Follow Them to the Edge of the Desert

I dreamed that I was passing through Arizona with a bunch of friends from Ann Arbor en route to Utah, but just before our caravan reached the border we passed a Cabela's and the group collectively insisted that we stop. I was very anxious to continue onward, but I was riding in someone else's car so I didn't have a choice in the matter. I wasn't going to buy anything, so I planted myself on a bench just inside the automatic doors and waited for my friends to finish up. However, after several hours my friends were still not ready to go and I got tired of just sitting there waiting, so I wandered over to the in-store shooting range.

The shooting range had a desert theme, with mechanical coyotes and scarecrows and buzzards randomly popping up for the players to shoot at with rifles. The desert scene seemed to extend back all the way to the horizon, which was surprising, since it was inside the store. There was a wooden fence surrounding the gallery, but as I scanned the perimeter I saw an opening in the fence and a pathway with a sign marked "UTAH - 5 MILES." Great, I thought, I can just walk to Utah and I won't die out out under the desert sun because this is just a set inside a store.

As I walked down the path, cutesy little animatronic desert animals popped up along the side of the path and sang a "It's a Small World"-type ditty about Cabela's. I came to a sharp turn and a rattlesnake jumped out onto the path. I assumed that it was fake like all the other animals, but as I approached it rattled and lunged at me with it's fangs bared. It was a real rattlesnake, and I sprinted back down the trail to get away.

I got back to the main part of the store, where hundreds of rattlesnakes of all colors were raining down from the ceiling, completely covering the floor. My friend Stephanie Harris Frischknecht was cornered by a rattlesnake, so I ran over to her, grabbed her by the hand, and the two of us made a dash for the exit. On the way out we saw a bright orange rattlesnake swallowing a cashier whole.

We jumped in her car and sped towards the Utah border, not driving on a road but straight across the desert. Once over the border we slowed down and relaxed, knowing that the rattlesnakes wouldn't be able to follow us over the border. However, over the horizon we saw a dozen Utah Highway Patrol cars coming straight for us with lights flashing and sirens blaring. Stephanie and I looked at each other, bewildered. What had we done? Speeding? Driving off the road? We stopped the car and the armada of police cars surrounded us. The lead officer asked me to step out of the car, handcuffed me, and read me my rights. "What did I do?" I asked. He answered gruffly, "You'll find out at your arraignment in Salt Lake City."

We traveled to Salt Lake City on foot. At this point the view switched to a high aerial perspective and our journey resembled an old-school Nintendo role-playing-game like Dragon Warrior. We passed through deserts and forests and swamps, crossing rivers over tiny bridges and cutting through mountain passes. Along the way we battled 8-bit monsters and earned experience points towards gaining levels. Despite all the difficult terrain and random monster encounters, the most pressing concern on my mind was, "What did I do?" It was a nightmare straight out of Kafka.

The arraignment was held in the courthouse on State Street in Salt Lake, which was filled to capacity for the occasion. After an agonizingly long set of preliminary readings, the dreaded charge was read: I was accused of being a polygamist.

I staggered out of the courthouse, past the City and County Building and onto Library Square, searching through my memories for any evidence of either innocence or guilt. A polygamist? How could I be a polygamist if I wasn't even married to one woman, let alone to several women? From Library Square I ascended the giant staircase that curves upward around the library. Although I couldn't pinpoint any wrongdoing in my memories, I felt a growing sense of dreadful certainty in my mind with each successive step upwards. By the time I reached the top I knew it was true: I was a polygamist.

Tramps Like Us

[Real-life background: When I was at the University of Utah, my friend Anthony and I co-founded a student opera organization named Zero Budget Productions. Our first show, Gian Carlo Menotti's one-act opera Amelia Goes to the Ball, took place in February 2004.]

I dreamed that my friend Anthony and I decided to reunite the original members of Zero Budget Productions for a one-night-only revival of our first show, Amelia Goes to the Ball. Since we had performed it once before we naturally assumed that we wouldn't need to rehearse beforehand, and we sent out invitations to the veterans of the Zero Budget company, asking them to please arrive at least five minutes before the show so that we could get an accurate head count.

I was in charge of assembling the band, and I scored a major coup by getting Magic Johnson on bass guitar. Right before the show I decided on a whim that I was going to play mandolin with the band. Magic saw me pull out my mandolin and asked if we could switch instruments, since had never actually played the bass guitar but was a closet mandolin virtuoso. I said too bad - if he had put "mandolin virtuoso" on his resume I would have let him play, but it was too late to switch now.

