Our Dreams Will Never Be the Same Again
International bestselling author Rodger Kamenetz believes it is not too late to reclaim the lost power of our nightly visions. He fearlessly delves into this mysterious inner realm and shows us that dreams are not only intensely meaningful, but 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.
July 23, 2007
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, 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.
October 1, 2007
After delineating connections between Judaism and Buddhism in The Jew and the Lotus (1994) and reporting on contemporary Jewish mysticism in Stalking Elijah (1997), Kamenetz continues his heady and unusual spiritual chronicle by examining the role dreams play in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in psychoanalysis. Kamenetz keenly investigates the interpretation of dreams from Jacob and Joseph to Freud and Jung and neatly elucidates relevant aspects of gnosticism and kabbalah. In some of the books most probing passages, Kamenetz analyzes the triumph of the word over the image and the elevation of sacred texts over direct experience in monotheism (a fascinating corollary to Leonard Shlains Alphabet and the Goddess, 1998). Then there are Kamenetzs dramatic adventures in dream work. He first consults with Colette Aboulker-Muscat, an 87-year-old Algerian practitioner of kitchen kabbalah in Jerusalem, then finds his true dream teacher in Marc Bregman, a Vermont postman turned shaman. Kamenetzs hard-won and provocative insights into how exquisitely made dreams are, and how dreams reveal us to ourselves, profoundly alter our perception of what goes on while we sleep.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)