The first, will-he-look-like-his-mom-or-his-dad, was resolved quickly and unequivocally at his birth: he was beautiful. Or, as my dear wife so aptly puts it, “The only thing he inherited from you is the hair on his back.”

And the second issue, what-will-he-be-when-he-grows-up, was of concern for the first three years of his life. His bad temper qualified him to be a taxi driver; his phenomenal ability to make excuses indicated that he might do well in the legal profession; and his consistent mastery over others showed his potential to be a high-ranking member of one totalitarian government or another. But during the past few months the fog surrounding our son’s plump and rosy future has begun to lift. He’ll probably be a milkman, because otherwise, his rare ability to wake up every morning at 5:30 and insist on waking us too would go completely to waste.

One Wednesday, two weeks ago, our routine of being awakened at 5:30 a.m. was preempted by the doorbell. In my pajama bottoms, I opened the door and saw my best friend, Uzi, standing there, white as a sheet. On the balcony, he smoked nervously and told me that he’d had dinner with S., a crazy kid who’d gone to elementary school with us and had become, of course, a crazy high-ranking military officer. Around dessert, after Uzi finished bragging about a dubious real estate deal he’d just closed, S. told him about a secret dossier that had reached his desk. It dealt with the psychological makeup of the Iranian president. According to the dossier, which originated in foreign-intelligence agencies, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of the only living leaders in the world whose real views, aired only behind closed doors, are even more fanatical than the ones aired in public.

“It’s almost always the opposite,” S. had explained. “World leaders are barking dogs who don’t bite. But with him, it seems, his desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth is really a lot stronger than he actually says. And, as you know, he says quite a bit.”

“Do you get it?” Uzi, covered in sweat, asked me. “That crazy Iranian is prepared to destroy Israel even if it means the total annihilation of Iran, because from a pan-Islamic perspective, he sees that as a victory. And in a few months, that guy is going to have a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb! Do you understand what a disaster it’ll be for me if he drops it on Tel Aviv? I rent out 14 apartments here. Did you ever hear of a radioactive mutation who pays his rent on time?”

“Get hold of yourself, Uzi,” I said. “You’re not the only one who’ll suffer if we get bombed. I mean, we have a kid here and—”

“A kid doesn’t pay rent,” Uzi yelled. “A kid doesn’t sign a lease with you that he’ll break without a second thought the minute he grows a third eye.” At that point in the conversation, I lit a cigarette too.

The next day, when my wife asked me to call in a plumber to check a wet spot on the bedroom ceiling, I told her about my conversation with Uzi. “If S. is right,” I said, “it would be a waste of our time and money. Why fix anything if the whole city is going to be wiped out in two months?” I suggested that maybe we should give it half a year, and if we’re still here in one piece in March, we’ll repair the ceiling then. My wife didn’t say anything, but from her look I could tell that she hadn’t realized the seriousness of the current geopolitical situation. “So if I understand you correctly, you probably want to postpone the work on the garden too?” she asked. I nodded. Why waste the citrus tree saplings and the violets we’d plant? According to the internet, they’re particularly sensitive to radiation.

Aided by Uzi’s intelligence, I managed to save us from quite a few chores. The only home-repair job I agreed to take part in was roach extermination, because even radioactive fallout won’t stop those pests. Gradually, my wife also began to realize the advantages of our shabby existence. After she found a not exactly reliable news site warning that Iran might already have nuclear weapons, she decided it was time to stop washing dishes. “There’s nothing more frustrating than getting nuked while you’re putting the soap in the dishwasher,” she explained. “From now on, we only wash the dishes on an immediate-need basis, a second before we eat.”

This if-I’m-going-up-in-flames-anyway-then-I-won’t-go-as-a-sucker philosophy extended well beyond the dishwasher edict. We quickly stopped unnecessary floor-mopping and garbage removal. At my wife’s cunning suggestion, we went straight to the bank to apply for a huge loan, figuring that if we take out the money fast enough, we can screw the system. “Let them come looking for us to pay it back when this country turns into a giant hole in the ground,” we laughed as we sat in our filthy living room watching our enormous new plasma TV. It would be nice if only once in our short lives we could really put one over on the bank.

And then I had a nightmare in which Ahmadinejad came over to me on the street, hugged me, kissed me on both cheeks and said in fluent Yiddish, “Ich hub dir lieb,” “My brother, I love you.” I woke my wife. Her face was covered in plaster. The problem of the wet spot on the ceiling over our bed was worse than we had thought. “What’s wrong?” she asked, frightened. “Is it the Iranians?”

