Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz is the bestselling author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elija. His new book is: The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul (October 1, 2007, Harper Collins). For information on Rodger and his new book, continue to scroll down. For information on his bestselling The Jew in the Lotus, click here on The Jew in the Lotus .

A poet and professor, Kamenetz teaches English and religious studies at Louisiana State University alongside his wife Moira Crone, also a writer, who teaches creative writing. The Kamenetz family has played an integral role in the history of Words & Music, serving as faculty members and judges of the Faulkner Society’s literary competition. Their daughter Anya, author of Generation Debt, a highly praised book issued last year, worked with the Society as an intern while she was a student at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Their daughter Kezia, who won the Society’s prize for best short story by a High School Student, while she was at NOCCA, was student editor of the Society’s journal, The Double Dealer, last year. She is a student at Yale University now. Rodger and Moira, although faculty members at LSU in Baton Rouge, live in New Orleans by choice, choosing to become a part of ensuring a bright future for New Orleans.

Recent Interview with the Author

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.

Here is what Publishers Weekly has to say about the book:

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. Kamenet 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 will follow with surprise and pleasure his next steps along a winding spiritual path.

Stephen J. Dubner, author of Turbulent Souls, co-author of Freakonomics,

says:

What would you say if someone told you that all the masterful dream interpreters in history, from the biblical Joseph to the heretical Freud were ? well, wrong? That is the jolt delivered by Rodger Kamenetz in this powerful and beautifully written book. Kamenetz is a soul-searcher, quite literally, and we are all better off because of it.

Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and From Where We Dream, says:

Rodger Kamenetz's The History of Last Night's Dream is an enchanting and provocative book exploring a subject with profound implications about our very humanity. As always, Kamenetz writes with intellectual keenness, spiritual longing, and the verbal elegance of a poet. This is a book that has the cumulative effect of our most complex and revealing dreams.

Andrei Codrescu, poet, fiction and non-fiction writer, and regular NPR essayist, says:

The History of Last Night's Dream reads like a well-paced thriller. I took nourishment from this book. The care and feeding of the soul is hard going these days of spiritual fast food of every kind. In the strip mall of New Age snake oils and cardboard palliatives Kamenetz's book is a square meal. Steeped in erudition, rooted in his own search, Kamenetz has written a manual for living the dream of life through the real dreams of an individual.

Another Interview with the Author:

Why did you write this book?

After my mother's death, I began to see her in my dreams and the way she spoke seemed very convincing, not at all what I thought I could have imagined on my own. Could dreams be giving us glimpses of another world-the world of the soul? I found a teacher who could show me a path in dreams that was amazingly direct and extremely powerful. I felt like I'd discovered a long lost gift, a gift each of us receives most every night without realizing it. I had to tell people about this gift and how to use it, and that's why I wrote this book.

What were some of the challenges in writing this book?

The first challenge was to accept what my dreams were telling me about my life. The second was to change my life enough that I could glimpse the huge treasure dreams offer us. The third and biggest challenge was to communicate to those who hadn't had these remarkable experiences what they were about. The biggest difficulty is our general attitude towards dreams. We simultaneously believe that dreams are hugely significant and total nonsense.

For more information on Rodger Kamenetz and his new book, visit his web site:

http://www.kamenetz.com

For latest information on his book tour appearances, visit: