Recap July 7

Well, that was interesting! I have missed two classes because of Regional Championships but I feel like I understand where we are going with this. I woke up this morning from an interesting dream as well, and for me, my dreams all seem very connected - they always contain being on a set or in a theatre in some way, and horses. Go figure! Anyway, I went to type this one up (I have to type my journals - it's another one of those joys of living with MS thing - my fingers do not work well enough to handwrite when I first wake up) and I remembered that I had not completed my recap yet, so here goes!

I don't have a lot of "notes" from this class, but I will include the ground rules for dream work:
1. Don't tell more than a selected image - we have to "project" a freeze-frame of that image
2. Allow the environment that you are in to start to affect you
3. "Seeing" is the least important aspect of the work
Take the snapshot, project it, then we can activate it

It was interesting seeing different people work tonight, seeing the way images from their dreams started to impact them, MAtt, in particular, still sticks with me - the stream of light in his dream was so powerful. I could see how it was affecting him as well when he spoke about it.

I think, in our dreams, and in the memory of them, we can get in touch with deeper parts of ourselves, and these can be used to help us connect to emotions on a different level. By allowing ourselves to be impacted by the environment we are in when we reconnect to our dreams, this is like allowing a character to come into us instead of forcing ourselves onto the character. Here is how I THINK we can use this in the work: We live in a world where we are impacted by the things that we smell, touch, taste, and feel all of the time, but generally, those reactions are not conscious. We don't think "It's cold - I should shiver and huddle my arms around myself" - it just happens. When we act, we are often acting in a "cold" location in the script, but it may be 98 degrees where we are shooting. So we need that memory of reacting to actually feeling cold so that when we are in a scene we then can actually feel it, not fake it.

Looking forward to trying my hand at this tonight!