tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69082923850679390722024-11-01T06:37:02.865-04:00A Dream JournalBryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.comBlogger206125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-69618101328604024212022-02-07T00:47:00.002-05:002022-02-18T00:50:00.529-05:00

My wife and I were having people over for a surprise house warming party. The surprise lay in the fact that no one was aware that we had actually bought a new house. We had found a house a few streets over that was nearly identical to our old house. The new house was on a quieter street on a somewhat larger lot, but it was the same blue Dutch colonial, the stars just hanging in a different

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-55650374685564517752022-01-02T00:43:00.001-05:002022-02-18T00:44:31.535-05:00

I woke up groggy and confused, yawning and shuffling through the rooms of a stranger’s house. I came to the kitchen, and there on the table I saw that someone had been working on a diorama. There was a shoebox lying on its side surrounded by brushes and acrylics and glues and scraps of newspaper folded into different objects, the newsprint still showing through in the spots that hadn't been

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-80708544214926547362021-10-31T01:41:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:46:10.876-05:00

Giant spiders had devastated the Earth. The first spider had actually originated as a toy from a cereal box, a rubber novelty item that grew and divided as soon as it was removed from the wrapper. The spiders had been allowed to multiply and grow beyond control until they had taken over everything everywhere entirely. There was a flimsy vinyl record that had been attached to the back of the

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-59621437860284502972021-09-29T01:39:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:45:40.254-05:00

I was trudging along through a cold marsh. It was almost night, and I was straining my eyes and sweeping my hands out in front of me to find my way. I came to a clearing where there was a small cabin. There was a kerosene lamp in the window. As I approached, I almost stumbled over a huddled figure sitting on a tree stump a few yards away from the cabin. I caught the figure by the shoulder to

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-3349053409758230432021-09-14T01:38:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:45:24.536-05:00

I was climbing up to the sixth floor of this decrepit old apartment building in the city. I had to trudge up the stairs that spiraled around the large open stairwell in the center of the building. I had received some sort of mysterious summons to meet someone, and when I reached the landing on the sixth floor, I saw that the door to the first apartment at the top of the stairs was wide open. I

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-62823017945586108452021-07-28T01:37:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:45:08.019-05:00

In a passage of an old book, I read about an encounter between a monk and Dostoevsky on a train. The two men had been seated together in the same section of the train on seats facing each other. In the book, the monk described Dostoevsky’s distracted demeanor and the preoccupied way that he nodded to the porter, never looking up from the papers that he was leafing through in his lap. He made a

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-70769038188027350522021-07-06T01:36:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:44:49.760-05:00

I was out on the west coast, wandering around the streets of the city, and I came across a beach where a famous scene from a historical epic had been filmed. I passed under a bridge where the echoes of the cars zipping by on the freeway overhead reverberated off the concrete walls, and on the other side there was the vast white beach, and further on was the ocean with the waves rolling in from

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-55313197009765097712021-06-05T01:31:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:34:30.610-05:00

There was a documentary made about my childhood. Someone sent it to me on a film reel, and I projected it onto the wall of my basement and watched it in the dark. The documentary seemed to portray me as some sort of feral wonder child who spent all of his waking hours roaming the woods in misunderstood solitude, even though the only wooded area that I ever really played in was a patchy little

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-54218731467566563022021-05-21T01:29:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:34:15.453-05:00

There was a spot that I used to like to take dates to when I was younger. I would turn down an alleyway between two tall buildings and then I would drive straight up into the sky, passing window after window as we climbed past the floors of the buildings, until we were up over the roof of one building and then the other and there was nothing but open space around us and the glitter of the city

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-16749914376865489952021-05-20T01:28:00.003-04:002022-02-18T00:33:58.622-05:00

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-16866658187416197722021-04-25T01:27:00.004-04:002022-02-18T00:33:05.147-05:00

I was walking through the countryside, carrying a box of donuts, headed for a meeting that was going to be held at the town hall that evening. I kept worrying because I had stopped by the side of the road along the way and eaten two of the donuts in a moment of a greedy hunger and now the box was short. There was nothing more embarrassing than showing up with a box that was missing donuts. I kept

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-43361167707310417232021-04-07T01:25:00.004-04:002022-02-18T00:32:47.231-05:00

The whole family slept in this big farm house. It was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the shapes of the house and the fence and the cars parked in the driveway and the tire swing that hung over the worn dirt patch in the back yard were all black against the first red hints of daylight. The family was scattered in beds around the house, my grandmother and grandfather snoring away on a

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-28922138338848690432021-03-13T00:23:00.000-05:002022-02-18T00:24:53.797-05:00

It was late on a Friday night, and I was hanging out with some stand-up comedians that I was friends with. We were all sitting around in the dark, riffing on this terrible movie that we were watching, when we heard someone knocking at the front door. The owner of the house got up to see who it was. When he opened the door, his next door neighbor burst in, frantically waving around a torn envelope

