Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author, tenured LSU professor, and certified natural dreamwork practitioner.
“Against an artificial intelligence, the natural intelligence of dreams represents all that makes us human.”
—Rodger Kamenetz, Seeing into the Life of Things
My personal, admittedly rudimentary, dreamwork began when I was thirteen and a teacher assigned an optional assignment over the Easter holidays. Students who wanted to would set an alarm periodically throughout the night and, immediately upon waking, write down whatever we’d just been dreaming about. The hypothesis was that we could train our brains to remember our dreams.
The eleventh of twelve kids, I had only just landed a bedroom by myself. What better way to celebrate my newfound autonomy than to jump headlong into this experiment? I set my alarm for every three hours each night that week and, by the time school began again, I was indeed better able to remember my dreams.
I kept up the practice, whenever I could, for a few years. Then came high school, college, marriage, career, four kids, and although I stopped chronicling my dreams, my fascination with dreams and dreaming never waned.
Fast forward several decades and a record-scratch moment came to me when an acquaintance mentioned that his father-in-law is a dream therapist. It turns out, though, that his father-in-law is much more than a dream therapist. Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author, tenured LSU professor, and certified natural dreamwork practitioner. Of his thirteen books, The Jew in the Lotus was an international bestseller that the New York Times called a “revered text.” Its sequel, Stalking Elijah, won Kamenetz the National Jewish Book Award. He’s also received the Readers’ Choice Award in Poetry from Prairie Schooner and the St. Andrews Review for two of his nine poetry collections. And for his book on dreamwork, The History of Last Night’s Dream, he was interviewed by Oprah.
His newest book, Seeing Into the Life of Things: Imagination and Sacred Encounter is equal parts spiritual memoir and practical guide into his dream therapy practice. In it, Kamenetz explores how imagination—rather than being a form of escapism—can act as a medicinal force to help heal anxiety, envy, reactivity, and digital exhaustion. Based on that belief, he has worked one-on-one with dream therapy clients for more than twenty years.
I had to know more.
So, I made my way to one of those quintessentially New Orleans neighborhoods where vibrantly-colored Creole cottages sit cheek by jowl with funky shotguns all shaded by centuries-old oaks. I was greeted by an avuncular and generous soul I can imagine was a favorite of many an LSU student during his twenty-seven years as a professor of creative writing and religious studies. I also met Kenny, a geriatric lap dog Kamenetz fondly calls his “dream scout”.
The first thing I learned is that dream therapy is not the same as dream interpretation. It’s actually quite the opposite, Kamenetz explained, “We’re looking at dreams as natural phenomena rather than a riddle to be solved. We’re looking not at the storyline of your dream but at the images and, more importantly, the feelings those images evoke. When the awesome appears to us in our dreams, can we receive it or do we react to it and try to control or dominate it? It’s the difference between a genuine feeling of fear, terror, joy, disgust, pain, or love and our reaction to that feeling.”
Dream therapy is not a quick process. It’s a journey embarked upon by the therapist and the dreamer. “Over time, the dream point of view, through various experiences of deeper feeling, softens and becomes more permeable and more open to feeling,” Kamenetz said. “Instead of being a dream ego, you become a dream soul. As a dream ego, you dominate, solve, judge, have opinions, and interpret. But as a dream soul, you can receive what your dream is offering. It takes time to dissolve the ego and receive what your dream is presenting.”
He offered this example from his own life. “I had a reoccurring dream that I entered a lecture hall to teach a class, but I didn’t know what I was meant to teach. So, I began teaching and the class just ignored me. Some walked out. I told my own dream therapist about it and he asked, ‘How do you know you were the teacher?’ When I had that dream again, I took a seat and another teacher entered and began to teach. I think I’d become too attached to the narrative of myself as teacher. My dream was showing me I needed to step out of that role sometimes and allow myself to be the student.”
Kamenetz took inspiration from the work of William Wordsworth for the title of Seeing Into the Life of Things. “Wordsworth was greatly preoccupied with the growth of the imagination,” he said. “How can we cultivate the imagination? What things are we doing that are diminishing imagination?”
“For me,” he went on, “dreaming is like being alive twice. I have this other life and the two, over time if you work with your dreams, can become more congruous. Your life will inform your dreams and your dreams will inform your life. But that takes time and devotion to the process.”
What exactly is that process? It begins with remembering the images and, more importantly, the feelings in your dreams. “The plot of your dream is secondary,” Kamenetz re-emphasized. “Our rational mind wants to put things together in an understandable way. It can impose itself on the dream. It can be scary to let go of the ‘I’—the person we tell ourselves we are because of the things that have happened to us. But dreams don’t care about that. In dreams, you’re freer to be separated from your autobiography, and that’s where the work can begin.”
Kamenetz firmly believes our dreams can restore us to wholeness and feeling. “As adults we live in an interpreted world and explain away our dreams,” Kamenetz said. “My first goal in natural dreamwork is to return the dreamer to the feelings images bring. That’s where the healing lies.”
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Learn more about Kamenetz's dreamwork at thenaturaldream.com and his other books at kamenetz.com.
