Maybe a long-gone relative or friend came to visit you in your sleep.

Maybe the whole thing was just a feeling that slipped out of your grasp as soon as you entered the mundane world of being awake.

Or maybe it was one of those nonsensical visions where you're eating tomatoes for breakfast on a boat with Bob Dylan, who is actually your mother, while your dog performs a magic show and then turns into Brittany Spears.

To Rodger Kamenetz, even such a dream is fraught with meaning.

Meaning-yes. But not exactly the way Sigmund Freud, the 20th century's most influential interpreter of dreams, envisioned it. Whereas he interpreted dreams, Kamenetz suggests a way of "uninterpreting" them that he says can lead us into spiritual realms that Judaism once explored but no longer does.

The latest book from the spiritually questing author of "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah" is "The History of Last Night's Dream" (HarperSanFrancisco), out this month. In it, Kamenetz explores the history of dreams and dream interpretation from Genesis to Freud and Carl Jung, explains why he believes that we-as human beings and as Jews-have lost the power to connect with and learn from our dreams, and takes the reader along on visits to several individuals who have made dreams the focus of their spiritual life.

Kamenetz will be in Chicago to talk about his book and about dreams on Wednesday, Oct. 10 at Temple Sholom of Chicago.

In a recent phone conversation, the genial and articulate author, professor and poet, whose previous books have explored Jewish mysticism and the links between Judaism and Buddhism, said that several events propelled him into studying dreams. One of the most powerful was connected to the death of his mother.

"I've always been fascinated by dreams, and"-considering that we spend a third of our lives asleep-"I'm sure I'm not alone in that," he says. "In my earliest poetry, my first book, there were poems that came out of dreams," including one in which his recently deceased grandfather spoke to him in a dream.

Then there's a more recent book, "Terra Infirma," which chronicled his relationship with his mother and was built around a dream he had after she died.

"Many people have this kind of dream, in which people we've lost come back to us. Those are very striking and powerful dreams," he says.

The dream about his mother "felt as if she were trying to give me a message. It is not logical, it challenges our logic and is very haunting. I'm a very rational person, I think, very reasonable. On the other hand, that feeling (of receiving a message in a dream) is very real and I can't dismiss it. It feels so real, like the person is really there again, almost like they're trying to tell you something."

The way his mother spoke in the dream "seemed very convincing, not at all what I would have imagined on my own," he says.

Shortly afterwards, Kamenetz began exploring the tradition of dreams in various cultures, particularly Judaism.

Harking back to his visits to India and Tibet, chronicled in "The Jew in the Lotus," he "became aware of how powerful the tradition of dreams and of visual meditation was in Tibet. I began to wonder, what about Jewish tradition? We are the people of the dream-look at the stories in Genesis. What happened? Why are dreams not so important in our lives anymore?"

"We've lost the revelation dream," he contends. "What happened to the dream? After the Book of Genesis, there are no more dreams-there are 10 or 11 dreams in Genesis and none after that. The early rabbis and rabbinic sages talked about dreams and after that, there is almost no commentary." He suspects that later thinkers "disposed of the dream. There is really a fear of the dream, that it is too powerful and might lead you astray."

The first part of Kamenetz's book details the powerful role of the dream in Judaism, from Joseph's and Jacob's dreams in Genesis to the obscure Jewish tradition of "amelioration of the dream," in which an individual who has a negative or bothersome dream can describe it before a beit din (rabbinical court) of three witnesses, who then "say it's a good dream, like, don't worry about it," Kamenetz says. The tradition is still practiced among some Orthodox Jews, he says.

Several Chicago rabbis agree that dreams no longer have the importance to Judaism that they once did. Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, says that "it is quite questionable whether someone today can really interpret what a dream is. According to the sages, every dream might have some truth to it but every dream also has falsity to it. To be able to know what is truth and what is false, how does one determine it?"

Noting that there is a tradition in Judaism of fasting if a person has a bad dream, Moscowitz says that "today we don't do that, we don't put so much stock in dreams as Jews did historically."