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-27109247924575136052020-12-02T00:16:00.003-05:002022-02-18T00:21:56.910-05:00

My wife and I were looking at a house that we were thinking of buying. But as we went from room to room, we became more interested in how the house was decorated and furnished than we were in the actual house itself. We were intrigued by the lives that were lived there, by the framed family photographs hung on the wall by the stairs, by the checkered pot holders coordinated with the soft blues

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-67823216151990497542020-11-21T00:12:00.002-05:002022-02-18T00:21:42.479-05:00

A neighbor of mine invited me over to see her flowers. She led me to a sun room in the back where several flower pots were clustered on shelves enjoying the light that shone in through the bay window. As I stood among these flower pots, I noticed that, at least to my eyes, the leaves and stems of many of the flowers were arranged in ways that resembled human poses. One appeared to lounge in a

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-89487828878544775642020-10-06T01:09:00.002-04:002022-02-18T00:21:29.739-05:00

Baseball was our favorite game in the neighborhood where I grew up. We always played in this open field across the street from my house. The grass was worn away in the corner that we used for home plate, and there was a dark wooded area which neatly marked the edge of the outfield. One day as we were playing, a goat demon came strolling out of the woods to talk to us. He had cloven hoofs for feet

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-50766809382938339092020-08-07T01:01:00.004-04:002022-02-18T00:20:57.080-05:00

I was a violin player in the local symphony orchestra. Early one October evening, I was walking down a country lane with a few other members of the string section. We were all headed for a performance at the town hall. We all had on white shirts and black bow ties. My hair was slicked back and wet, and my freshly shaved face stung in the crisp air. I was carrying my violin case and a handful of

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-83730478296268656482020-08-05T00:58:00.002-04:002022-02-18T00:20:24.659-05:00

I flew back to visit my family in Ohio. My mother was living in an old red brick house that had ivy along the walls. She had started a flower delivery service with her sisters, and they ran the business out of her house. I took a nap when I got in, and after I woke up, I found them all working in the front room. One of my aunts was typing out the messages for the cards on a black typewriter;

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-63627693948406785682020-07-27T00:56:00.002-04:002022-02-18T00:20:01.040-05:00

My wife and I were driving along a country road with wide open fields on either side. It was late in the evening and there was a storm in the distance. A fog hung over the landscape diffusing the lightning as it flashed in shades of blue and gold along the edges of the horizon and cracked between the dark bruises where the cloud banks were thicker. We drove for miles and miles along this road,

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-54048766320606957032020-06-22T08:00:00.000-04:002020-07-13T19:23:05.593-04:00

My daughter called me one night from the bar. I could tell from her drawn out words and the insistent way that she was talking that she'd had a couple of drinks. I could almost hear her leaning in and poking at the air with her finger to punctuate her sentences. Luckily, I could hear her boyfriend in the background, the more sober and calmer of the two, and I knew that he'd be there to drive

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-5038537434478481502020-06-02T16:48:00.000-04:002020-06-10T00:24:34.275-04:00

Late one night, I stayed up listening to some music. I was leaning my elbows against the upstairs railing, looking down into the lamplit study in the open area below me. The album was playing on the stereo in the study, but I liked to listen from up above, because I liked the acoustics and the way the music reverberated off of the vaulted ceiling up there. The music was loud enough to fill the

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-90142411873207512852020-05-25T06:42:00.000-04:002020-06-08T11:22:03.725-04:00

I was wandering around an abandoned neighborhood. There were whole streets lined with empty houses, the rotten boards cracked and splintered and caved in on sagging porches, the glass broken out in front windows that showed nothing but blackness inside. There was a gas station with weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement around the broken pumps and a little grocery store with cleared out

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-58609881143596293782020-04-23T20:08:00.000-04:002020-06-08T11:20:28.401-04:00

There was a massive tree in my back yard. The trunk was a good ten feet around, and the nobby knuckles of its roots filled almost the entire yard. The bark was smooth and white, hard like sinews of muscle and bleached bone, nicked here and there with deep black cuts and dark red notches. And most notable of all, the tree had made a strange twist as it had sprouted, as though tightening its grip

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-23102769449453890992020-01-16T18:06:00.000-05:002020-06-08T11:18:50.530-04:00

I was working on a large memoir, trying to recount every little significant detail that I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and there was one moment in particular that I wanted to capture as vividly as I could. It was a morning many years ago when I was returning home for the funeral of an old friend. It was just before dawn, and I was taking a ferry across a large open lake.

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6908292385067939072.post-9601270596931566532019-11-11T13:51:00.000-05:002020-06-08T11:09:00.237-04:00

It all started with an explosion. I was making my way through the middle of town, and there was a single engine plane droning overhead in the placid blue sky, and suddenly everyone on the street was looking up at the spreading burst of black smoke where the plane had been shot down. There was a long interval of silence where everything seemed to hold quiet and still, and then the silence broke

Bryan Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01607046468663026271noreply@blogger.com0