Tag: basketball

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Basketball Diary #5: The Court of Greg Brown III

This has been a rough season for fans of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. The players are learning a new system from their rookie head coach, Chauncey Billups, in his first season in that role. Their star player, Damien Lillard, plays poorly (by his standards) at the outset, then is forced to undergo season-ending surgery. Three other players in the original rotation—Cody Zeller, Larry Nance Jr., and Nassir Little—go down with injuries. The General Manager of the team, Neil Olshey, is summarily fired after years of internal conflict, leaving the operations in the hands of neophyte executives and detached ownership. Just before the trade deadline they deal away three of their best remaining players—Norman Powell, Robert Covington, Jr., and the beloved C.J. McCollum. In return the Blazers receive some promising guys (Josh Hart, Justice Winslow, Keon Johnson), plus draft picks and salary cap flexibility (an aspect of the game I don’t understand and don’t want to understand). In the midst of it all, the team wins a few surprising games, but loses many more, often by huge margins. Now, with a season-ending injury to Jusuf Nurkic, the lone remainder from the starting line-up at the beginning of the season, the Blazers have been reduced to a fragment of what they hoped to become this year.

Perhaps the green shoots of new growth that signal better things for the future can be observed in player performances today, even in recurrent circumstances of dispiriting defeat. Three guys in particular—C.J. Elleby, Trendon Watford, and Greg Brown III—have been interesting to watch this year, as their roles have shifted dramatically from regular “DNP (coach’s decision)” benchwarmers to starters and vital rotation players. Each of them has an impressive set of skills and abilities they are testing and honing against the toughest competition they’ve ever faced. Sometimes it’s painful to watch, but just as often there are flashes of potential that seem to be harbingers of future greatness. Twenty-year old Greg Brown III, for instance, has so much athletic talent and basketball intuition, I can easily imagine him continuing to grow and eventually becoming a dominant player in his own right. When he’s on the court now, there’s always a sense he might do something amazing, some huge, leaping feat of blocking a shot, stealing a pass, or slamming an alley-oop dunk on a fast break. He and C. J. Elleby are the best on the team at that latter move, one that electrifies a crowd and pumps up the whole team.

My dreams about the Blazers this year have been vague and impersonal, but this brief one (following a 124-92 blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets) expresses special hope for the future play of Greg Brown III:

Lots of Energy

I am helping Greg Brown III with his basketball court, the game that is happening there….Lots of energy, with players moving quickly back and forth on the court….

The feeling is that the court is his, Greg Brown III’s. Like he owns it and reigns over whatever happens on it. Hmm. It’s true, now that I think about it, GBIII is the only player on the team right now who is emotionally demonstrative when he makes an amazing play. After dunking hard over another player, he doesn’t pretend to be cool and nonchalant. No, he lets everyone in the arena know what he just did. He expresses authentic, heartfelt enjoyment of these heroic moments, which is really all that we fans want, a chance to share in those moments of enjoyment. It also makes it easier to sympathize when he tries to dunk or block a shot and fails spectacularly, which happens rather frequently, too.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the ownership and management of the Trailblazers have essentially given up on this season, and on this group of guys. That’s too bad, because we may be seeing a glimpse of the future court of Greg Brown III—that is, a glimpse of what he and the guys like him could do with their potentials if fully supported and developed. It’s worth noting that the Blazers are still in contention for the tenth and last seed in the playoffs. And there’s more than a month of regular season games to go….

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Basketball Dream Diary #4: My Blazers Hat

Of SUVs, prosperous males, and watching witches.

On Monday night, the Blazers beat the Toronto Raptors, 118-113, in an exciting, closely-fought contest. The Raptors came out hot, taking a 13-3 lead before the game was barely two minutes old. The Blazers looked slow and hesitant, the Raptors young and springy. Damien Lillard had missed the previous game with a nagging abdominal injury, and even though he was starting tonight, he did not look 100% healthy. The Raptors’ brilliant small forward, Og Anunoby, made four 3-point shots in the first quarter alone, as Toronto soon pushed their lead to fourteen. But Portland gradually figured it out and got themselves back into the game. They mostly gave up on playing their two biggest guys, Jusuf Nurkic and Cody Zeller, and went instead with a rotation of smaller players who could keep up with the Raptors’ speed. Larry Nance, Jr., played especially well off the bench, scoring 15 points and making an impact at both ends of the court. He’s someone who’s big enough to defend the post in a small-ball lineup, and quick enough to take a rebound and dribble up court like a point guard on a fast break. This was a great game for him. C.J. McCollum was stellar as usual, with 29 points, 5 assists, and one amazing block at the rim. Despite being double-teamed every time he touched the ball, Damien finally warmed up and scored 24 points to go with 8 assists. He and C.J. each played 40 of the 48 minutes, a heavy load. But the Blazers bench made the difference in the game, with ten guys in the rotation throwing a constant series of new looks and fresh bodies at the Raptors, who only had one guy off the bench with significant time. Their starters all played 38+ minutes, and at the end of the close game, they didn’t have enough juice to overcome Portland’s two all-star guards and good-enough team defense.

