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

don’t know the code. Sure we
recognize who or what the characters are, but what they're doing in our dreams
makes absolutely no sense. So we go on a quest to crack that code, and we learn
that the code might not be as difficult to break as we may have previously
thought.

Why Acting?
     
    Modern citizens
love movies, the greatest phenomenon in storytelling in the history of humankind.
How many of us have held our breath during a scary movie, so terrified that we
could barely watch what was going to happen next? How many times have we jumped
when something unexpected startled us? How many times has we felt embarrassed
for a character who found themselves in an awkward situation?
     
    What about a
really good drama? Sometimes, despite all our efforts otherwise, we find
ourselves fighting emotions and casually reaching toward our face to wipe off a
rogue tear before someone sees. Somehow, through the course of the movie, we grew
so attached to the characters and their plight that we couldn't help ourselves.
     
    For others,
there's nothing like a belly laugh. Sometimes a movie becomes a cult classic
such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To this day, no matter where I am,
every other person I meet is able to quote the movie almost line by line.
     
    There are so
many genres as we all know: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Action/Adventure,
Documentary, and the list goes on. All of these (the good ones at least) have
one thing in common: we believe them… or we believe their premise. Even if it
starts out “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” we believe and relate
to what the actors on the screen are going through. That's what makes movies so
powerful.
     
    The actor knows
how to create for us a character that is so compelling that, whether we like
them or not, we can't help but believe them. It's that kind of persuasion that
convinces us that an actor is staring at a huge space ship called the Death
Star when in reality they're looking at a blue wall in which the Death Star was
added later in a special effects room. We believed that those castaways were
running away from massive dinosaurs in Jurassic Park when they were only
running from an imagined creature in the director's mind.
     
    Believe it or
not, those actors go through a lot of work to make you and I believe that they
are the persons they’re portraying. Each script involves a certain analyzation
process that allows them to create that character. Since dreams are so much
like movies, and we are all actors in them, what better way to learn to
understand than to use some of those techniques to breathe life to our own
characters?
     
    I won’t be
covering the analyzation processes here because it’s not necessary. In this
book all you need for your characterization are the more creative techniques.
So let's approach this other Hollywood, where we are the stars, the directors,
and the supporting cast, with the excitement of a real movie star.

The Purpose of this Workbook
     
    The goal of
this workbook is to take some of the confusion out of dream interpretation and
to embark on our own Star Trek by using some of the very same techniques that
our favorite actors use to identify with their characters. To do it right, we
will have to look at our dreams through the all-important “eyes of a child.”
And what makes a child's mind so incredible? It's imaginative, open, and
running at mach speed in an attempt to keep up with the millions of bits of
information being presented to it every second of every day.
     
    This book can
be done in a small group, or alone. I recommend the small group because the
involvement with other dreamers helps keep us creative, connected, and
interested. It also motivates us just a little more when the time to be
creative is actually sanctioned. Another reason to consider a group is the
thoughts and ideas of others can enhance the thoughts and ideas we have of
ourselves. These ideas combine so that we can build a powerful kinship with