Ta-da! I recently came across a new tool for creating deep, imaginative, and truthful performances. Its inventor, M.I.T. theatre professor Janet Sonenberg, calls it dreamwork. Simply put, it involves harnessing your nighttime dreams for use in acting. The way you do it is by sensorially re-experiencing your dreams—dreams influenced by specific text- and character-related images that you "incubate" beforehand. The result: You and your character fuse physically and emotionally in ways that prompt fresh and organic impulses.
The process itself isn't especially simple, but Sonenberg—who developed the technique with Robert Bosnak, a Jungian analyst, and wrote about it in Dreamwork for Actors (Routledge, 2003)—swears by it.
Basically it goes like this:
First you study the script, then go through an intuitive physical/mental process with your guide, or "dreamworker," to create what Sonenberg calls "incubation images"—subjective visceral visions of your character and the world of the script. The process is not unlike being guided through an affective memory exercise with your teacher. The goal, writes Sonenberg, is "to create embodied images that form a network of impulses."
You fixate on these visions when you go to bed, to stimulate your unconscious. The images you formulate needn't, and probably won't, feel logical. As you're exploring the material, look/feel for contradictions within it, and within your character. "The incubation image should [consist of] contrasting or opposing images or states," writes Sonenberg.
As you nod off, let those images waft over you. "If the actor presents a charged image directly to her imagination," writes Sonenberg, "her imagination will playfully do something with that image. And that something is likely to be far more profound and surprising than anything she could willfully invent…. Precise answers [to questions about the text and character] are yielded up in the dream because the incubation image acts like a magnet, attracting affinities to it out of the vastness of imagination."
The next day, your dreamworker guides you in sensorially re-inhabiting—not analyzing or retelling—your dreamscapes, which, writes Sonenberg, resemble sculpture more closely than they do film. As you delve into the elements of your dreams that seem relevant to your acting work, you infuse your body with an altered reality that will affect, even transform, your character's behavior and physicality—that is, your acting.
Curious About George
Sonenberg's book offers examples. In one, a student, working on George in Of Mice and Men, started by picking an important textual point: just before the moment when George kills Lenny. The dreamworker guided him through an internal, imaginative, sensorial George-scape, related (not necessarily literally) to the script's reality. The actor also "incubated" images from Lenny's perspective. Ultimately the actor arrived at several images—among them a wobbling inside his head, anchored and "timeless" feet, the weight of a rock in his hand—internalized from bits of textual content, including George's sense of his environment, the central action (George kills Lenny), and Lenny's state of mind.
The actor had intense, diverse dreams that night. From among them he and the dreamworker chose elements that were particularly imaginative and/or seemed to relate to the incubation images or the climactic scene itself. Guided again, the actor re-experienced the emotions and physical sensations in the dreams—not as himself exactly, not as a "character," but rather as a sort of actor/George hybrid. Then he performed. He told Sonenberg later that he was impressed at how, in moving from image to dream to scene, he bypassed his intellect, and was totally alive and connected emotionally while acting.
Sonenberg believes that in dreamwork your own unconscious and the character's unconscious merge. Further, your new, profound understanding of the character results in layered acting, in which your objectives are multiple, just as they are in real life, and may even be at cross-purposes with each other, producing natural obstacles. Dreamwork, writes Sonenberg, "banishes that boundary [between us and the character] and places everything—the actor, the character, and the world of the play—inside a sphere of imagination."
In testing dreamwork on her students, Sonenberg saw that they were "possessed by the character. So much material emerged that the actors could simply let it emerge, while still attending to the conscious choices every actor must make while on stage."
What if you don't usually remember your dreams? She told me one third of her students have come in claiming that to be the case. Yet they all end up remembering. What if your dreams tend to be boring and repetitive? Don't prejudge them, she cautioned; there's stuff there to work on.
I asked her why she recommends incubating images for the other character as well as your own. "Acting is never one character's thing," she explained. "You're always in a situation with another person, and your situation is created by other people. The other has got to be part of that reality." She suggests devoting a third of your incubation images to the other character in whatever scene you're working on.
I asked her if actors can do dreamwork solo; after all, how many of us have in-house dreamworkers? She said some of her students now work alone, or two actors can collaborate. Her book offers instructions for the dreamworker-guide.
Can this approach apply to on-camera, as well as stage performance? Sonenberg hasn't worked with film itself, although she's worked with film pros like Willem Dafoe, Alan Arkin, and John Turturro. "Someone skilled with film technique, like Alan Arkin, could certainly use it in film," she said. "Alan has no problem knowing what part of his body is covered by a camera angle, and how to hit his mark. If you're a young actor concentrating really hard on hitting your mark, you might not want to use dreamwork right away."
Similarly, dreamwork works best for accomplished actors. Sonenberg discovered early on that with beginners, the dream was sometimes more powerful than the actor. Seasoned actors aren't subverted by the dream because they already have a structure in place from which to act.
World of Pure Imagination
Sonenberg does not intend dreamwork to supplant traditional acting techniques but rather to enhance them. "The principle of the objective and the obstacle is a beautiful organizing principle," she told me, "but simplistic. As humans, we've always wanted more than one thing at a time. The conflict is not simply that you have an obstacle, but that you have two or three desires. The shift with dreamwork is that instead of the desires seeming ordered and mechanical in that brilliant way that Stanislavski set out, they seem organic. Everything organic is impregnated with imagination. [Stanislavski's system] is a fantastic way to teach an architecture for acting, but at some point a really good actor starts [noticing] that this is not quite the way it is in life." She added, "The body, in which all sensation exists, is available to the actor through dreamwork. She can step into that fully imagined body and live in it, and she can stop thinking about [the actor's mantra]: What do I want, what's in my way?"
In addition to testing her process on herself and her own students at M.I.T., Sonenberg held a session at the Meisner-based Ruskin School of Acting in Los Angeles. Did the method work for the 10 participating students and teachers? "Absolutely," John Ruskin told me; most of the participants had an emotional catharsis. Still, he doesn't know if it would work on an ongoing basis and currently has no plans to continue with it.
"To remember what's dream, what's imagination, what's reality—a great actor allows himself to mix and blur those lines," he observed, citing Anthony Hopkins, who's taught at his school. Hopkins, he noted, exemplifies that ability: You never know when the acting stops and the truthful behavior begins; they're one and the same. "The foundation of acting is the reality of doing—real interactions, real feelings," he said. "So in dreamwork, you're playing in that arena."
Ruskin thinks dreamwork, although still in its infancy, is an amazing find. "In my dreams, aspects of myself come up that I don't experience consciously," he said. "For an actor to look at that landscape is crucial. You can get to that deeper level so quickly through dreams, even in one night, whereas it might takes years to get there through therapy or [traditional] acting classes." Sonenberg writes that the process of incubating images and re-living the resulting dreams should take very little time once you have the hang of it.
Is there a type of actor that won't take to dreamwork? I asked Sonenberg. "For actors who really use their own lives in a one-to-one substitution, or correlation—if you're the type of actor who always has to stay in your own life at all times—dreamwork might be tricky," she conceded.
Finally, can you learn dreamwork just from the book? Sonenberg thinks so, although she recommends reading it with a partner. What dreams may come? BSW
E-mail Jean at jeanschiff@earthlink.net.