Later that night, I had the following dream:

My Blazers Hat

Someone gives me a Blazers hat….it says “Suvvies” on it? Or the person says that when they give it to me?….I do like the gift, but that word is weird….Later, I see written on a paper to my left, “The witches are watching”….

(11/15/21)

Upon awakening, I didn’t see much meaning to this. Last night while I was getting dressed before the game, putting on a Blazers t-shirt and red-and-black Nike shoes (they haven’t lost yet when I’ve worn this pair), I had noticed a Blazers hat in my closet. I bought it earlier in the season, but immediately regretted it, as I realized I didn’t like the way it fit and looked. A twinge of self-criticism about the hat lingered after I closed my closet door and set off for the game.

The word “Suvvies” seems to be a way of saying multiple SUVs, like sports utility vehicles. When I was first thinking about it after waking, I wondered if “Suvvies” might be a variation on “Subbies,” which might refer to “substitutes,” and thus a reference to the Blazers bench players…?

Hmm.

If the dream wanted the hat to say “Subbies,” it would have done so. But the hat says “Suvvies,” apparently referring to SUVs. I don’t drive an SUV, but going in and out of stadium traffic last night, I was surrounded by them. In cultural terms, SUVs bespeak size, power, self-protection, and a disregard for fuel efficiency. Their prevalence at the game made me think of a recent survey I commissioned about dreams and interest in sports (full analysis and discussion to come), in which my first scan of the results found that high interest in sports correlates with, among other factors, being male, having a high income, and having a higher educational degree.

Hmm.

Then I start thinking about the symbolism of the hat. And I remember that the first dream of Wolfgang Pauli’s that Jung analyzes in his text on dream symbolism and alchemy is about a hat: “the dreamer is at a social gathering. On leaving, he puts on a stranger’s hat instead of his own.” Jung says the hat in general epitomizes the head, “the leading idea,” covering the whole personality. He referred to rituals of royal coronation in which a crown is placed on the sovereign’s head as an emblem of the solar disc. In Pauli’s case (which I’m writing about in my in-progress book The Scribes of Sleep, so it’s not such a random association), Jung interpreted the hat as a prefiguration of the mandala, symbolizing the whole actualization of the personality. What seems strange to Pauli in his dream is in fact the gradual emergence of his true Self, from which his waking ego is currently alienated.

Hmm.

And then, in my dream, there are the witches. Three of them, at least. I don’t actually see them, I’m just aware of their presence as I read their words on the paper. So, does this mean that while I am watching the basketball games, the witches are watching me? As I immerse myself in a realm favored by other prosperous, socially powerful males, am I drawing the attention of darker anima energies at the other end of the psychological spectrum? Do the witches have other ideas about proper coverings for one’s head?

 

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Basketball Dream Diary #3: Fans

The Blazers beat the Memphis Grizzlies, 116-96, last Wednesday night, to even their season’s record at 2 wins and 2 losses. They played excellent defense and held Ja Morant, the Grizzlies’ young star guard, to 17 points, half of what he had been averaging the first few games of the season. The Blazers had a strong second half, with more amazing dance-and-shoot moves from C.J. McCollum, who plays with astonishing grace and fluidity. He excels at step-back jumpers, mid-lane floaters, sneaky inside drives, and quick-release 3-pointers, always hunting for the spots where he knows he can elevate and hit his shot. Damien Lillard played well enough on offense to give C.J. room to maneuver, which seems to be part of the season’s overall design. And the bench continues to gain in confidence and cohesion. There was a great play towards the end of the game when Dennis Smith, Jr. took a C.J. Elleby outlet and made a touch pass to Greg Brown for an alley-oop dunk. Everybody loves to see that.