The curtain went up (the venue was never certain - sometimes we were in Dumke Recital Hall at the University of Utah, other times we were at the University Commons in Ann Arbor, and other times we were out on the four-square courts behind my old elementary school) and we started to play the overture. The members of the band were actually pretty good individually - even Magic on bass - but we couldn't stay together because the conductor couldn't keep a steady beat. The conductor was none other than the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, and he had detached his nose (the tip of which lit up like a laser pointer) to use as a baton.

I realized very quickly that I wasn't good enough at the mandolin to sight-read a Menotti score (should have switched with Magic!), so I snuck out of the orchestra pit and went backstage. Anthony rushed over to tell me that we had a major problem: none of the singers who showed up had been a part of Amelia Goes to the Ball - they had all joined the company later on. The overture was about to end and we couldn't send the clueless singers out on stage, so I told Anthony to stall until I came back with an alternate idea for the performance.

My quest for inspiration lead me to a mall in Simi Valley, California. The first thing that caught my eye inside was a wild labyrinth of wildly colored escalators spiraling downward in bright splashes of reds, yellows, and greens. Perfect, I thought, I'll make an experimental film about the escalators!

Meanwhile, Anthony stood alone on stage trying to keep the audience (about a dozen people) from getting restless. He was doing stand-up comedy after trying (and failing) to juggle. He was losing their attention fast, but he had a sudden flash of inspiration: he launched into the first principle of the old missionary discussions. At the end of the discussion he asked if someone in the audience would volunteer to say the closing prayer. A hand raised in the back, belonging to former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. His prayer included the line, "And bless these two Mormon boys as they continue to stall," which sent Anthony into a panic. He grabbed his phone and called me, saying that the audience had caught on to our stalling and that I'd better come back with a solution fast.

I knew that the escalator film was going to take too long to make, so I abandoned it. On my way out of the mall I passed by the multiplex, where a live performance of the play Amadeus was taking place. The actor playing Mozart was standing alone outside the multiplex, about to make his first entrance from the back of the house and up the aisle. He was predictably dressed in an 18th-century long jacket and a powdered wig, but surprisingly he also wore an eyepatch and had a plastic hook on his left hand. As soon as I saw him, I knew exactly how we could save our show.

I sprinted back to find Anthony and the rest of the cast pacing furiously backstage. I unloaded my idea on them: instead of Amelia Goes to the Ball, we would perform Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album in its entirety (except "She's the One" - the one track on the album I always skip). They all looked confused and told me that they'd never heard it. "Nonsense," I replied. "It's one of those albums that exists in everyone's collective unconscious. Just follow my lead."

Just then we heard the low rumble of Magic Johnson's bass, followed by giant crashing chords from a Fender Telecaster. I got a running start, the curtains parted, and I glided across the stage on my knees in a trademark Springsteen power slide:



Freeze frame, fade out.

ZCMI India

I dreamed that I went to visit my friends Anthony and Desiree in Salt Lake City on the day their baby Josephine turned 9 months old [which hasn't happened yet in real life]. They had just moved into a new apartment located on a slope of almost 45 degrees, so that you couldn't even put down a glass on the table or it would slide off and break. It was long and narrow like a New York apartment, and I met Anthony and Desiree in the family room where chatted and caught up for a little bit. After a few minutes I asked about Josephine, and I saw Anthony grow visibly upset. He said that if I wanted to see Josephine so bad I should go back to the kitchen and find her myself.

I went to the kitchen and to my surprise Josephine was now a boy of about 6'11" who looked and sounded exactly like Joseph Gribble from King of the Hill. He was sitting a desk writing furiously and muttering to himself. I left the kitchen, went back to the family room, and asked Anthony what was going on. "These kids today," he grumbled, "as soon as they hit 9 months they think that they can just grow up and turn into boys!" He explained that Josephine now insisted on being called 'Joseph' and that he was constantly coming up with far-fetched scientific hypotheses. Just then Joseph burst in from the kitchen holding up a yellow legal pad covered with crazy scribblings.

