lost and Wandering Dreams: The Predicament     161
The Opposition: Gravel Grandma     166
The Opposition: Freud's Staircase Dream     174
The Orphanage Dream: The Situation of the Soul     182
Becoming the Boy: The Pins and the Desert     189
A Very Important Person     198
The Male VIP: The Second Gift of the Dream     205
Jung's Descent into the World of Dreams     211
Marc Bregman Meets the Animus     220
Return of the Orphanage Dream: The Father Archetype     225
North of Eden     230
Acknowledgments     241
Notes     245
Bibliography     253
Index     257