Tuesdays with Muerte

Plot summary: Last night I dreamt I was a participant on a reality show run by heavenly angels and produced by atheists. (Weird things happened, and we had no idea what was going on, or why.)  We all lived in shared house, but I had a private bedroom with a connecting bathroom.  Every morning, I woke up to a mystery deuce in my toilet. Analysis: Without giving too much away, this plot is somewhat similar to the plot of  The Good Place  (starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson on Netflix). I have been using that show as a procrastination technique to actively avoid working on my dissertation for the past couple of weeks ago. (I loved it! I felt really connected to Chidi, the moral philosopher.) Also, I've been worrying a lot about where I'm going to end up living this upcoming school year. In fact, the last thing I remember from last night is receiving a rental contract from my property manager. The poop aspect of the dream may...

The Dream Last night, in my dreams, I was a young tennis pro at an exclusive country club.  The club was located in a majestic old-growth forest somewhere along a coast; it felt like a subtropical Redwood Forest, but in Italia. I won't try to chronicle the many events of my dream. Instead I'll just set the stage for the most incredible one. The entire dream took place the last two weeks of summer. Since tennis lessons had died down, I was fortunate enough to be able to work as an event photographer at a professional tennis tournament happening nearby. I was single and anxiously looking for fun opportunities to end the summer right. One afternoon at the tournament, I ran into a friend, Deborah Weiss, who was sitting down to lunch with girlfriend of hers. Thrilled to see a friendly face after months of social isolation, I asked if I could join them. After briefly reconnecting with Deb, I turned to her friend to introduce myself. "Hi. I'm Bryan. I'm a photogra...

Preface I slept from 11pm to 11am last night—a luxury I felt I deserved after spending literally all day on BYU's tennis courts. One of the benefits of sleeping past the morning and well into the day is it enhances my ability to remember dreams. (I love remembering my dreams; they're dependably bizarre.) Dream My family was chilling at an exclusive mountain resort for week-long getaway. (Think Snowbird, but Ritzier.) We were in one of the hotel's larger guest rooms awaiting a formal dinner in the resort's main banquet hall. My 95-year-old mom's mom, Besta, sat on the couch facing the bay window. And 10-12 of my extended family members on my dad's side shuffled about aimlessly. Arnold Schwarzenegger was also there, naturally. He was seated comfortably in the love seat closest to the window, which overlooked a snowy, alpine landscape. (High muscle mass = immunity to cold seeping through the window.) Strangely, Arnold was dressed from head to toe in jean. I c...

Here are the high and lowlights from last night's dream: DREAM LOW-LIGHT: I lived on a modern-day, family-owned farm, located far away from “civilization.” (It should be known that I am not a farmer. However, I’ve always thought a farm is a great place to raise a family.) A grand party was thrown on our estate and to my delight the girl of my (literal) dreams walked in. Naturally, I proposed marriage on the spot.  Later, as we were walking into the marriage room, my dear old dad was waving around a large, wrapped present—arguing with everyone regarding how and when it should be (inappropriately) presented during the sacred ceremony.  (FYI, Dad's always been particular about arranging Xmas presents under the tree.)  Amidst the commotion, I seized the opportunity to lean over to my mom and ask my bride's name, having completely forgotten it. DREAM HIGH-LIGHT: I didn't care for that dream very much so I decided to fall back asleep and try again.  In anot...

Forward:   You are about to commence a five-part dream reenactment. This is only the first part of five! Although I have only dreamed two of the parts so far, I am pretty confident that I can force myself to finish the story.  I can tell, this is going to be a REALLY good one, possibly my best, most-meaningful dream ever!  The cast incorporates many of my family and readers of this blog, so hope it will be exciting for you to read about yourselves.  The dream will be fantastic and still be grounded in moralistic lessons throughout. It will take a lot of time to write and probably to read, but I hope you will find it  a Christmas message worth reading. Image  Source The Medieval Christmas Carol, Part I: All my siblings and their families flew into Seattle to be with my parents for Christmas and my sister's subsequent wedding. Mom got our family tickets to a theater performance called, "A Medieval Christmas Carol."  It was a $7 show, so ...

Last night, I was a riot control officer assigned to an unruly high school. I was stationed at the southeast elbow joint of a school hallway. The problem was that there were two exits and only one of me. I positioned myself directly in front of one of the exits and aimed my state-issued shotgun at the other. We were told our weapons were loaded with live ammo, which seemed pretty unnecessary to me. Especially since the students were armed with paint-filled water balloons. We were commanded to open-fire on any student that threw a balloon at us or tried to exit the school building. All at once, 30 students stormed my corner. I shouted commands at them, but their body language was still very aggressive. I quickly determined which students I would target first based on whose eyes were searching for the doors instead of being locked on the barrel of my shotgun. For the very first time in my life, I felt the fear of being responsible for the control of a situation [others] and ...

