Acting Your Dreams: Using Acting Techniques to Interpret Your Dreams by Ben Tousey Read Free Book Online

how
expensive it is to use color photographs in a workbook such as this. Still
others will think, “What a waste of time.” Someone with an allergy to cats may
wish to sneeze just looking at the picture. It’s all a matter of perspective…
your perspective.
     
    That’s Point of
View. No matter what any character in your dream may do, they all work from
their own point of view, and it’s going to be different from yours. This is
true in life, this is true in acting, and this is true in dreaming. Every
character in your dreams is going to have a slightly different vantage point,
and therefore a different reason for their actions. Some may have a radically
different point of view from what you thought possible.
     
    Often times we
may fear a creature in our dreams. But if we just looked at the dream from that
creature’s point of view, we might find it far less intimidating. Jeremy Taylor
tells of a man who was being chased by a fire-breathing dragon. At one point
during the chase, the man turned around and asked the dragon, “What do you
want?” The dragon looked at him in surprise and said, “I’m your smoking habit.”
And at that moment, the dragon turned into brown, greasy glob. In those brief
moments, the man saw himself from another point of view. He saw his smoking
habit from another point of view. Maybe he even saw his smoking habit as his
body saw it.
     
    Mission #9
    1.       Look at each of your
dream characters from their point of view.
    2.       Rewrite the dream
from the character’s point of view. For example, I could rewrite the dream from
James Bond’s Point of View, and then rewrite it from “Somebody’s” point of view.
    3.       Ask each character what they’re trying
to do.
    4.       Consciously re-dream
the dream from each character’s Point of View.

Words—Language—Dialogue
     
    Words create
emotion. To understand the power of words we need only watch other’s reaction
to our words, or take note on how someone else’s words affect us. The old
saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” has
never been true, and the older we get the more aware we become of this fact. In
the book of Proverbs there’s a saying that “life and death are in the power of
the tongue.” Another axiom regarding the power of words is “the pen is mightier
than the sword.” Truly there is no greater power than words and the images and
feelings they create. How many times have we said something to somebody that we
would give anything to take back, even years later, even after we’d cleaned it
all up with them?
     
    With words we
flatter, defend ourselves, express our love, share feelings, do battle, and try
to change the world. Words are symbols upon which we drape powerful emotions.
It was just as much words as it was weapons that won the War of American
Independence. Guns and men would have had little effect if it hadn’t been for
the words of men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. It
was words that inspired men to fight, to “Live free or die.”
     
    Words spring up
from the wellspring of our souls. They tell the world who and what we are
whether we’re aware of that or not. By listening to a person speak you can
become familiar with their internal processes. You can determine whether this
person has good communication skills. Most of us have friends that we hate to
be around because all they do is talk, but if we would listen, they would speak
volumes to us.
     
    When an actor
is reading a script, they must not decide too early how a phrase is to be read;
otherwise it will be useless to work on their inner life, which creates the
motivation for saying the line in the first place. In life we do not plan what
we’re going to say, or even how we’re going to sat it. We speak in accordance
with our feelings and the situation at hand. We do not plan how we are going to
respond to a cutting comment or a jibe. Many times we