I nodded, but quickly reassured her that it was only in a dream.

“That they annihilated us?” she asked, stroking my cheek. “I have one of those every night.”

“Even worse,” I said. “I dreamed we were making peace with them.”

That hit her really hard. “Maybe S. was wrong,” she whispered in terror. “Maybe the Iranians won’t attack. And we’ll be stuck with this filthy, rundown apartment, with the debts and your students, whose papers you promised to give back by January and haven’t even started to mark. And with those nudnik relatives of yours in Eilat we promised to visit for Pesach because we were sure that by then—”

“It was just a dream,” I tried to cheer her up. “He’s a lunatic, you can see it in his eyes.” But that was too little, too late. I hugged her as hard as I could, letting her tears flow onto my neck, and whispered, “Don’t worry, honey. We’re both survivors. We’ve already survived quite a bit together—illnesses, wars, terrorist attacks, and, if peace is what fate has in store, we’ll survive it too.” So it was that in the middle of an autumn night, we found ourselves sweeping the living room in tense silence. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m calling a plumber.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

The first time I had that dream was five years ago. In the middle of the night, when I got out of bed, covered in perspiration, I made do with a glass of iced tea and watched an episode of The Wire. It’s not that I’d never had a bad dream before, but when I saw this one start to make itself at home in my unconscious, I knew I had a problem, one that even the winning combination of iced tea and Officer Jimmy McNulty couldn’t solve.

My best friend Uzi, a well-known dream-and-hot dog buff, worked out its meaning in no time. “You’re a second generation Holocaust survivor,” he said. “Your parents were forced to leave their country, their home, their natural social environment overnight. That unsettling experience filtered down from your parents’ unsettled consciousness to yours, which was unsettled to begin with. On top of which there’s the unstable reality of our lives in the Middle East. Stir it all up and what do you get? A dream that includes all of those fears: of being uprooted, of arriving in a strange, alien place, of being forced to work at something unfamiliar or unsuitable. You’ve got it all.”

“That makes sense,” I told Uzi. “But what do I do to make sure that that nightmare doesn’t come back—see a psychologist?”

“That won’t do you any good,” he interrupted. “What’s the therapist going to tell you? That your parents weren’t actually persecuted by Nazis, that there’s no chance of Israel being destroyed, leaving you a refugee? That even with your lousy coordination you can do a good job selling hot dogs? What you need isn’t a bunch of lies from a Ph.D. in clinical psych. You need a real solution: a nest-egg in a foreign bank account. Everybody’s doing it. I just read in the paper that foreign accounts, foreign passports, and four wheel drives are the three official trends this summer.”

“And that will work?” I asked.

“Like a charm,” Uzi promised. “It’ll help the dream and the reality. It’s not going to keep you from becoming a refugee or anything, but at least you’ll be a refugee with a bundle. The kind who even if he winds up with a hot dog stand at a train station in Japa-Germany has enough cash to hire another refugee with even lousier luck to stand there and stuff the sauerkraut.”

Taking advantage of refugees wasn’t an idea that appealed to me at first, but after a few more nocturnal visits to the hot dog stand I decided to go for it. On the Internet, I managed to find a nice website of an Australian bank, with a promotional video that showed not only breathtaking landscapes but a smiling teller, who looked like Julia Roberts’s even-nicer sister and urged me to deposit my money with them.

Uzi nixed the idea straight away. “Ten years from now Australia won’t even be there. If the hole in the ozone layer doesn’t get to them, the Chinese takeover will. It’s a sure thing. My cousin works in the Mossad, Pacific Division. Go for Europe. Any place except Russia and Switzerland.”

“What’s the problem there?”

“The Russian economy is unstable,” Uzi explained, taking a big bite of falafel. “And the Swiss… I dunno. I don’t like them. They’re kind of cold, if you know what I mean.”

Eventually I found a nice bank in the Channel Islands. Truth is that before I started looking for a bank I didn’t even know there were islands in the Channel. And it may well be that even in the worst-case scenario of a world war, the bad guys who’ll conquer the world won’t realize there are islands there either, and that even under global occupation, my bank will stay free. The guy at the bank who agreed to take my money was named Jeffrey but he insisted that I call him Jeff. A year later he was replaced by someone named John or Joe and then there was a very nice new guy named Jack. All of them were pleasant and polite and when they talked about my stocks and bonds and their secure future they made sure to use the present perfect tense correctly, something that Uzi and I never managed to do. Which only reassured me even more.