Preface Note: I do not do drugs.  I just have weird dreams. Last night, I was groggily flipping through TV channels, when a sitcom called Bored To Death caught my attention. A budding writer bravely approached a famous film director at a NYC gala. I don't know why, but I immediate resonated with the writer's character. The prestigious director: "So, I really love your [writing]: dark, funny, perverted…beautiful. You must really suffer from the terrifying clarity of your vision." Novelist: "Thank you. I do suffer. Thank you." Cut to my Life "Yes! Thank you. I Do! I do suffer. Daily!" The words echoed in my mind as if I were responding to the director. "You have no idea what I go through every night. AND THE MORNINGS! The mornings are worse. When I fall back asleep, my visions become more lucid than before. And don't even get me started on what afternoon naps do to me!" I've been steeling cat-naps recently. (...

Preface I woke up early this morning to work on a group project. I can typically sleep in until 10am without an alarm to wake me. But this morning, I woke myself up, without assistance, at 6am sharp. And when my sleeping schedule is disrupted, my dreams are drastically affected. Not only are they more vivid, but they sometimes scare me with how insane they seem. Dream This morning, I dreamed that I woke up with more than 20 tiny, military-grade landmines buried in an inch of sand that covered my body. Each mine was set to explode 1.5 seconds after it was detonated. In order to remove them, I had to pinch the single antenna that poked up out of the sand and throw it across the room without disrupting the other landmines. This removal method was risky and time-consuming. My other option was quickly jumping out of bed and running to the other side of the room before the mines exploded. After trying to remove them one by one for a couple of minutes, I decided that it would be...

The Dream In my dream last night, part of my responsiblity as Inter-chapter Treasurer for the Logan Institute Men's Association was to walk through the Institute building at midnight and turn off all of the lights. (I guess I was trying to save money.) While I made my rounds, the building slowing turned into an abandoned insane asylum. I saw claw marks on the walls and shredded drapes and headless dolls. But the scariest thing I saw was a large-scale, miniature castle made [poorly] out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Oh, the travesty! There was paste all over it; there was no way to salvage the lost cereal. I couldn't imagine what sick mind would waste so much perfectly good cereal?! The very thought made me shudder. When I was finished, I had to walk the 10 blocks back to my apartment. I'm not sure why, but I had my school shoulder bag with me. My laptop was in my unzipped bag so with it's open side exposed to the air. Suddenly, I heard a goose squawk and...

Dream I died early on in last night's dream, but strangely, I didn't wake up. My disembodied spirit was not ready to pass on. It took a day to find my way back to my body and then fight to reconnect with it. After regaining consciousness, I discovered that I was never really the same. I found that I no longer had complete control over my three-part (body/mind/spirit) connection. During the rest of the dream, I could see dead people from my past. I felt like I was losing my mind at times, and I was more susceptible to spiritual possession. It was as if my spirit's act of leaving and coming back had stretched out my soul to a point that there was a gap there where I could inadvertently slip out or unwanted spirits could find their way in.  (Brian Bean thinks my idea would serve as a treatment for a great book or movie—I'd call it, Mortal Virginity.)

Dream After being honorably sent home from my mission for medical [mutant] reasons, my Dad sent me on a trip to Washington DC where I would spend the day with a powerful attorney. The day was boring and I only saw my Dad's friend once; the rest of the time I spent shuffling papers with only of the many legal-secretaries that he had. At the end of the day, "Mr. Rockafeller" gave me a ticket to a formal gathering. He said I could think of it as a ball without the dancing. Then he gave me the address of his personal tailor who would find something suitable for me to wear. Once I was outfitted in a $1500 tuxado, I made my way to the danceless ball. There, Mrs. Rockafeller picked me out of the crowd and introduced me to her son so that he would show me around and help me meet new people. The son ditched me. So I found a small group of girls to mingle with. I told them about my situation and they all took terrific pity on me. (Can I just say, that these girls were...

Dream I was serving a second mission somewhere on the East coast. The funny thing was the area looked desserty, like Albuquerque. I lived in an townhouse built for four. It had VERY old books. I was tempted to take some home with me when the time came to leave. One of the books was a HUGE, leather, hardbound edition of Pride and Prejudice. I came to find out that the people we were serving were occupied by a foreign government, like Ancient Babylon and the Jews. There was a lake that our city was built next to. We went swimming a lot. That's not the only mission rule I broke. My companion and I slept in the same bed [don't worry, it was very innocent; like Joseph Smith and his siblings.] And I would always sleep in an hour when I was supposed to be doing personal study. One day, the national guard was sent in and ordered everyone to pack up their belongings; we were all being sent home. The only catch was that we weren't allowed to talk, otherwise we would...

What is  The Ganzfeld Proceedure? ( Wikipedia )  Basically, it uses sensory deprivation to get the mind to hallucinate. I decided to give the experiment a try.  Now, ideally, the procedure requires two halves of a ping pong ball and headphones, but I used taped-over goggles instead. I should have cut open one of my two ping pong balls I have lying around, but I couldn't bring myself to do it; what if one of them broke and I needed the other to challenge someone to a game? (Ping pong is obviously a high priority in my life right now.  Master Chen and I are really working hard in the evenings.) In addition to the darkened goggles, I set my radio to static and laid down on my bed. Everything was dark. Even though the radio static was blaringly loud, after about 3 or 4 minutes, the radio would seem to auto-correct itself and I would begin to pick out songs and an announcers voice through the static. When that happened, I would adjust the dial to random static again...

