The fourth of John Strasberg's Nine Natural Laws of Creativity brings together the first three laws -- talent, functional thinking, and imagination -- in what Strasberg calls "intentional dreaming." "In Intentional Dreaming," he writes, "we project ourselves into a world we want to explore, know, and understand." This combines two categories of imagination from our previous post: Currie and Ravenscroft's "recreative" imagination, which is experiencing the world from a perspective different from one's default, and Williams' imagining "from the inside," in which one adopts the perspective of a character. Strasberg compares an actor's intentional dreaming of the character and his/her world to the dreaming that an architect does in imagining a structure, or an athlete in imagining a competition.
Preparation, which Strasberg calls an "ongoing state of being," enables inspiration from intentional dreaming to find expression "in form and action." In contrast to a technical actor who focuses on how to consciously execute what he/she imagines after reading the play, Strasberg suggests, to an artist the process is less conscious. Strasberg's father Lee is sometimes credited with having said "... [A]cting is responding to imaginary stimuli...." This brings to mind Wilhelm Reich’s description of the relationship between stimuli, sensation, and emotion, which we touched on in the previous post. “We recognize the capacity for sensation in living organisms by their response to stimuli. This response is inseparably connected with an EMOTION.... Emotional stimulus response is functionally identical with sensation....” (Ether, God and Devil, p 86).
The imaginary world the artist perceives, Strasberg writes “... is at least a real as any reality we are aware of.” In the previous post we touched briefly on modern neuroscience’s view of the nature of imagination and its relationship to perception and planning. Work with stroke patients has underscored the extent to which the imagination activates the same parts of the brain that operate in intentional activity. Researchers found that imagined movement exercised not just the so-called premotor areas of the brain and the cerebellum, which coordinates muscle groups and plays a role in learning movement, but also the primary motor cortex itself, i.e. the part of the brain that would actually trigger the movement.
In a comment that links back to his father’s work, John Strasberg notes that “Sense Memory” – training an actor to create imaginary realities – can help anchor an actor in their personal dream space. For John Strasberg, though, the actor's relationship to the imaginary world goes beyond responding. The actor "feels as though he is being pulled unconsciously into the world he imagines, like a child...," he writes. "He begins to play." The actor's task becomes identifying some reality that will allow them to believe they are living in the play. Here, functional thinking operates to help find the "simplest deepest reality." This process can take time, Strasberg notes, and can’t be forced, or the resulting reality won’t be connected to talent and perception. This description reminds me of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi described flow as “"being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved....” Says Strasberg, “This stirring and simmering of life is in all creative processes before a recognition of some reality, old or new, stimulates a deep desire for involvement and creation.”