All around me, squabbles in the Middle East were growing more aggressive. Hezbollah’s Grad missiles were hitting Haifa, and Hamas rockets were thrashing buildings in Ashdod. But despite the deafening explosions, I slept like a baby. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have any dreams, but what I dreamt about was the pastoral setting of a bank, surrounded by water, and Jeffrey or John or Jack taking me there in a gondola. The view from the gondola was dazzling, and flying fish swam along with us, singing to me in a human voice that sounded a bit like Dido’s about the splendor and beauty of my investment portfolio, which was growing by the minute. According to Uzi’s Excel charts, it had grown to the point where I could open at least two hot dog stands or, if I preferred, one roofed kiosk.

And then came October 2008, and the fish in my dream stopped singing. After the market crashed, I called Jason, who had replaced the last J on the list, and asked him if he thought I ought to sell. He said I’d do better to wait. I don’t remember just how he said it, except that he too, like all the J’s before him, made very correct use of the present perfect. Two weeks later, my money was worth another 30 percent less. In my dreams, the bank still looked the same, but the gondola had begun capsizing and the flying fish, which didn’t look the least bit friendly anymore, started talking to me in the same familiar Japo-German dialect. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have bribed them with a good hot dog. Uzi’s Excel charts left no doubt that I hadn’t enough money left for a stand. I kept phoning the bank. In our first few conversations, Jason sounded optimistic. Then he began getting defensive, and from a certain point on, simply indifferent. When I asked him if he was looking at my investments and trying to do something to salvage what was left of them, he explained the bank’s policy: proactive management began with portfolios of one million dollars and up. I knew then we’d never again take a gondola trip together.

“Look at the bright side,” Uzi said, and pointed at the picture of a friendly looking man in the newspaper’s financial supplement. “At least you didn’t invest your money with Madoff.” As for Uzi, he made it through the crisis unscathed; he gambled all his money on wheat crops in India or weapons in Angola or vaccines in China. Before that conversation, I’d never heard of Madoff, but now I know all about Bernie and Ruth. Looking back, apart from the bit about the rip-off, we have a lot in common: two restless Jews who love to make up stories and have been sailing along for years in a gondola with a hole in the bottom. Did he too, once, years ago, dream he was selling hot dogs at the train station? Maybe he also had some true friend, like Uzi, who never stopped giving bum advice?

The guy on the news just announced a state of alert in the middle of the country and that there were roadblocks on some of the highways. There are rumors about a soldier being abducted. On my way home I bought two bottles of green tea and stopped at the video store to pick up the first few episodes of the last season of The Wire. Just to be on the safe side.

Translated by Miriam Shlesinger.

In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition because they were deemed too disturbing or difficult to understand. As Kamenetz went deeper into his own dreams, which he calls “the oldest spiritual technology on the planet,” he found that they did not have any explicitly Jewish content. But in their own strange way—as he recounts in his new book A History of Last Night’s Dream—they did, over the years, begin to lead him back to something like God.

You say that dreams have been exiled from Judaism since Genesis.

There is a twin tradition. One is of the dream as direct revelation that requires no interpretation. That’s embodied in the dreams of Joseph as a boy, and in Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven. And then there is the whole tradition of interpretation which actually begins with Joseph’s brothers, who have been quite correctly identified as the first dream interpreters. Their interpretation is full of anxiety and rage.

And you see that same mistrust reflected in the Talmud?

To give them credit, I think the rabbis were concerned for the average person who may not want to take a mystical venture into dreams, or who may not be equipped, or who may be fearful. They also wanted to assert that the Torah is the primary spiritual guide. They limit the scope of the dream very severely based on a passage in Deuteronomy essentially saying that no dream can contradict the Torah.

How has this affected the way we understand dreams now?

Our own response to dreams is often that they’re painful or that they are difficult. They bring up feelings we don’t want to face and we call out for an interpreter who will remove the sting of the dream and soothe us. One can find this not only in the rabbinic project but in the Freudian project, which says that the real meaning of the dream is hidden. But in my view the real meaning of the dream is right on the surface.

You once dreamed of an enormous book that was keeping you from writing.

I walk into my study and I have this feeling I’m going to write something. But in front of the computer monitor is this very large blue book with the letters “K de G” on the cover. The author is the Rabbi K de G, which seems to stand for “Kamenetz on Genesis.” The book reads from back to front and it appears to be a commentary on Genesis. As the dream ends, I’m thumbing through the pages from back to front and have completely missed the fact that behind the book, at a distance, was my father who had given it to me.

