Okay, I promised another go-round on dreams and how the fiction writer can make practical use of them. I have to say, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I”ve swung toward the view that, even though awareness of the dream life is crucial to expanding your working creative consciousness, your dreams can’t be harnessed for DIRECT practical application.
Some other methods for tapping the unconscious can–freewriting, for example (only a step away from the "automatic" trance writing) is a supremely practical tool. Do you need some missing aspect of a character? Think, think, think and not much happens; freewrite on it and the unconscious will give it up in chunks of character knowledge that you can use. But imagine trying to order solutions from your dream machine.
Dreams have a mind, a will, a life of tbeir own. They are YOU, of course, but they come from the conscious, a place by definition unknown to you. Your conscious mind, by contrast, is trying to direct the show–needing this, needing that, but no more able to control their force and direction of a dream when it comes than picket fencing can control a tsunami.
So then…what place should dreams, dreaming, your dream book, etc. have in your arsenal of tools as a fiction writer?
I called Boston playwright Jon Lipsky, a pioneer of Dream Theater. On the whole, Jon shares
my reluctance to think of the dream as a practical in-the-moment tool
for solving immediate creative problems. He mentioned Janet Sonnenberg’s "Dreamwork for
Actors" as a way actors can deepen their character work––also Jungian
analyst Robert Bosnak’s "A Little Course in Dreams," which uses a
technique called "embodied dreamwork" to help fiction writers break through
blocks and connect with the source of their creativity (Bosnak’s work is
worth an entire post, but…down then line). Here’s what else Jon had to say:
Most of our lives are lived in an habitual manner, under
ordinary circumstances. Often we are so busy, so caught up in our
routines, we don’t notice the emotional impact of our everyday life.
Or to put it another way: we may get angry with our boss but we
don’t knife him in the back; we may fantasize about a woman on an
elevator but we don’t start unbuttoning her blouse. In dreams, we do.
In dreams, we live a life as rich and full as the lives of the
dramatis personae on the Shakespearean stage. Our dreams are inhabited
by killers and seducers, by betrayers and enchanters, by flying
creatures and hideous monsters. And low-lifes too, like the
mechanicals in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Plumbers and car mechanics
live in our dreams cheek by jowl with taxi drivers and shoeshine boys,
our fat noisy neighbor, and the scary old lady who lives next door.
They are all there. Everybody. From the lowest of the low to the
highest of the high. Not to mention our parents, our children, and our
lovers in their many benign and malignant disguises.
Certain things that happen on the Shakespearean stage can only
happen to us in our dreams. Where else do we try to murder our
brother, romance a queen, or meet the witches on the road?
Dreams give us access to a range of experience that includes our
mundane life but then goes far beyond it. An actor experiences in
sleep the passions of a Cyrano, of a Hedda Gabler, of a Richard III.
He becomes a thief, a movie star, a randy lover. He visits places as
exotic as Prospero’s Island, the forests of Elyria and the castle at
Ellsinore.
At the same time there are the bathroom dreams, dreams of cooking
breakfast in the kitchen, of fixing the engine of your car: everything
from the sublime to the ridiculous. In dreams we drink, burp, fart, and
bellow to rival John Falstaff. Dreams even make jokes at times; there
are even dream puns.
Dreams expand our horizons and animate the ordinary. They make us
feel the breadth of our desires and the passion we bring to everyday
life. When we tell dreams and share these experiences with other
people, we recognize a common humanity that goes far beyond the
confines of our mundane existence.
(Here’s a plug for Jon: he’s Professor of Acting and Playwriting at Boston University. He’s had professional productions of 10 original plays, and is an artistic associate of The Vineyard Playhouse (Martha’s Vineyard). This year he received the Boston Critics Circle Eliot Norton Award for Best Director. Watch for his soon-to-be-published book, “Acting Dreams: A Practical Guide to Dream Enactment.”)
|
|
|
|
|
 |