Joseph had surmised that there was a new species of metallic subterranean birds that migrated each year from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Blue Mountains of India. I had never heard of the Blue Mountains, but Joseph revealed a map showing a rectangular mountain range covering much of eastern India. Joseph passionately argued that if he were correct, this discovery would advance science by at least ten years. During his argument I kept seeing the same five second clip over and over again in my head of a bronze hummingbird poking up through the dirt and then darting off. Finally Anthony cut him off. "Fine. We'll all go to India. But if you don't find any metal birds, you have to go back to being a baby girl."

On the flight to India they showed "Footloose," but it wasn't at all how I remembered it - it was a disaster movie. I got really engrossed in the movie because I had this strange feeling that it was somehow important.

When we landed in India, Joseph went off alone to look for the metallic birds. Anthony, John McElderry (a friend from Ann Arbor) and I all went for a walk through what looked like a Brazilian favela. I told them that after graduation I wanted to go on a third mission [the dream Brian had already been on two missions, I guess], but I was going to play hardball with the church and tell them that I would only serve for six months and I would only go to Campinas, Brazil. Anthony and John both thought this was a terrible idea and told me that I should get a job instead.

Just then we passed by a mall (called "ZCMI India") and I went inside and got a job in the food court. However, this wasn't a fast-food place - it was a nice sit-down restaurant whose best-selling item was chocolate cake with meatballs inside and spaghetti on the top. Like the Mall of America, ZCMI India had an indoor theme park adjacent to the food court. Desiree stopped by my restaurant to say hi before heading over to the roller coaster. I watched from afar as her car started to inch its way up the first hill, which was so steep that it was practically perpendicular to the ground. My eyes followed Desiree's car as it ascended when suddenly a meteor shot down through the sky.


Panic erupted in the food court as soon as the meteor appeared and everyone evacuated except for those trapped on the roller coaster. The meteor crashed smack into the top of the first hill and ripped up the track, but the cars kept slowly climbing higher and higher towards their inevitable doom.

I felt oddly serene as I watched the scene of destruction unfold. I knew exactly how to save everyone: this was the exact scenario I had seen in the disaster movie version of "Footloose" on the airplane. I ran to the control panel, pulled the same lever I had seen in the movie, and the cars screeched to a halt. Desiree and the other passengers were able to climb down the wreckage of the roller coaster to safety.

A Mall and the Night Visitors

I dreamed that on the day of my first voice lesson of the semester I went to my teacher's office in the music building and knocked on the door as I customarily do before my lessons. No one answered, so I opened the door and discovered that my voice teacher's studio had been replaced with a Nordstrom. I went inside and wandered around the racks of clothing and shoe displays but I couldn't find my voice teacher anywhere, so I left through the same door where I had entered. However, when I passed through the door, instead of being back in the music building I was inside a mall.

Naturally I was pretty confused, so I found the mall's information desk, where real-life music school secretary Karen Frye was stationed. I asked her what happened to my teacher's studio, and she told me that his office had been relocated to the food court.


I went down to the food court and found the stall that had been converted into a voice studio about ten minutes before my lesson was scheduled to begin. Professor Serbo, my teacher, saw me coming and told me that since I was ten minutes early, he was going to sleep until our lesson started. He disappeared into the back and I waited around for him to return until I woke up.

*****

I had this dream the night before my first lesson of the semester and the lesson began I told the whole dream to Prof. Serbo. The idea of teaching voice lessons in the food court made him laugh so hard he literally started crying. It was priceless.

Note: The title of this post is a play on the popular Christmas-themed opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Professor Serbo starred in a production of Amahl last December that aired on local public television.

The Ice Sorceress

I dreamed that President Obama gave a press conference saying that a giant spacecraft had crash landed in Antarctica and he admonished all Americans to visit the crash site because it was vital to the survival of the human race. So I joined a local pilgrimage group and we hiked through the bitter cold and stinging winds of Antarctica until we came upon the wreckage of a giant spaceship that looked like the Technodrome from the Ninja Turtles cartoons. When we arrived we saw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims streaming into the dark interior of the ship through a giant smoking hole in the side.

Inside the ship, we walked down miles of dark hallways that were filled with mazes of conduits and sparking electrical panels. As we descended lower and lower into the depths of the ship, the temperature dropped dramatically and the walls, which were now made of rocks, were coated with a thick layer of ice. At the end of the journey we reached a large clearing with a frozen river running down the middle. The multitude stood shivering and confused for several hours, wondering why we had been told to gather in this miserable place. But then on the horizon we saw the figure of a barefoot man wearing a white suit walking down the frozen river towards us. As he approached, the ice started to melt, and pretty soon the clearing was green with plants and the river started to flow again. Finally the man came close enough for us to see who he was: President Obama.