Again, the question arises: Is this the real team? Or maybe the question should be instead: Is there even such a thing as “the real team”? It seems every other franchise in the league has already had at least one truly great game, and at least one shocking clunker. Every fan now has good reason to hope their team can make a championship run, if their guys can just play the way they played in that one game… And also, every fan now has good reason to fear the whole thing could collapse in a second, and their team tumble into the bottom ranks, especially should one of their key players gets injured, which in the NBA in recent years has felt like a matter of “when” rather than “if.”

None of this made any apparent impact on my dreaming imagination that night. Instead of dreaming about the game, I dreamed about the experience of attending and watching the game with other fans:

Jane Fonda at the Center

 A group is helping Jane Fonda with something inside a place….She is happy, being treated like a VIP….Everyone is trying to take good care of her, she is smiling in the center of it all….

(10/27/21)

The dream quickly brought to my mind two aspects of the game-attendance experience I had noted the previous night. First, the efficient staff at Moda Center, from ushers to security staff to entertainers to servers, all of whom have been doing an excellent job of making people feel happy and well-treated, like VIPs. Second, the shameless antics in which people will engage to attract the attention of the television cameras, with the ultimate goal of simultaneously performing and seeing oneself performing on the jumbotron screens hanging over the center of the arena. To give people the feeling of being a happy VIP at the center of it all—that’s clearly considered by fans and stadium alike as a highly desirable feature of attending a Blazers game. Live and let live, I usually say to myself during a break in the on-court action when the TV cameras roam through the crowd to find the most wildly dressed and/or dancing people for their three seconds on the jumbotron. What do I care if the world is sinking into a vortex of narcissism, and people are lost in screen-mediated labyrinths of their own egos? So what? No harm, no foul. The game will start again in a few seconds….

This whisper of misanthropic negativity towards my fellow Blazer fans seems to have evoked later that night a surprising dream response, in the form of Jane Fonda. I can say with confidence that I have never dreamed of Jane Fonda before. Nor does she appear often in other people’s dreams (just 1 reference in the 30K+ dream reports of the SDDb). Yet here she is at the center of my dream the night following an excellent, highly satisfying Blazers victory.

Hmm….

An unusual, anomalous character like this raises the question, why her rather than anyone else? What are the qualities of Jane Fonda, in my own mind at least, that make her a singular figure?

Overall, I suppose I have a positive impression of Jane Fonda. In fact, I’d say I admire her. She’s a very talented actress, a cultural innovator, a passionate advocate, a courageous risk-taker, a source of surprise and wonder. She is physically beautiful and has remained so throughout her life. She has courted controversy, defied authorities, and made very public mistakes. Some people find her unbearably annoying.

Hmm….

Would I describe her as a narcissist? That seems too harsh. But I would say she has a very healthy and robust sense of her own importance, which seems consistent with what transpires and how she behaves in my dream.

Aha!

Maybe Jane Fonda embodies a spirit of courageous creativity that I admire, even if it generates flak and friction from others—myself included. Can I recognize that same spirit in the Blazer fans around me? Can I stop rolling my eyes and appreciate their creative energy, too? Their unusual talents and risk-taking aesthetics? Their willingness to provide others with three seconds of surprise and wonder?

That makes sense and feels like it carries forward the energy of the dream. And yet, it does seem like there’s more….

Hmm….

Okay. Can I also recognize my own yearning for public attention here? My inner Jane Fonda, my unconscious desire to be a VIP at the center of everything, smiling and happy? Can I turn the critical analysis of my fellow fans around and see how I am projecting my concerns onto them? Am I anxious about my own fortunate status as a “VIP,” by being able to attend so many games this season? Yes, that’s in there, too.

Two nights later, the Blazers hosted the Los Angeles Clippers, who had crushed Portland by 30 points. This would be a chance for the Blazers to show they can bounce back from that kind of loss. And they did, beating the Clippers 111-92 in convincing fashion, even though their star forward Paul George III scored 42 points. Damien Lillard played his best game of the season, scoring 25 points to go with 6 assists. A winning brand of Blazers basketball is emerging: good team defense, hustle rebounding, a deep bench, and so many offensive weapons that someone is bound to have a hot hand. It was a very entertaining game, and promising for the future of the season.

That night I had a dream that carried forward the theme from the previous one:

The VIPs Behind Me

I going to my seat at the Blazers game, and there are complications and confusing aspects with the ticket and my phone….hmm, this is stressful….but I get there, it is all going to be good….But several other people, VIPs, one of them former President Trump, have come up behind me, and they want to pass me and go ahead….I say no, you have to wait, we will all get there in time….

