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, and even then, many fine actors fall into bad habits. Lots of bad acting is the result of actors acting from the conscious, rational parts of the brain… planned, managed, correct, and dead.
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 very archetypes you need in order to see the world from the character’s point of view… your disowned selves never go away, and the dream is where they speak to you, every night, whether or not you are listening.
In general, paying attention to your dreams helps you build a library of images, impulses and archetypes you can use any time, in any kind of role. The choices your dreams hand you every night 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.
But it isn’t enough to just start vaguely using your dreams after reading this article. Nothing is more annoying to directors and professional actors than someone barely scratching the surface of a real acting process, experimenting in a professional rehearsal with tools they know little about. That’s what professional acting classes are for… not the rehearsal phase of a production. In class, you learn very specific ways of harnessing your dreams for your acting. Let me show you two real examples from my work with professional actors.
The actor who was working too hard
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.
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 character’s memories?”
I listened to him go on for three minutes, asking whether 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 wreck your acting.
I asked him if he had any dreams about the play. Surprised at the 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 to stop working so hard, the dream presented him with an archetypal energy he needed to play the character from. This actor was acting from his “good student” and his “rational mind.” He needed to play the character from the kind of energy the dream gave him. 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… not only as an idea, but 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, having enormous fun. The quality of his energy immediately changed from heavy to light, and his voice and body were suddenly infused with highly charged aliveness. His dreams… his imagination… had solved his acting problem.
I told him to do a physical and mental preparation at the next rehearsal: remember the dream, step into the image of the character from the dream, and do the scene honoring whatever impulses came. The director went wild. Total success.
Working too hard can block your talent and wreck your acting.
Jason Bennett, Using Dreams for Your Acting, original article.
The actor and the nightmare
Another accomplished professional actor I worked with complained she was always 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 her off-stage persona matched the roles she was being typecast in… no surprise. She was emotionally open, 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… the opposite of this 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 patterns.
After two weeks of working on the play on her own, she came to class and announced she had no idea how to approach the role. She had no impulse for the character. She couldn’t imagine saying the things Mother Pitt says, or why she feels and does what the script shows. She couldn’t understand why Mother Pitt would yell at her son, “Drinking is a sin!!” and hang up on him, after he admitted he was gay in a totally vulnerable moment.
None of the traditional acting tools from her extensive training could help her truly access Mother Pitt’s point of view. She simply judged Mother Pitt as cruel and insane. And how can you empathize with a character you are busy judging? Empathy is the actor’s fundamental obligation. Notice, too, what the judgment was pointing at… strong judgment can point toward a quality we find difficult to inhabit. Her judgment of Mother Pitt was a map, if we could read it.
I asked her if she had any dreams about the play. There was a very, very long pause. She said no. Another pause. Then 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 she told us the dream, she started crying and becoming exactly the kind of character she was always typecast as.
I said, “Let’s put the image of your mother from the dream over there, on the right side of the stage. Now stand where you are and hang out with that image. Bring in some of the energy. Just stand there and see what it feels like to be your mother in the dream.”
Although she was intellectually confused, she followed the instructions. Immediately, her arms crossed sternly. Her tears dried up. Tension formed between her eyebrows, her jaw set, 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. Now… can you imagine saying ‘drinking is a sin’ from this point of view?”
Her face lit up. 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 parts of her imagination she had been consciously cut off from… the parts that were blocking her work on the role. The nightmare had been holding the exact energy she needed, waiting for her to stop refusing it.
This process draws on Jungian and archetypal psychology. I use those ideas as practical ways into the imagination, alongside the tools of earlier acting teachers. The work is to find an image you can embody, test it in the scene, and notice what changes.
Building your dream practice
Here is how to begin, tonight, and none of it requires talent… only consistency.
Keep paper by the bed, or use your phone before the feed gets its hands on you. The moment you wake, before moving much, write what you remember: images, people, feelings, fragments. Dream memories can fade quickly after waking. Recording what you recall gives you material to return to, even if at first you remember only fragments.
Don’t rush to interpret. An actor’s first job with a dream is not analysis but cataloguing: what were the images, who were the figures, what was the energy? A dream figure is a fully realized characterization your imagination built overnight, free of charge… complete with body, voice, atmosphere and point of view. Record enough of them and you are building a library that cannot be duplicated, because it is built from your dreams… and your dreams have never happened to anyone else.
A practical cataloguing method, the one I give students: date every entry. Under each dream, list three things. The figures… every person, creature or presence, each one an archetype wearing a costume. The images… the places, objects and pictures, which become usable sensory material. And the energy… one or two words for the dominant charge of the dream: dread, longing, mischief, fury, wonder. Over time you can build a catalogue to search when a role arrives. “I need a cold authority figure”… and there she is, from a dream you had in October, complete and waiting.
When you are working on a role, invite the play in. Read the script before sleep. Ask, plainly, for dreams about the character. This sounds strange until you have done it. You may begin to notice images and associations connected with the role. Record what arrives, then find out in rehearsal what you can use.
And when the dream frightens you, pay the closest attention of all. As with the actor and Mother Pitt, the nightmare is often the imagination delivering, at full intensity, precisely the disowned energy you have been unable to reach by any polite means. There is much more to say about nightmares… they deserve, and will get, their own article.
Why this matters beyond any single role
You can learn to use your dreams to create a character’s past relationships and life. You can use them to achieve extreme character obligations that go far beyond the life you have lived… a head of state, a being from another century, someone whose experience seems impossibly distant from yours. You can imagine anything, if you know how to specifically use your imagination.
Dreams can bring together memories, feelings and images in surprising ways. I work with them as a source of creative intelligence that can take you beyond your usual rational habits. For the actor, their value is practical... what can this image help you imagine, embody and play?
In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious describes shared patterns that may appear in symbols, images and stories. That is one way of approaching dreams. In acting, I use dream images to explore recognizably human experiences while making room for cultural and personal differences. The test is what those images help you communicate in the scene.
Your imagination keeps working while you sleep, whether you attend to it or not. Start attending. It has been waiting your whole life to be taken seriously.
Jason Bennett Actors Studio. Based in NYC and Jersey City, NJ. Online worldwide. Expanding to Florida.
Continue exploring imagination and range in Great Actors Are Energy Masters and The Little Bubbles You Don’t Know You Live In.