Rabbi Asher Lopatin, spiritual leader of Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel Congregation in Chicago, agrees with Kamenetz that "the rabbis paid a lot of attention to dreams in a serious way. You can fast on a lot of days when you are not supposed to fast (such as on Shabbat) because you had a bad dream. The rabbis felt (people should) address a dream, not ignore it, and you had to fast right away. It was a unique thing, such an integral part of dealing with daily life." The dream could be one in which something bad happened or "any dream that gets you depressed," he says.

Fasting to reverse the effects of an unpropitious or "bad" dream has a long history in Jewish folklore, according to JewishEncyclopedia.com. For instance, it was considered an evil omen to have a bad dream on Yom Kippur, when fasting is obligatory and the dreamer would be unable to ward off the effects of the dream with a fast especially for that purpose.

And Lopatin notes that if an individual fasted on a day when fasting was forbidden-such as on Shabbat or a holiday, which is supposed to be enjoyed-the person might have to fast a second day as punishment for fasting the first time-"a fast for a fast." The power of dreams to influence daily life through those traditions is evident, he says.

"I think (Kamenetz) is right, it's been toned down," Lopatin says. "I don't know any people who have done that kind of fasting in the contemporary period."

But the tradition of bringing a dream before a beit din lives on, in a sense, Lopatin says. "I have had religious friends who, when they have had a difficult dream, ask someone to interpret a negative dream by using a positive spin. The Talmud says, however the dream gets interpreted, that's the potency of the dream."

In addition, he says, during the ceremony of blessing the Kohanim, or priests, "there is a part where you are supposed to say if you've had a bad dream. I think people say it, I've said it before."

These ways of dealing with bad dreams "are definitely a real thing, but we're living in this rational era, so it's not as common to take on a fast for dreams, to be so obsessed with it," Lopatin says. "It definitely remains part of the fabric of Jewish life, just a smaller part of it."

Kamenetz contends there are two exceptions to the Jewish world's neglect of dreams: Rabbi Isaac Luria, the great kabbalist, and Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Luria "dreams every night. He goes to the heavenly academy and gets Torah teachings there and brings them back down to earth. For the mystics, a dream is a journey to the other world," he says.

As for Rabbi Nachman, "he is a fantastic dreamer. Probably some of his famous tales come from dreams," Kamenetz says.

Aside from these two sages, however, he finds that "Judaism is so rich (in dreams) but the basic approach is making the dream good, the amelioration of the dream. To my mind, that's not the best way to learn more about yourself from the dream. It tends to dismiss the dream."

Nor does he hold with the Freudian theory of dreams, which has been predominant in Western thought for a century.

"About 100 years ago, Freud wrote about the interpretation of dreams," Kamenetz says. "He said dreams are about the past, that they are made up of memories of the previous day or earlier in the past. (To Freud) they tell us absolutely nothing about the soul, G-d, the future. Freud was an atheist, and many Jews-and I myself for many years-followed Freud. I don't know why we liked him so much. Maybe because he's Jewish-we were proud of him."

In the book, Kamenetz traces other modern theories of dreams, such as those of Carl Jung, who used dreams and mythology to explore the psyche and spirituality and connected his contemporaries' dreams to the dreams in Genesis.

And then there was Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, whose theory was "that dreams are essentially garbage, reverse learning, and should be tossed out. He's not the first with that theory," Kamenetz says.

Kamenetz's own view, though, is closer to that of Rabbah, the third-century Babylonian sage who "believed that G-d will show his face to us in dreams if G-d has hidden His face from us," Kamenetz says. "He's my man."

Mulling these varying views on dreams, Kamenetz "began looking and exploring: What happens when we dream? What is the power of the dream? And how could dreams be used to change us?"

The physical and spiritual journeys he took to try to find the answers to these questions make up the major part of the book. He essentially found three teachers. The first, an 87-year-old female Algerian Jewish kabbalist living in Jerusalem, "used visualizations for spiritual growth and to help people who had medical conditions. She was quite a remarkable teacher," Kamenetz says.

His other mentors were a Tibetan tulku (religious leader believed to have been reincarnated many times) in Copenhagen and a postman and "dream master" in northern Vermont who perfected "a method of working with dreams that was very powerful," Kamenetz says.

The book recounts what he learned from these teachers; at the same time, Kamenetz makes clear that it is not a comprehensive history of dreams.