(10/29/21)

I did have phone troubles at home before game, trying to get my ticket to appear on the screen. Everything was fine once I got to the game, but I must admit I felt very anxious waiting in line at the arena, because what if it happens again? That’s a very uncomfortable prospect, of fumbling with my phone while other people wait in line behind me, growing increasingly frustrated. A true nightmare.

Hmm….

It suddenly made me think of waiting in line to get on an airplane, the same feeling of anxiously making sure my papers and documents are in order, standing in a closely-packed crowd of people with whom I am about to share several hours in an enclosed space. Trying to be diplomatic, managing my own discomfort, biting my tongue at the rudeness of some of those around me, keeping an eye open for possible bogeys who might snap and cause serious disruption…. And yet unlike an airplane, the people coming into the arena are expecting to yell and scream, not sit quietly; to express their individual passions, not comply with federal regulations; to drink as much as they want and eat as much as they want and get up and down as much as they want.

Hmm….

The ex-President’s appearance adds metaphorically to the feeling of an increasingly rowdy, mostly male crowd wanting something it believes it is owed and yet being unfairly denied. And I’m blocking them, slowing them down, standing in their way.

Hmm….

The dream does suggest that there is a potential for all fans to get what they desire, if they can just show a little patience. The line is moving, slowly but surely. My troubles have been fixed, and everyone will arrive where they need to go in plenty of time. I say this to all the other people who act as if they are VIPs and should get special treatment, at Moda Center and elsewhere; I also say this to myself, insofar as the ex-President represents at some level my own selfish impatience in these situations, my own temptation towards arrogant, boorish VIP behavior. Whoever we are, however fast we move, wherever we sit, and whatever we do when we get there, can we all come together as fans to enjoy the game?

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Basketball Dream Diaries #2: The First Two Games

The day before the opening game of the Trailblazers’ 2021-2022 season, I was bothered by something I read online about Damien Lillard, Portland’s best player. The article ranked him lower among the league’s top players than I think he deserves; it dinged him for his defense, and emphasized the catastrophe that would befall the Blazers should he ever leave. The tone of the article reflected the very low expectations people seem to have for Portland’s performance this season. The Blazers hired a new head coach, Chauncey Billups, who has never held that role before, but whose previous assistant coaching focused on defense, and that’s where the Blazers most needed to improve (tied for 3rd best team in the league in offensive efficiency last year, but 19th in the league in defensive efficiency). Otherwise, Portland made no big roster moves during the off-season. They let Carmelo Anthony go, which I thought was too bad, he had a great run with the Blazers the past couple years. They re-signed their big mid-season acquisition from last year, shooting guard Norman Powell, which is certainly good. They added several new players to the bench, including two big guys who play great defense, Cody Zeller and Larry Nance, Jr.

What’s not to like? The fear is that it doesn’t add up to enough in an NBA that gets faster and more skilled every year. Yes, Damien and C.J. McCollum will score points. But will the rest of the team be able to perform at championship-levels of competition? Nothing that happens in the preseason should cause too much anxiety, but losing all four games didn’t help in calming the worrisome vibes as the first game approached.

The Sacramento Kings were the visiting team. Led by veteran Harrison Barnes, they have lots of quick, young, talented players who clearly want to change their reputation as one of the league’s weakest teams. They certainly succeeded in gaining new respect from the Blazers, who lost in a very dispiriting fashion, 124-121. Portland played terribly for the first three quarters, made a comeback in the fourth, then fell short as Damien missed a last-second 3-point shot. For the game, Damien missed all nine of his 3-point attempts. Ouch. The team had no chemistry, and looked slow and out of tempo. The defense was awful.

Prospects of a truly disastrous season suddenly loomed. What if the Blazers had suddenly dropped into the lower ranks of the league? What would that mean for Damien and C.J., who have been the subject of trade talk throughout the off-season? Watching a franchise go through a sudden decline is a very, very painful experience for a fan…

That night after the game, I had this dream:

Will Damien Be Distracted?

Damien Lillard goes onto the basketball court with a gift someone gave him, a white rectangular box with a few things in it….He is happy, but I am confused….Won’t this distract him from the game?….

(10/21/21)

The dream made me think back to the opening ceremony before the game started, when Damien stepped to center court and spoke to the crowd. He welcomed everyone back to live action (yay!), and promised the team would try hard, even if the initial results might not be pretty to watch (hmm).  The announcer thanked him as “Dame D.O.L.L.A.,” his musical pseudonym (double hmm). Now that I thought about it in light of the dream, it struck me at the time as a strange moment, breaking the fourth wall to reach out and lower our expectations, while gesturing towards his career beyond basketball. Damien is the not just the leader of the Blazers, but also the unquestioned athletic Alpha of the city, so it felt jarring somehow to hear him talk like this.