Preface I slept in twice this week to cope because life without roommates is so boring. Today, I woke up the first time at 10am, had a bowl of cereal and decided to go back to bed. The second time I woke up was at noon. I showered, read scriptures, re-wrote yesterday's blog post, listened to the eerie silence surrounding my apartment complex and went back to bed until 3pm. Dream It's during these late afternoon naps that my dreams take a turn for the bizarre. I spent three hours climbing stairs of city skyscrapers and searching the rooftops for abandoned sniper rifles. And no, I didn't find any. I just had a feeling that some top secret assassination operation had gone awry, forcing a sniper to make a quick exit and leave their weapon behind. I deliberately walked every inch of those rooftops in search of rifles. First around the parameter of the rooftop, and then in zig-zags. The air-conditioning units were loud. It was basically the only thing I heard for the...

Dream Last night, I dreamed that I was a returned missionary who had recently graduated from college. I was in need of money so that I could finally visit Mexico. To raise the money for my trip I decided to make a documentary film about eating weird things. Not just the typical weirdness; I'm talking about things like: Swallowing chunks of duck's beak inside rice balls, then soaked in sweet and sour sauce. Sucking the hair off of a live tarantula's legs. Chewing jumbo cow colon, barbecued. Sipping on a cold cup of an unknown substance and tastes like despair. Served raw, as it were. The movie was a hit. I made thousands of dollars in the first week while I was getting my travel plans in order. Once in Mexico, I wandered through the countryside, from rancho to rancho, taking in the indigenous atmosphere. As I wandered, I came across an old mission acquaintance. It was a man who raised horses locally with his family. He immediately adopted me and made me...

This dream is from 3 or 4 days ago. I recounted it to Riz Rinker when I went over for a chat earlier this week. Thankfully, I remember enough to write it down. I had a series of dreams throughout the night, tied together by a recurring theme of justification and eternal judgment. The segment I remember best is right at the end. My mind created an anecdotal conclusion to make sense of the night's events in the form of a stick-figure comic strip. Maybe later, I'll update this post with a depiction of what I saw. For now, I a written explanation will have to suffice: The Stick Figure Comic Strip In the first pane, a religious scholar approaches the gates of heaven and is stopped by St. Peter. In the second frame, Peter asks the man, "What beliefs did you adhere to during your visit to Earth?" The man adjusts his glasses in the third frame and offers a laundry dogmatic list of tenants and what-have-you regarding his belief system. i.e., All Orthodox Jew...

PREFACE Some of you have asked how much liberty I take in transcribing what I actually experience in my dreams to written word. Let me first say, that my dreams are so vivid, I truly believe that I am living them. Still, I realized that they are just dreams, which imbues me inhuman courage and presence-of-mind through my frequent life-or-death situations. This practiced calm may cross-over a little bit into my waking life. Anyway, when it comes to dream details, there are some circumstances when I don't actually hear words but feel specific ideas that are being communicated around me through body language and EPS, if you will. In other words, if a certain character could speak, their words would be indisputably clear. In very few circumstances, I "fill-in-the-blanks". For example, in this following dream sequence, I had a clear picture of what my dog, Dexter, looked like. However, I didn't remember his name upon awaking. So deducing from my memory of his app...

PREFACE Last night's nightmare gradually transformed from bad to worse. I woke up multiple times throughout the sequence of dreams, which usually never happens. DREAM 1) Sinking Sandtraps Not having played golf in a long time, I was surprised to find that many of the rules have changed: Instead of playing two sets of nine short holes, you now play two sets of two long holes. The course actually resembles the game of Shoots and Ladders. I discovered this the hard way when I hit my ball in the sand on the "first hole." I went to pitch it out when I sunk through the sand and found myself at the beginning tee. As the course progressed, I made very sure to stay away from the sand traps, but I never did find the equivalent to the ladders. I suspect that if you hit the ball on the exact middle of the fare-way, the grass acts like a moving-walkway that you would find at an airport and carries your ball great distances, around corners, and even to adjacent holes. ...

PART I - This dream was vivid, like the rest. But this time, I only included chunks of the detailed dream in this account. Tell me, do you prefer to have the full dream in summary or chunky details? I went in and began to browse. The first thing that caught my eye was a super discounted Speedo on the sales rack (Size M). $15.95?! That's outlandish! Then my eyes raced to some boots that looked like they were from outer space (very cool). On the other side, I was drawn to a snazzy, brown jacket (similar to the one I already have). The sales man was closing up. Asked me what I was looking at. Took my items downstairs and told me, there may be something we can do about the price on these items. Not wanting to miss a deal I followed him. Soon, all the racks were taken down by store employees and the remaining shoppers were ushered to tables situated around the room. We were being made card carrying members of Sports Authority. In order to qualify for the card we had to...