ask from your dreams

“The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.”
- Vic Braden

I’ve recently re-read Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Handbook and was thinking about his insistence that an actor either learn to develop a strong imagination or get off the stage. He believed that some actors had a type of imagination that had its own initiative; the type that would work “untiringly, whether you are awake or asleep.”

He also believed that it was the actors’ responsibility to prod their creative fantasy and to stir up emotions and memories from the secret depths of the subconscious in order to regroup them to “correspond with the images which arise in us.” Creative fantasy was the fundamental, absolutely necessary tool needed to be an actor.

TODAY’S CREATIVITY CHALLENGE:

Are you working on a painting, a song, a novel, a play, preparing for an audition? Maybe you have just the inkling of an idea of something you might like to start working on…

Tonight, pick a character from your piece or an image from your painting or a verse from your song. Not too much. Don’t bite off the whole shebang. Just a little piece from what you’re working on.

As you relax in bed before sleep, allow your mind to watch that little piece of your project as if it was floating above you, slightly distanced from it. As if someone was telling you about it, showing it to you.

Ask your dreams to help you know more about this little piece of the puzzle. Ask your dreams to show you something you didn’t know about it before.

When you are ready to sleep, say softly to yourself: TONIGHT, MY DREAMS WILL SHOW ME MORE ABOUT THIS ___________ (CHARACTER, PICTURE, SCENE, PAINTING, SONG).