Acting Your Dreams: Using Acting Techniques to Interpret Your Dreams by Ben Tousey

Introduction:
     
    All of us
dream. Whether we remember them or not, we will have several dreams during the
course of the night. Even those who say they don't dream actually do. They may
remember a feeling, a sensation, or even a brief scene… but they will dream.
It's inescapable. During any given night, about every ninety minutes, a human
being will experience as many as five nocturnal visits to the land where
anything can happen: from an Egyptian mummy in a tutu singing "I Got You
Babe" with Beavis and Butthead, to elephants wearing sweatpants eating butterscotch
ripple while vacuuming the living room with their trunk.
     
    The land of
dreams and dreaming is a fantastic place, but also a confusing place. Why are
those elephants eating butterscotch ripple ice cream? What about those Egyptian
mummies in tutus? Sometimes an image like this, which should be funny, can
frighten us in such a way that the memory will haunt us for days, weeks, years,
or in some cases, our whole lives.
     
    Dream images
have haunted mankind since the dawn of civilization. It was the early Egyptians
who first started talking about these "messages from the gods." The
first written dreams—that we know of so far—were recorded in 4000 B.C.E., and
the first dream diary was created in ancient Egypt. But the Egyptians weren't
the only society interested in dreams. Dream records and dream diaries have
been found in every empire from the dawn of civilization.
     
    These images
have hunted us, haunted us, inspired us, and frightened us out of our wits.
Even in today’s technological age of enlightenment we are just as perplexed by
them. Thanks to the work of Sigmund Freud and then Carl Jung, and their
revolutionary work with dream interpretation, we have become even more scientific
in how we approach our dreams.
     
    Freud wasn’t
the first “scientist” to believe that dreams could be understood or that they
played a part in human health. That belief goes as far back as the Greek
physician Hypocrites who believed that dreams could show us how to heal the
body when it was sick. Since Freud and Jung, many other dreamers have made
great strides in the realm of the dreamscape. Some of their dream theories are
scientific, some psychological, and some spiritual or even mystical, but they
all reveal a little more about dreams and dreaming.
     
    For a long time
it seemed that the only way to fully understand our dreams was to spend long
hours with a qualified therapist doing concentrated dream work. Thanks to Gayle
Delaney, Jeremy Taylor, Ann Faraday, Robert Moss, and the many others who have
devoted their life to dreaming, the common person gained more access to their
dreams than ever before. But pop culture, with all its books and self-help
knowledge, hasn't made the dream any easier to understand. In our modern society
there is a cornucopia of dream dictionaries, each attempting to tell us what
our dream symbol means, but most of us have been left cold at the dictionary's
definition. The dictionary may say that a snake in your dreams represents
"sexual power or potency," but the snake crawling down your shirt
last night could be anything but sexual. Then again it could. Either way the
dictionary couldn’t tell you much about the context around that dream image
because it doesn’t know your personal relations with that particular symbol. No
dream dictionary can ever know what a snake means to you.
     
    Despite the
seeming difficulty, our desire to understand our dreams continues to build even
though we don’t quite know why. Even the most cynical person will, at one time
or another, wish they could know what really happened to them in the middle of
the night.
     
    The Talmud
says, "An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter from God."
An average dreamer would ask cynically, “Isn't that great?” It does seem a
little ironic. God sends us a letter, but the letter is in code. A lot of good
a coded letter is going to do us, especially if we