Stories about pretending

Stories of Pretending, Illusion, Hypnotism, Lying, and Reality.

Acting, hypnosis, pretending, lying and play all merge. They are all very similar and overlap. It depends on where you are looking from. I'm collecting a few examples.

When at college, a student was being hypnotised by a professor of psychology from Exeter University. He got her to imagine herself teetering on the edge of a skyscraper – ‘but I was really there- it was so scary’ and then after a pause she added ‘but I was only pretending’.
How JK became a producer. ‘I was a dancer and I wanted to be a producer so I started acting like one and then I was one.’
Pomp and Ceremony – I am not religious but I went to a ceremony in the high church in Brighton. Everyone in the church (a spectacular building filled with the smoke and the smell of incense) dressed up. Everyone there seemed to believe in the costumes and ceremony, therefore it becomes sacred and magical. The 'drama' of the occasion made it real
I was told a story about an exorcism- A salesman in Sydney was convinced his house was haunted and wanted a holy man to perform an exorcism. So the holy man dressed up in his robes and wandered around the house burning incense and speaking in gibberish, knowing, as he said, that it was all rubbish. The salesman thanked Jeremy a couple of weeks later for a successful exorcism ridding his house of the bad spirits. “ He believed it was real and I just played along”
Magic in Bahia- in Bahia, Brazil most people believe in Candomble, the spirit religion and base their lives and actions around its practices- so it helps to create the reality in Bahia. This happens anywhere where belief shapes societies behaviour. Whether you believe in Candomble or not, you have to deal with the reality of the behaviour ensuing.
The exercise of imagining walking along a broad scaffolding plank lying on the ground – it's easy, but then imagining walking along that same plank if it was between high buildings with a massive drop beneath it. if you are visualising the height, you are imagining, entering that fiction, it becomes hard.

What is pretending? Behaving As if something is there when it's not? Is pretending lying ? Pretending can be purely innocent, or playful, or it can intend to deceive or it can educate. In performance it is better if it is conscious. .

When a child plays, they act as if it was real. When an adult plays like a child are they denying reality? are they lying?

(maybe I am overthinking this).From an adult point of view they are being ‘childish’. But if you enter the childish world too, the child’s fictive space, you are sharing that reality in play. Likewise, as a performer you can get the audience to join you in that space. If the audience can see the performer inhabiting that space, behaving in that space, so that the audience is able to trust the performer completely, The performer and the audience collaborate in creating a reality, playing together.