ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 draws again on qualitative interviews, here with three actors telling the story of their creation of their characters in scripted plays. They too described several different modes of experience which pointed to three different psychological worlds: the everyday world, a reflective world in which they analyzed their roles, and a drama world in which they let go of conscious control and responded spontaneously to one another as their characters. The chapter extends the multiple realities framework as the actors’ descriptions suggested the ways in which the different psychological worlds affected one another successively and simultaneously. For example, when the actors were on stage in the drama world, the everyday world was implicitly in the background with possible figure-ground reversals elicited by events such as prop malfunctions or cell phones going off.