In the dream, I don’t know what’s in the box. It seems like a gift box for nice candles, or small jars of preserves, or little containers of grooming products. Whatever it is, it makes Damien happy. For nine seasons, a happy and confident Damien has led to a lot of Blazers success. What makes me worried about him now? His gifts. Literally and metaphorically, Damien Lillard is amazingly gifted. And that’s exactly what worries me. He has so many talents and future potentials, what if he isn’t totally committed to the Blazers anymore? What if he could do better as a musician than as a basketball player for Portland? It feels disrespectful to Damien even to think such a thought—so it comes out in a dream.

But one game does not a season make. No matter what’s going on with Damien, he’s not going to miss every 3-pointer he shoots. We could certainly hope for a better showing in the second game, even though it would be against a much better team, the Phoenix Suns. Led by rising star Devin Booker and all-time great Chris Paul, the Suns went all the way to the NBA Finals last year. If the Blazers were ever going to show a new level of defensive competence, now was the time to do so.

And lo and behold, an entirely different team showed up. The real team? Maybe. The Blazers overwhelmed the Suns, 134-105, and it could have been much worse. Booker did what he does, and scored 21. But the Blazers out-shot, out-rebounded, and out-hustled the Suns on both ends of the court. C.J. McCollum was hot and scored 28, while Damien had 19 points to go with 8 assists. Lots of bench guys got to play, and they looked great, too. Nassir Little and Anfernee Simons brought high energy and confident shooting, and Dennis Smith, Jr., had 5 assists in just 15 minutes of play. Ahh. What a wonderful exhale of a game.

That night after the game, I had this dream:

A Knife’s Edge

I am paying attention to a guy, his story, like in a book….A knife’s edge is threatening something of his….A round dark piece of fruit?….He is doing ok, though, overall….A couple, a man and woman, are sitting next to me on my right….But they just see the pages in the book, the images; they do not hear the story, and so they have no real idea what is going on….But I do….The guy in the story just has to keep moving forwards, that is all….

(10/23/21)

In the dream, the people to my right reminded me of the young couple sitting next to me at the game. They were in a happy party mood, friendly and chatty, shouting at the players by name, and getting high fives when they could. And yet… For most of the game they were fiddling with their phones, taking pictures, making videos, instagramming, etc., completely oblivious to the actual game in front of them.

To be clear, I have no problem with a fun date at the basketball game. Courtship at the court is an awesome thing and should be encouraged whenever possible. The dream doesn’t really seem to be about this couple or my feelings towards them. To be honest, the obnoxious man sitting to my left was much more annoying, so if this was a crowd-focused dream, I’d expect something from that direction. Instead, the dream revolves around the guy, his story, and the image of the knife and the round dark fruit. When I think of the dream in the light of the previous night’s game, the fruit immediately reminds me of an ad (for whiskey?) I saw on TV recently in which an artist spins an art-work basketball made of black shiny ceramic. That struck me as really cool and creative. And the guy in the dream with his story makes me think of each individual Blazers player, and what a big win like that means to them, how it opens up a new vista of confidence, reassurance, and possibility.

All of these basketball-related associations hover around the dream. Yet they shouldn’t distract from what Ernest Hartmann called the central image of a dream, in this case the piece of fruit and the knife. Sports aside, what other symbolic and metaphorical meanings can be connected to this specific, vivid image? Hmm. It could be seen as a vision of perilous sexuality, with the knife a phallic danger. It could be seen simply as part of preparing a piece of fruit to eat, and thus an image of impending nutrition. A knife and piece of fruit are common elements in classic paintings of “still life” scenes. Hmm.

The biological purpose of fruit is to bear seeds into a favorable growing environment, carrying the potential vitality of the plant into the future. Aha, there’s something that strikes a chord. The seed idea feels connected to the preseason-as-fertilizer metaphor from BDD #1, like an extension of nature-language to make sense of the basketball experience. In the dream, it felt like the fruit-like object needed to go forward with him, that’s the desired flowing growth of the story. But the knife is a threat; it could stop the flow (a player could be cut from the team?), and so it requires great caution in moving forwards (the Blazers’ weakest position?). The fruit is right next to the knife, right by its edge…

That seems to be the metaphor of the dream, or at least one of its metaphors: Playing on the knife’s edge. That’s what all the guys were doing last night. The story of the Blazers’ new season, the stories emerging for each player, the fate of their deepest seeds of potential, all entered last night’s game in a perilous and uncertain condition. Who is this team? How well can they perform?  Do they have a future? By meeting this challenge with such a powerful and thoroughly entertaining performance, they put those questions to rest, at least for a night.

