by Jason Bennett, 2007

Can you create vivid, specific imaginary worlds to live in while you act? Can you create intense experiences for yourself, effortlessly and on cue? Once you learn how, your dreams can help you do these things with astonishing results. Dreams connect you to your unconscious world of hopes, fantasies and fears -- your imagination. Dreams literally are your imagination and talent being expressed every night while you sleep.

Great acting comes mostly from your imagination, not your rational, conscious mind. Great actors have solid access to their imaginations while they act. It takes many years of work for this to become automatic. Even then, many great actors fall into bad habits. Lots of bad acting is the result of actors acting from the conscious, rational parts of their brain.

Dreams can offer the solutions to your acting problems. Sometimes the characters will literally speak to you in your dreams. Or your dreams will contain images and symbols you can learn to use while you act. This can result in unpredictable, profoundly felt acting and characterizations. Often you will dream about the archetypes you need to see the world from the character's point of view.

In general, paying attention to your dreams can help you build a library of images, impulses and archetypes that you can use any time in any kind of role. The "choices" your dreams give you every night while you sleep can be catalogued and used for your entire career. The more you spend time with your dreams, the more solidly your acting will be controlled by your imagination.

It isn't enough to just start vaguely using your dreams after reading this article. Nothing is more annoying to directors and other professional actors than actors who barely scratch the surface of a real acting process, experimenting in rehearsal with processes they know little about. That's what professional acting classes are for -- not the rehearsal phase in a professional production. In class, you learn very specific ways of harnessing the potential of your dreams for your acting. Here are some examples of using dreams in our work with professional actors:

A young, very talented actor was cast in a Neil Simon comedy. He worked very hard in class. He was beginning to develop a specific acting process, exploring the tools great actors use.

So he came to me and said, "The director is telling me I'm having problems. I'm really worried. He says the work is too heavy, and things just don't seem funny. I don't know what to do. Should I do more background work on the character? Should I use the Sensory Process and Imaging to create more of the memories of the character?"

I listened to him go on for three minutes asking me if he should try every acting tool he could think of. Clearly, this actor was working too hard. Young actors often do. Working too hard can block your talent and screw up your acting.

I asked him if he had any dreams about the play. Surprised at my question, he said yes.

In the dream, the character told him to "just have fun" and jumped around laughing and going crazy. I told him it sounded like he ought to take the character's advice and stop all the intense acting homework!

Beyond the literal instruction from the character to stop working so hard, the dream presented him with an archetypal energy he needed to play the character from. You can read more about archetypes here. This actor was acting from his "good student" and "rational mind." But he needed to play this character from the kind of energy the dream gave him a connection to. Remember, he dreamed the dream. His imagination created it. Everything in the dream is an aspect of him and comes from his psyche.

His imagination was giving him the point of view he needed for the character -- not only as an idea, but also as an energetic experience. So in class, I asked him to improvise from the point of view of the character in the dream -- to act from the character in the dream.

He started jumping around, making silly noises, saying outrageous things and having lots of fun. The quality of his energy immediately changed from heavy to light, and his voice and body were suddenly infused with highly charged energy. His dreams, or imagination, had solved his acting problem.

I told him to do a physical and mental preparation at the next rehearsal where he remembered the dream and then stepped into the image of the character from the dream, doing the scene honoring whatever impulses he had. The director went wild! Total success.

Another accomplished, professional actor I worked with complained she was always being cast as vulnerable, screaming women in films. She had left Los Angeles for New York to start her career over and get away from the typecasting. I noticed that her off-stage persona matched the roles she was being typecast in, no surprise. She was emotionally vulnerable, kind, soft, almost childlike and easily capable of feeling hysterical.

Because of this, I assigned her the role of "Mother Pitt" from Angels in America. "Mother Pitt" is detached, rational, traditional, hard, parental and very controlled. She really is the opposite of the actor's primary, archetypal personality structure. This is the perfect kind of work for a great acting class and for an actor who wants to break her habitual acting patterns.

After two weeks of her working on the play on her own, she came to class and announced she had no idea how to approach the role. She said she had no impulse for the character. She couldn't imagine saying the things "Mother Pitt" says or why she felt and did the things in the script. For example, she couldn't understand why "Mother Pitt" would yell at her son, "Drinking is a sin!!" and then hang up on him, after he admitted he was gay in a totally vulnerable moment.

None of the traditional acting tools she had learned during her extensive training could help her truly access the point of view of "Mother Pitt." She simply judged "Mother Pitt" as cruel and insane. How could she empathize with this character, the actor's fundamental obligation?

I asked her if she had any dreams about the play. There was a very, very long pause. She said no. There was another pause. She said, "I have had nightmares about it."

In the nightmare, the actor was in bed with her sister, holding her sister and crying, very scared. Her real mother was standing by the bed. Her mother looked at them coldly and walked out of the room slamming the door.

As the actor told us the dream, she started crying and becoming the kind of character she was often typecast in.

I said, "Let's put the image of your mother from the dream over there on the right side of stage. Now I'd like you to stand where you are and "hang out" with the image of your mother in the dream. Bring in some of the energy. Just stand there and hang out with it and see what it feels like to be your mother in the dream."

Although the actor was intellectually confused, she followed my instructions. Immediately, she crossed her arms sternly, her tears dried up, tension formed between her eyebrows, her jaw clenched and her voice dropped about an octave as she said, "I don't understand what we're doing right now."

It already sounded like "Mother Pitt." She looked increasingly cold, irritated and judgmental.

I said, "Just stand there and 'hang out' with this energy. If it gets too intense, you can back off. But just hang out with this image the dream gave you. Now, can you imagine saying 'drinking is a sin' from this point of view?"

Her face lit up and her eyes opened wide. She smiled hugely and said, "Yes, of course! Oh my God. This is so weird."

She had begun, in that moment, to reclaim the parts of her imagination that she had been cut off from consciously, and that therefore blocked her work on this role.

This process isn't "weird" or mysterious, although it may sound that way to actors trained solely in traditional acting methods. This work is based on a modern understanding of the way your imagination and psyche operate. It is rooted in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology.

These are just two examples of the ramifications of this work for professional actors. There are many more ways to use your dreams for your acting. It would take a book to explain it all.

You can learn to use your dreams to create a character's past relationships and life. Or you can use your dreams to help you achieve extreme character obligations that go way beyond the life you have lived -- like being the leader of the universe or someone with two heads who speaks ten languages. You can imagine anything, if you know how to specifically use your imagination.

The dream process is a result of millions of years of human evolution. Dreams are not random. Our culture is one of the few on the planet that pay little attention to dreams. Dreams are a "higher form of intelligence" than your rational, conscious mind. Many traditional acting methods attempt to connect actors to their dream world while they act, without the teachers fully realizing the purpose of these methods.

In contemporary actor training, we know things about the brain the last generation of acting teachers didn't. We have the benefit of offering our students these new discoveries. Because of this, acting training is becoming more intense, efficient and effective. It will be this way for generations to come.

Dreams speak a universal language, connecting you to what many psychologists call the "collective unconscious" world of symbols, images, associations and stories. The more connected your acting is to your dream world, the more your storytelling will resonate with universal audiences. The language and energetics of your dreams transcends cultural, racial, historical and sexual boundaries. The more your acting transcends these boundaries, the greater an actor you can become.