The crowd broke into ecstatic cheering as Obama took his place on a shallow sandbar in the middle of the river. He silenced the crowd and gave an impassioned speech in which he explained that the spaceship belonged to the Ice Sorceress, who had come to earth to freeze our planet. He said that the earth would be doomed unless we forced her to leave our planet, and the only way to do that was to vote for his environmental reform platform. In the meantime, he had negotiated with the Ice Sorceress and she agreed that she would not kill any humans until after the vote. At the end of his speech, Obama told us to tell all of our friends and family about what we had seen and encourage them to also make the same pilgrimage to the crash site in Antarctica.

As we left the clearing and returned to the hallways of the spaceship, I somehow managed to be the at the very front of the crowd. All of the ice had melted away and everyone was excited to spread Obama's message. But as we reached the end of the final corridor, around the corner came the towering figure of the Ice Sorceress. The whole crowd gasped and we were frozen with terror as we saw her with her with her crown, her jeweled scepter, and her robes flowing in an eerie slow motion. But our fear quickly dissipated because we remembered that Obama had promised that Ice Sorceress would not kill any humans. We were about to resume our exit, but her booming voice announced that although she had negotiated with Obama, he had agreed to let her shoot at the first human that she saw, which was me.

The Ice Sorceress raised her arms and shot a blue lighting bolt at me from the jewel at the end of her scepter, but I jumped out of the way and rolled underneath a metal staircase. She had wasted her only chance to kill a human until after the vote, and she was furious. As I peered through the metal slats of the staircase where I had landed I had an excellent view of her face. She looked so familiar and with a shock I realized who the Ice Sorceress really was: Drew Barrymore.

My first thought on realizing that it was Drew Barrymore was, "Good for her! She's branching out into new types of roles." But then it dawned on me that I had uncovered an enormous conspiracy: President Obama had staged the spaceship crash landing and hired Drew Barrymore to play the Ice Sorceress to frighten America into voting for his environmental legislation. I ran out of the "spaceship" and went to find the one person who I knew would believe my story: my sister Emily up in Minnesota.

By the time I completed my journey from Antarctica to Minnesota, it was Sunday morning and Emily out was strapping the kids into their car seats before driving to church. I breathlessly told her that I had uncovered an enormous government conspiracy, but she said that she didn't want to be late, so I sat up front in the van and told her the whole story on the way to church.

*****

I had this dream on a Saturday night while I was with my parents visiting my sister Emily in Minnesota. The strange thing about it was that when we went to church the next morning, my Mom asked me if I wanted to sit up front so I could talk to Emily. I told her the whole story, just like I had done in my dream.

(I also found it strange that I had such a political dream - I consider myself by and large to be a fairly apolitical person.)

The Ann Arbor 500

I dreamed that three guys from my ward (John McElderry, Adam Frischknecht, and Dan Magleby) and I entered a cooking competition called "The Ann Arbor 500." The objective of the competition was to prepare a dish that had exactly 500 ingredients, and the rules stated that teammates had to take turns selecting one ingredient at a time and that each new ingredient had to blend harmoniously with the previous ingredient. Hundreds of teams had entered the competition and the opening ceremonies took place on the Diag on the U of M campus, which was filled with tents and balloons and news cameras. They fired off the starting pistol and John quickly picked his first ingredient, green peppers, and threw it in a pot. Adam picked next: yellow peppers. Those two ingredients seemed straightforward enough, but with the fourth ingredient Dan threw me a curveball: a live octopus.

After the live octopus (which Dan specified had to remain alive in the final dish), I wasn't sure what ingredient I could pick that would be complementary. I stood there for hours trying to think of something while John, Adam, and Dan put pressure on me because we were falling behind the other teams, some of which had already added 30 or 40 out of the 500 ingredients. Eventually I folded under the pressure and grabbed the pot full of peppers and a live octopus and headed back to my apartment where I could ponder my ingredient options. I spent the next week trying to decide between minced garlic (the easy way out) or crumbled up Ritz crackers (a bold move - breading a live octopus). At the end of the week I turned on the TV and they were showing an update of the Ann Arbor 500. The final round was underway and I realized that while my team was still stuck at just three ingredients, most of the other teams were up to 300 or 400 ingredients. So I grabbed the pot, threw in some garlic and frantically ran back to the competition.