The couple in the seats next to me did not seem to share any of my concerns, but that’s fine, they clearly had a great time at the game, too. To be honest, they reminded me of Ronnie and Amber LaFontaine from “Modern Family.” I tried to be a really, really good neighbor.

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The Basketball Dream Diaries #1: Preseason

Earlier this week I attended the preseason basketball game between the Portland Trailblazers and the Sacramento Kings. Although the Blazers played with lots of energy, the Kings beat them handily, 107-93. That night (it was a Monday), I had the following dream:

Fertilizing the Basketball Court

Lots of people are engaged in some activity, trying to set up a sports game, on a basketball court…. They are sweeping and spreading lots of soil onto the court…. To fertilize it?…. I am confused, but I go along with it, curious to see where it leads….

(October 11, 2021)

This is the first basketball dream of the 2021-2022 season, and it offers a simple and actually quite beautiful metaphor for the meaning of the preseason. Of course, it might seem at first glance like nothing more than typical dream nonsense, the random combination of two incidents from my previous day—watching the basketball game, and spreading compost in my yard, which I did in fact do earlier that morning. The dream puts these two bits of “day residue” together in a way that makes no logical sense. Spreading dirt on a basketball court in the way it was spread in my yard would prevent a game from going forward, not help it along. But this is a case where we need to put aside a literal reading of dreams and think of them in metaphorical terms. As a metaphor, the soil may express something else, a meaning related to its literal qualities but connecting those qualities to a non-literal situation.

That sounds abstract, I know, so here’s a practical way to bring out the metaphorical dimensions of a dream. I call it asking questions of specification. Why soil? Of all the things my dream could have portrayed as being spread across the basketball court, why this and not something else? It could have been sand, or pennies, or ping pong balls—but it wasn’t any of those, it was specifically soil. What are the qualities of soil, of composting earth, that might metaphorically relate to a preseason basketball game?

Just as my dream might seem trivial and insignificant, the game that night could be considered trivial and insignificant, too. Only one of the Blazers’ regular starters (Jusuf Nurkic) even played, while Damien Lillard, C.J. McCollum, Norman Powell, and Robert Covington, Jr., sat out the whole contest. The Kings pretty much dominated at both ends of the court, with the Blazers making 27 turnovers and shooting only 21% from 3-point land. Not a pretty game. But was it meaningless? Not to the bench guys who did play, and played hard, every one of them striving to use his minutes on the court to learn, grow, and demonstrate to the coaches how he can contribute to the team. They were playing as energetically as they could, flashing their best moves and testing their newest skills. Pre-season games are vital for these players’ developmental progress, and beneficial for the whole team’s long-term success.

This suggests one aspect of the dream’s metaphor: Pre-season games are like composting a garden. And, composting a garden is like getting a sports team ready for a new season. They’re both about nourishing, preparing, getting ready for big moves and expansive growth. Fertilizing the future, empowering the fullest expression of latent potentials, fueling the competitive fires that animate all forms of life.

The concept of a season is another metaphorical link. Both gardens and basketball teams follow a regular annual cycle of activity and rest, with transitional states between. With gardens and Nature in general, the coming of winter brings a lessening of external activity and an inward focus on survival through the dark and cold, and preparing for new growth when light and warmth return. Basketball runs on an opposite (complementary?) cycle, with activities turning indoors and revving up just as the days shorten and chill of winter approaches. To understand the rhythms of a season for a garden or a basketball team is to understand the distinct and essential value of each stage in the cycle, and how that specific stage adds to the ultimate health, strength, and dynamism of the overall process.

And, as a further metaphorical extension, compost doesn’t smell great. But the stinky smell is actually a good thing! The strong, earthy odors of a well-fertilized garden—and the turnovers and missed-3s in a hard-fought preseason game—are all part of a deeper, long-term growth process. In basketball, it’s part of the magical transformation of a disparate group of individual players into a cohesive, high-performing, championship-level team.

