Carroll Levis and the Meaning of Dreams

Found in The World's Strangest Ghost Stories by R. Thurston Hopkins (Kingswood: The World's Work, London  1955) this piece in the preface about the American writer, TV personality and dream therapist Carroll Levis. There is much on Carroll online with Pete Waterman claiming he invented reality TV and The Beatles in their earliest form as The Quarrymen failing in the first rounds of one of his TV talent contests(1957). Paul McCartney described him as the 'Hughie Green of his day.'

Thurston Hopkins is dealing with an earlier incarnation of Levis as a radio star and before that a sort of analyser of dreams (during the depression.) At the end Hopkins even brings in our own J.B. Priestley, also in his time something of a star...The radio show where the public's dreams are re-enacted seems ripe for rebirth.

In 1931, Carroll Levis, who presented the Levis Discoveries Radio Show to eight million aficionados, published Dreams and their Meanings, which was syndicated and featured in newspapers in Canada and the United States. The same year, he wrote a radio series entitled Dream Dramas. Listeners were invited to send a description of their most vivid dreams to Levis, who rewrote them into short twelve-minute playlets. The dreams were re-enacted by  a group of actors, under the direction of Carroll Levis, and at the conclusion of the dramatized dream, a three-minute analysis and interpretation was given to the listeners.

As the result of the prominence given to this subject by the famous broadcaster and author, he soon compiled one of the largest collections of dreams in the world. He became a competent authority on this subject....

Radio Acting

 Cecil B. De Mille, Bing Crosby and Edward G Robinson.

ACTING FOR RADIO

By Cecil B. De Mille

Director of CBS Lux Radio Theater

  Once when my father was writing stage plays on Broadway with David Belasco, Harper's Magazine paid him $1000 in advance for an article listing the "Ten Commandments for a Playwright."
  After many weeks, my father returned the money with a note reading, "I have written the 'Ten Commandments' of Playwriting but don't dare allow them to be published for fear I might be expected to live up to them."
  If I had inherited my father's caution, I'd never have promised to do an article under such a dangerous title as "How to Act for Radio." Good acting is an art, and for art there are no unbreakable rules except complete sincerity and hard work.
  Bernard Shaw says that the way to learn to write is to write–and write. Similarly, the way to learn to act is to act–and act. You don't need a stage or an audience. Charlie Chaplin, perhaps the greatest pantomimist of our time, mastered most of his technique standing in front of a bureau mirror; Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator, achieved perfect diction standing on the sea shore with his mouth full of pebbles, talking to the waves.
  I know radio actors who record their voices by means of inexpensive attachments on their home phonographs, then play the records back time after time to study their own deliveries and techniques in reading lines and correct their errors.
  The best beginning, of course, is to get a good teacher. Although I make it a rule never to recommend a dramatic school or coach, there are many excellent ones specializing in radio acting-and remember that acting for radio is different from any other form of the art.
  In the days of silent pictures, our job was to make the audience see sound; in the Lux Radio Theater we try to make the audience hear sight.