So the problem wasn’t so much that this holy book was keeping you from writing, but that it was standing between you and your father?

The book was a gift from my father that could have brought me closer to him. A few years ago I had a dream where my house is falling down and I just call my dad and ask for help. And he comes with a bunch of painters and carpenters and suddenly the house is repaired. It was just the first in a series of dreams that helped to lead me closer to him. One of the great gifts for me was to have this different relationship with my father in the last years of his life.

And what was coming between you and your father in waking life?

My pride. There’s another dream where we’re sitting at a kind of Talmud study. My father knows what a certain word means and I don’t. But I don’t ask him; I think I can figure it all out for myself. I don’t want to be the vulnerable son who needs help. But at a deeper level, this was not just about my relationship to my father, but about my relationship to the Father.

You hear people talk that way in church, but not as often in synagogue.

My answer would be two words: Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father, our King. Obviously Jesus said stuff like that because he also went to Rosh Hashanah services. There’s a whole Yiddish tradition of referring to God as tateynu, as “dear Father.” Our ancestors were very comfortable with the idea that God was a father and a king and a shepherd. But now if we have an emotional relationship to God, that’s immediately seen as goyish. We have drained the feeling level out of our liturgy and then we wonder why people can’t connect. They’re not just words. If God is a father, then I must be like a child.

So how does God appear to you in your dreams?

At the end of the book, I describe a dream where an orphan boy is being visited by his father. The father shows him his hand and says, “My hand is the same as yours.” Then the father leaves and the boy starts sobbing and looks in the mirror. And he’s me: I see my face. That sadness of having lost the Father, in this case not my father but the Father, that yearning to reconnect, not to be an orphan but to be his son—that’s the quest. It’s rather like what Rabbi Nachman said: You have to connect to God from your broken heart. The dream reawakened the feeling of loss, the pain of the separation from God. It’s a tremendous gift to feel that.

You’ve been studying under Marc Bregman, a self-styled “dreamworker” in Vermont.

Marc Bregman grew up as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia in a kind of anti-Semitic environment. He had a strict Jewish father and he rebelled in the 1960s. After he moved to Vermont he was working in the post office by day and seeing clients about their dreams at night. He’s certainly not a traditional Jew or even a nontraditional one. But I know that he is a man of God.

And you have your own clients now. How do you work with their dreams?

We meet once a week for an hour. We try to find the feelings in the dream, the belly button, as Marc calls it. Then we have homework, which is to visualize a moment from one of the dreams that needs change. There’s a rhythm back and forth from night dream to daydream and from daydream to actual life. Usually people come with a problem they’re trying to wrestle with but the dreams often point to some underlying predicament. It could be other people’s expectations. It could be family obligations, guilt, or a sense of duty. We just keep going deeper and over time there’s a shift. The dream becomes a live rehearsal. The changes you make in dreams can change how you behave.

In what sense is this approach to dreams Jewish?

When you’re taking a dream seriously it becomes a spiritual practice. How does that connect to what’s offered by this tradition we belong to where we have Torah and commentary and rabbinic authority and services and holidays and all of that? We struggle with a feeling of loss of connection to God. Religion tries to give us intellectual or ritual answers. People often outsource their spiritual struggles to the experts. Hence the tremendous pressure on rabbinic figures in our community. If we don’t have a personal feeling of a quest, at least if some of us don’t, then it makes the rabbi’s job very, very hard.

Could you have understood your dreams without coming to them from a Jewish angle?

It seemed necessary for me to go through the books, to go through Genesis, to go through the rabbis. And yet it’s true that having done that, it no longer seems quite as relevant. You can find the gift of the dream without Genesis. But it’s promised there.

/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost by monkeyinfez / Paul Hockett; some rights reserved.

You had a series of dreams in which men kept trying to feed you meat.

I had alternated between various dietary restrictions from semi-kosher to vegetarian and wasn’t too faithful to any of them. And all of a sudden these guys are showing up in my dreams serving meat. It started as hors d’oeuvres and ended with giant hunks of beef thrown on a grill by bare-chested Mexican chefs. It was obvious that these were good guys and that they were challenging me with a kind of a male generosity of spirit.

What did you dream last night?

Recently I dreamed I woke up and went to the window. I looked outside and the ground was covered with snow and I felt such joy. It took me back to being a kid in Baltimore thinking, I’m going to spend the whole day playing and I won’t have to go to school. You worry and you plan, you try to make yourself happy, you try to make other people happy and then the snow just falls, you know? It falls on its own.