And how good it will smell when the garden blooms again and the regular season begins…

 

About the Basketball Dream Diaries: Dreams about sports have been a recurrent theme in my life since childhood. Since moving to Portland, Oregon in 2010, I have become a big fan of the city’s NBA basketball team, the Trailblazers, and my dreams have reflected that interest with several references to the team, the players, and their interactions with the rest of the NBA. I’ve attended several games at Moda Center, and had a lot of fun each time. I have also noticed how the intense stimulation of the games, starting at 7 pm in the evening and going till 9:30 or 10, has a direct impact on my sleep and dreaming later that night.

This year, I’m unbelievably fortunate to have season tickets to the Trailblazers home games. In anticipation of possible basketball dreams to come, I’m starting this chronicle to track the influence of the Blazers’ season on my dreams, and to see how my dreaming imagination evaluates and interprets the Blazers’ performance this year. It’s going to be color commentary from the unconscious. A surrealist angle on the NBA. A self-experiment in sports-mediated dream incubation. And an open door and welcome mat for the metaphor-generating wizard of my sleeping mind.

 

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Why It’s So Hard to Sleep in the NBA

Pro basketball players and coaches suffer chronic sleep deprivation. Can they find help in their dreams?

On January 8, 1964, a 17-year old high school student named Randy Gardner set the world’s record for continual wakefulness: 264 hours, more than eleven straight days without sleep.  Gardner was helped in his effort by Dr. William Dement, a pioneer of sleep medicine who stayed with him round-the-clock to help him achieve his goal.  The worst times came during the wee hours of the night, when Gardner’s resolve faltered, but Dement said they found a sure-fire way to keep sleep at bay:

“Fortunately, playing basketball always worked. We almost had to drag him out to the backyard, but once he was there and got moving, he was much better.” 

This little anecdote from the early history of sleep research illuminates a problem at the heart of the modern National Basketball Association.  Professional basketball players are virtually guaranteed to suffer chronic sleep deprivation. For months on end they stay up late into the night and engage in intense, highly stressful physical competitions held in brightly lit, hyper-stimulating arenas full of thousands of screaming people.  They must endure a constantly changing schedule of long-distance travel, shifting time zones, and unfamiliar food and lodging.  It would be hard to intentionally design a system more likely to disrupt the natural, healthy rhythms of sleep.

Fortunately, a new awareness of the importance of sleep is growing among the players, coaches, and even the league schedulers. Two of the league’s premier players, Lebron James and Kevin Durant, have made their views on the subject clear:

James: “Sleep is the most important thing when it comes to recovery.  And it’s very tough with our schedule. Our schedule keeps us up late at night, and most of the time it wakes us up early in the morning. … There’s no better recovery than sleep.”

Durant: “Of course, on the basketball side, you have to fine tune your skills.  But on the other side, you have to fine tune your body. There’s a lot of remedies you can use as a basketball player to get better, but the easiest thing you can do is go to sleep.”

Much of the credit for the recent burst of attention to sleep and basketball goes to Dr. Cheri Mah, whose 2011 study of the Stanford University men’s basketball team found that increased sleep led to measurably better shooting, faster sprinting, and a higher sense of physical and mental well-being.  Mah’s findings have inspired men’s and women’s teams at all levels to take sleep more seriously as an integral factor in overall player health and performance.

Mah’s research has also spawned a method of predicting the winners of NBA games with alarmingly high accuracy.  ESPN writer Baxter Holmes has worked with Mah to devise a formula for evaluating how tired one team would be compared to another team on the night of a game against each other, especially on the second night of a back-to-back game.  Their formula takes many factors into account:

Whether the game is home or away, the time elapsed between tip-offs (including hours lost from flying east), how rested the opponent is from play or travel and whether it’s part of a longer run of four games in five nights, or five games in seven.

As Holmes reports, the formula has a success rate of about 75% in predicting the winner of a game when one team is likely to be very sleep deprived and the other team is likely to be very well-rested.  These predictions are made regardless of the team’s won/lost records, which is even more impressive in terms of identifying the direct competitive impact of healthy sleep.  If this formula were revised to include the won/lost records, it’s easy to imagine the success rate of the sleep-driven predictions rising to nearly 100%.

This season has also highlighted the sleep challenges of coaches as well as the players.  Two head coaches—Tyronn Lue of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Steve Clifford of the Charlotte Hornets—have been forced by health concerns to leave their teams for several weeks of recuperation.  In both cases, doctors identified chronic insomnia as an important causal factor.

What can be done to help NBA players and coaches improve their sleep?  The league is under growing pressure to eliminate back-to-back games, which would surely remove a major cause of disrupted sleep.  But there’s only so much flexibility when trying to craft a season of 82 games for each of 30 teams in a time frame of 6 months.  Even if back-to-backs are eliminated, the NBA’s regular season schedule will continue to put enormous pressure on everyone’s ability to get a healthy amount of sleep.

