The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul [Hardcover]

Rodger Kamenetz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2007

A third of our time on earth is spent sleeping. Yet our dreams, if remembered at all, have been relegated to nothing more than curious anecdotes. When Freud, a century ago, awakened modern interest in the dream, his theory of interpretation undermined the potential insights dreams had to offer. For Freud, dreams are nothing more than fragmented puzzle parts made up of events from our waking life. Most of us today still live under Freud’s far-reaching influence. When we wake up from a disturbing series of images, the first thing we do is explain it away or ignore it. We take away little to nothing and move on with our lives. In this way, we have lost the gift of our dreams. This is the legacy of Freud’s dream theory. But what if he is wrong? Rodger Kamenetz’s exploration of the world of dreams reopens all the questions we thought were settled. We soon learn how the struggle between what we dream and how we interpret our dreams has shaped Western thought. Learning from an 87 year old female kabbalist in Jerusalem, a suave Tibetan tulku in Copenhagen, and a crusty intuitive postman/dream master in northern Vermont, Kamenetz recovers for us the lost power of our nightly visions. Dreams are intensely meaningful and reveal essential truths about our inner lives. With Kamenetz as our guide, we move down into this mysterious inner realm and hear the messages waiting for us at the heart of our dreams. In the end you will think about your dreams in an entirely new light and finally understand their potential to lead us on the path to the soul.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 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. (Oct.)
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Review

“Rodger Kamenetz’s vividly honest and well-reswearched book on dreams in Western culture is extraordinary-- in part for its defiance of genre...Before I read it had heard Kamenetz refer to it as a memoir, but it as much an argument for a paradigm shift in dream interpretation.” (The Christian Century )

“Kamenetz’s fierce honesty and unflinching self-revelation inspire both admiration and awe [...] [A] smart, funny, and revolutionary book...” (Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune )

“A profound, affecting and deeply rewarding book from a charismatic teacher.” (Jonathan Kirsch, author of A History of the End of the World )

“Rodger Kamenetz writes in this fascinating book that words, too many words, stand between us and our dreams.” (Los Angeles Times )

“Kamenetz has written a manual for living the dream of life through the real dreams of an individual.” (Andrei Codrescu, NPR Commentator )

“The History of Last Night’s Dream is at once affable and audacious; Kamenetz is a reliable narrator in unreliable territory.... Kamenetz’s poetic eye is alive and well.” (The Forward )

“[A] powerful and beautifully written book.” (Stephen J. Dubner, bestelling co-author of Freakanomics )

“Kamenetz’s new book brilliantly combines dream and soul and offers an accessible understanding of both. I highly recommend it.” (Brian L. Weiss, M.D., author of Many Lives, Many Masters )

“An enchanting and provocative book exploring a subject with profound implications about our very humanity.” (Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (October 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060575832
• ISBN-13: 978-0060575830
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,828 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rodger Kamenetz lives in New Orleans where he works as a dream therapist. His journeys have taken him to Dharamsala, India where he witnessed an historic dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama that he recounted in The Jew in the Lotus, and to rural Vermont where he met the dream teacher Marc Bregman of North of Eden, as told in his History of Last Night's Dream. His latest book, Burnt Books, is a dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and also recounts his journey to the grave of the rebbe in Uman in Ukraine along with tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims.

For more information about Rodger Kamenetz, visit his website at http://kamenetz.com, or meet him on Facebook, or follow him on twitter at
www.twitter.com/Jewinthelotus

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, October 20, 2007

By 

Amanda C. Bosky (South Florida, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul (Hardcover)

I love to dream. I have always believed dreams are important but never knew quite what to do with them besides record them in journals. I feel like the author handed me a toolbox when he wrote this book. I could have floundered on my own for years and never come to one tenth of these conclusions on my own. I especially appreciate Kamenetz's intense honesty and openness in sharing his own dreams and life experiences.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honesty that cuts to the bone, August 28, 2008

By 

G. Buglion (Hyde Park, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul (Plus) (Paperback)

Reading The History of Last Night's dream is like looking into the open door of a private home - only instead of seeing the furniture and decor - you get to feel into Kammenetz's soul. I am awed by his honesty and the 'direct hit' the dreams have for propelling him into what really appears to be true inner growth.I found that it started a little slow - but keep reading! It will blow your mind - and change your ideas about dreams!

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is getting great reviews, October 13, 2007

By 

TalkingDream "talkingdream" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul (Hardcover)

"The History of Last Night's Dream" may well change [your life]. Kamenetz's fierce honesty and unflinching self-revelation inspire both admiration and awe and sympathy and a sense of kinship. We are all dreamers, are we not? This smart, funny, and revolutionary book is filled with compassion for our dreaming minds, for the ways in which they reveal ourselves to ourselves, for the ways our dreams, nighttime or waking, can carry us back to love and so to God.
--Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune
"Last Night's Dream" is the tale of Kamenetz's attempt to break free ...by training himself to place dream imagery on an equal footing with text in his quest for a spiritual connection. The book is deeply personal and artfully written; Kamenetz was an established poet before his 1994 classic "The Jew in the Lotus" turned him into a Jewish Renewal celebrity. It is also an accessible primer on the evolving status afforded dreams in Jewish and Western thought and science.
-- Jerusalem Report