A General Conference Dream

Author’s Note: For those not familiar with my religion, once every six months our church has its semi-annual general conference.  This conference is broadcast by satellite and internet around the world, and church members forego meeting in their usual congregations in order to tune into five 2-hour sessions of church leaders speaking kindly from behind a pulpit, and singing by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Last night I had a dream about General Conference.  I dreamed that they had decided to make Conference a lot more ‘accessible’ and ‘relevant’ to children.  They did this by making it a lot less of a stable camera pointing at the podium.  In fact, most of it wasn’t filmed at the Conference Center at all.

I must have been on the production staff, because I remember I was working with this kid (child-actor) and his mom (stage-mom) who was supposed to go and simply stand in a few shots during someone’s talk and look reverent and all inquisitive.  He was struggling to keep it together for all the shots he was scheduled for.

Then I dreamed I was down in the BYU Law Library, and people were watching the conference.  The people were very familiar to me, although now I don’t know who they were.  Everyone kept commenting about how ‘different’ conference was that year.  I remember watching it and thinking – this really isn’t very good.  I mean, most messages were less than 5 minutes long and about as deep as a 12 year old talk in the local ward.  Many of the segments were more about the dramatizations and visual effects we were producing than about the message itself.

I thought to myself, this is kind of lame, but I guess we need to reach out better to the younger generation…

Then the dream ended.

I’m hoping when I tune in later today, there are no pre-staged crazy looking kids staring up at President Monson as he speaks.  If there is, I guess I’ll be expecting a call from Salt Lake…