"There are many different ideas and feelings about dreams, and I'm not trying to cover all of them," he says. "I'm not interested in what dreams are scientifically-what happens in the brain, REM sleep, etc. etc. I'm not interested in that. There's a science of dreams but my book goes against that grain. I'm more interested in the soulfulness of dreams."

Nor does he cover, or have any interest in, the traditional folk wisdom that certain kinds of dreams or dream figures are lucky or unlucky. "If someone wants to win the lottery, gezunter heit," he says. "That has nothing to do with what I'm interested in."

The kind of dream interpretation that does interest him is closer to that of Joseph, who famously dreams of a sheaf that stands up while 11 other sheaves-clearly representing his 11 brothers-bow down to it.

"If you're a Freudian, what does that show about his past? Nothing," Kamenetz says. "His present, nothing. But 22 or 23 years later when (his brothers) come back to Egypt, they bow down to him. The dream showed Joseph how G-d sees him."

"I believe dreams show us the truth about ourselves. They are so deep they can actually show us the future, show us the potential of who we are that we don't know ourselves and hasn't been realized yet," he says. "In that sense, they can tell us the future," though probably not what lottery numbers to pick. From dreams we can see "I'm not who I thought I was-in a way that's showing me a person that the world hasn't yet seen," he says.

An example from his own life: "Recently a dear friend died. I had a dream the night before the funeral in which he said he was studying music, which he never did in his life. I was going to the train station and I said, can I give you a ride? He said no, I'll go there myself. I felt like that was a message that he was OK, that he was moving on to new things in life."

In this sense, Kamenetz says his book "is more the 'uninterpretation' of dreams. A big problem we have is that we don't feel deeply enough. I think dreams come to help us feel more deeply and tell us the truth about our lives."

Viewing dreams in this sense presented Kamenetz with a series of challenges, he says. He told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly that "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."

Eventually Kamenetz became so fascinated with dreams that he studied with a master teacher, Marc Bregman, and became a certified dream therapist, using dreams to lead clients on journeys of psychological and spiritual discovery.

To show how this works, he gives an example of a dream one of his clients had. "She was chained in her basement-a common dream many women have-and was talking to Bob Barker. They're chatting in a friendly way. Her son comes down on his way to school, kisses his mom on the cheek, says goodbye, and that's the dream."

Using the approach he learned in becoming a dream therapist, Kamenetz discovers that "there's always a hole in the story. She doesn't ask her son to help her." Then he and the client "work with the dream, not to dismiss it or forget about it. We treat it as if it were real. I said, why didn't you ask your son to help you? In the dream she didn't feel bad about being chained up."

From that, he extrapolates that "each of us has some predicament or situation we're living with, and we're so used to it we don't feel the pain anymore. It is really powerful and beautiful to get the person to say, I am chained up. How could I learn to ask for help?"

In this work, "I use a technique which is really almost the reverse of Freud," he says. "I call it 'uninterpretation.' I think we need to live with our dreams for a long time, and that we need to immediately resist interpretation. It holds us back from the power of the dream," he says.

Kamenetz is hoping that more people, and especially Jews, will recognize that power and turn back to an earlier Jewish mystical tradition in which dreams were primary sources of spirituality and inspiration. The mystics realized that dreams "are private revelations," which Kamenetz calls "the foundation of religion, which is available to all of us. Dreams come from the divine within us." People in the ancient world thought that dreams represented "a voice connected to G-d. We've lost that belief today," he says.

He hopes his efforts can help to answer the question he sets out to solve in the beginning: "How can we revive the power of the dream in our lives? As Jews, we have this wonderful heritage in Genesis. I feel this belongs to us. What happened to our heritage? How do we use dreams to deepen our feelings as Jews, and what do we make of the stories in Genesis?" He hopes his book can help readers with both tasks.

"I would like to revive the power of dreams," he says. "I'm hoping to make an impact so that people take their dreams more seriously."

Rodger Kamenetz will discuss "The Case of the Disappearing Dream: From Genesis to Freud and Jung" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10 at Temple Sholom of Chicago, 3480 N. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago. Call (773) 525-4707 for more information.