At this point, most teams have a sleep consultant of some kind, so players and coaches already have access to basic information about behavioral changes one can make for improving sleep.  Unfortunately, knowing what you should do is not as easy as actually doing it.  According to one coach quoted by David Aldridge at NBA.com,

“We’re all told what to do, but we don’t do it.  We’re all told we have to eat healthy, we have to exercise and we have to get our sleep. All of us. Every coach. This is not like, ‘oh, wow, I never thought of that.’ But it’s hard to do it.”

What else is there?  What other options exist for promoting better sleep, besides the standard methods of appealing to guilt and fear, focusing on behavioral markers, and relying on external authorities?

There is another approach, one that works well for some people and might work very well for NBA players and coaches.  This approach draws on a new source of motivation for getting as much good sleep as possible: Better sleep is important because it leads to better dreaming. 

When you sleep, your mind does not simply shut down.  Rather, it enters a different mode of functioning, a mode that can be described as a kind of play.  Liberated from the constraints of the external world, your sleeping mind is free to imagine, explore, and experiment.  Sometimes, during the phase known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which occurs four or five times a night for most people, your brain becomes intensely activated, as much as when you are wide awake. These complex bursts of neural activation are an automatic, hard-wired feature of your sleep cycle, and they stimulate the psychological process of dreaming.

But why should anyone, let alone those who play or coach professional basketball, care about dreams?  There are at least three reasons.

First, even if you never remember any of your dreams, the process of dreaming still contributes to your mental welfare in waking life.  Researchers have found that dreaming promotes more efficient learning, memory formation, and the emotional integration of new experiences.  The “bizarre” aspects of dreaming—strange settings, odd characters, impossible events—can be understood as playfully stretching your mind’s abilities, with the beneficial effect of increasing your mental flexibility and improving your readiness to deal with unexpected situations in waking life.  In this way, dreaming is like mental yoga.  It loosens the rigid boundaries of your waking ego, expands the range of your imagination, and keeps your mind open and alert to new possibilities.

This means that sleep is especially important for basketball players and coaches who are continuously trying to optimize their performance, because if they sleep well, their dreams will naturally boost their mental health and adaptive flexibility, whether or not they consciously remember any of them.

Second, chances are you that do remember at least a few of your dreams.  If you pay even a little attention to them, you’ll notice they often revolve around your current emotional concerns.  Whatever preoccupies you in waking life—whatever you care most about—is very likely to show up in your dreams. In this way, dreams offer a surprisingly honest mirror of how you’re feeling about the most important people, challenges, and conflicts in your waking life.  Every dream you remember is an opportunity to expand your self-awareness and strive for greater emotional balance.

For pro basketball players, good sleep can open the door to a valuable source of fresh information about how they’re playing, how their bodies are responding, and how they’re getting along with teammates, coaches, opponents, fans, and the media.  Dreams are a powerful tool for identifying hidden fears and emotional obstacles that get in the way of peak athletic performance.

Third, if you actively engage with your dreams by writing them in a journal, several things will happen.  Your recall will likely increase, as you become more consciously attuned to the rhythms of your sleeping mind.  Your sense of time will expand, as you understand more of your past and envision more of your future.  You will notice the emergence of creative insights and innovative ideas that offer new ways of problem-solving in waking life.  Eventually, your dreams will begin changing as you psychologically “level up,” discovering new challenges and new opportunities for growth. You may become “lucid” or self-aware in some of your dreams, and able to interact more intentionally with the characters and settings.  You can practice dream incubation, a method of formulating a question before sleep and then observing any subsequent dreams for possible responses to the question.

Looking at these potentials in a basketball context, good sleep combined with keeping a dream journal can set the stage for developing advanced forms of mental strength and clarity that will empower players to actualize their talents to the fullest.  Dreaming can be a path towards deeper mindfulness, as Hindu and Buddhist meditators have known for many centuries.  For NBA players and coaches, who need to keep their focus laser sharp despite constant distractions, a regular dialogue with their dreams can be a grounding practice that connects them with their core motivations and ultimate center of balance.

None of this is possible if the basic rhythms of one’s sleep cycle are badly out of sync.  But once you start making an active effort to improve your sleep, you will also be improving the conditions for your dreams.  And once you start actively exploring and cultivating the immense powers of your dreaming mind, the sky is the limit.

Note: this post was first published in Psychology Today, April 5, 2018.