The final round of the competition was being held at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was there to perform at the closing ceremonies. I found the rest of my team waiting for me in an aisle down on the main floor. To make up for the week of lost time, we were recklessly throwing ingredients into the pot and within a few minutes we had over two hundred ingredients. Overhead was a jumbotron showing the leading teams in a four-way splitscreen with a running point tally, and over the loudspeaker we heard an Alton Brown-like play-by-play announcer. Suddenly, even though we were so far behind every other team, they showed us on the jumbotron because we were chucking ingredients around with such furious speed.

The crowd really started to get behind our team because we were the underdogs and a few minutes later my sister Julie came down the aisle to talk to me. She said that she had joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and that she had convinced the choir to come down and support us. Suddenly the whole Motab surrounded us and started singing "Come Thou Fount of Ev'ry Blessing" to cheer us on. The spontaneous performance distracted our competitors, and the running tallies of all the other teams up on the jumbotron all came to a halt at 499 ingredients except for our team's tally, which furiously skyrocketed until we hit 500 right at the final cadence of "Come Thou Fount." Confetti rained down from above and the crowd erupted.

I was under the impression that a panel of judges would evaluate all of the completed 500-ingredient dishes and pronounce a winner, and I was worried that our live octopus stew wouldn't stand much of a chance. However, it turned out that the competition was merely a race to throw together 500 ingredients as quickly as possible, so my team ended up winning first place (afterwards we set the still-living octopus free).

The Yolks of Wrath

I dreamed that I opened up the fridge in my parents' house and it was full of broken eggshells. Puzzled, I examined the shells and saw that they still had the whites inside, but the yolks had been carefully removed from each. As I stood there trying to figure out what could have caused this, in my peripheral vision I saw a daddy longlegs scurrying out of the kitchen with an egg yolk on its back. I chased after it, but it slipped into a heater vent before I could catch it. Then in the hallway I saw another daddy longlegs with another egg yolk on its back, which also escaped from me down a heater vent. I figured that the raid on the fridge must have been perpetuated by hundreds of daddy longlegs, but I had never heard of them exhibiting this type of behavior. So I looked up an article on Wikipedia and I discovered that I had incorrectly identified the creature - it was a closely related cousin of the daddy longlegs called a 'yolk spider'.

I decided that I was going to stand up to the yolk spiders, so I assembled a crack team to help me track them down and terminate them, consisting of my friend Tyler Oliphant, Tim "The Toolman" Taylor (it was Tim Allen, but in the dream he was playing the Home Improvement character), and Mike and Matt Chapman (a.k.a. "The Brothers Chaps," makers of Homestar Runner cartoons). We went into my parents' basement and climbed into a mid-sized spaceship that was conveniently awaiting us (it looked like the Planet Express ship on Futurama). The ship's computer (voiced by Sigourney Weaver, the go-to computer voice for shows like Wall•E and Futurama) shrunk the ship down so that it was small enough to fly through the heater vent. We blasted through and disappeared down the dark duct.

As we descended lower and lower, the dull metal sheets of the heating duct became more and more colorful, until it became apparent that the duct was now constructed of Legos. We saw two little Lego men strapped in harnesses, hanging from a rope and wearing headlamps on their helmets as they cleaned and repaired the Lego bricks in the tunnel (The Brothers Chaps remarked that they thought that would be a good idea for a cartoon). We finally reached the end of the tunnel and found ourselves hovering above a vast underground Lego city. We floated above a suburb with quaint little Lego houses lining the Lego streets, and there was a magnificent Lego skyline in the distance. But the houses and streets in the suburb were dark and abandoned, with blocks and bricks scattered across the roads as if some disaster had struck the town. We flew towards the center of the city to look for survivors. As we got closer to the city, we saw hundreds of little malnourished Lego people lying prostrate in the streets, moaning and trying to drag themselves towards the city center.

As we flew above the center of the city, we looked down at a large public square and saw a great gathering of Lego people who were hugging each other and rejoicing. We landed the ship (which was now made of Legos) and pushed through the crowd to find the cause of the celebration. At the center of the crowd, we saw a spider lifting an egg yolk above its head.

We determined that the diet of Lego people was egg yolks and that the yolk spiders had come to save them from a famine. My crack team all felt ashamed that we had come to kill the charitable creatures, so we volunteered to use our ship to help the spiders distribute the egg yolks to the desolate Lego people.