Dreams & Afflictive States of Mind

Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he’s been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.

In fall 2007, his book, The History of Last Night’s Dream, was published which examines the spiritual possibilities of dreaming from Genesis to now. Oprah Winfrey interviewed the author in her Soul Series in August 2008. Kamenetz has been instrumental in shaping and articulating Natural Dreamwork a phenomenological approach focused on strong feelings held by the images in dreams.

In daily life we often suffer reactivity– “afflictive states of mind”– those emotions include anxiety, guilt, shame, and reactive anger. When we are in these mind states we feel overwhelmed. Some seeks to eliminate these experiences, through spiritual bypassing– but this is really impossible. Dreams show us a different and more productive path. Through feeling the images in our dreams we can go beneath the surface level of afflictive states to deeper experiences of feeling. We will look at several examples where dreams show us the difference between reaction and feeling, and how to move from one state to the other.