COLUMN: If only I could live my dreams
I hate my alarm clock.
No, it’s not what you’re thinking. I don’t hate getting up, and I’m not one of those people who think the sun shouldn’t be allowed to rise until noon. I’m actually a pretty big morning person. Just ask my wife. She says I’m way too chipper in the morning and then physically jams a knee in my back to get me to leave her alone.
The reason I hate my alarm clock is because it ruins my greatest sporting moments. As the name of this column implies, I am not a very athletically talented individual. The greatest athletic achievements of my life include playing on a youth soccer club in second grade and pretending like I had a clue what was going on when I played church ball.
Believe it or not, my greatest sporting moments happen while I’m asleep. I’d like to say I have some superhuman ability that allows me to body build in my sleep so when I wake up in the morning I suddenly have a finely toned six pack. Instead I wake up and shake my belly in disgust and try to console myself with the fat-kid myth of “why would you want a six-pack when you can have a whole keg?”
My athletic talent is really refined in the dream world. Lately my dreams have been focused on sports. This isn’t all that unusual since I write about sports for a living. I spend all day thinking about sports and who’s playing who where and what the scores of the day were. These thoughts can stick in my head all day long so that by the time I actually go to sleep I haven’t thought of much else.
That isn’t good for me. I swear I have OCD or something because once I get really focused on a thought, it follows me into my dream world.
When I was younger, I had a Tetris game for my GameBoy and would play it all the time. Sometimes I would get so involved in this game that when I fell asleep all I would dream about all night long were falling blocks.
Being a Tetris fan, this wasn’t too bad, but the problem is, the pieces would never go in the right place so the pile kept stacking up as I frantically tried to fix it. This sure makes for a restless night. Sometimes I would wake up more tired than when I fell asleep.
But I never thought I would become so absolutely obsessed with sports that I would dream about them. This has actually turned out to be a pretty good thing though. Because while in reality I’m pretty pathetic at most sports, in my dreams I am a world-class athlete.
A couple days ago, I had a dream I walked onto the football team here at USU. I was excited about this because I’d always wanted to play football but my mom would never let me because she was afraid I would get hurt. I don’t see how since I’m not that little of a guy, but that’s a whole different story.
In my dream I played safety, but I was never considered good enough to start. But then one game our team was getting slaughtered (no surprise there) and some of the starters got injured. The coach reluctantly put me in.
On the first pass I got a great tackle and the fans were excited. The next play I pulled down an interception. The crowd went crazy. From there on out, every time the opposing team’s quarterback threw the football, I would intercept it and return it for a touchdown.
The dream didn’t include just one game though, it proceeded through the rest of the season where I played both offense and defense and scored a whole slew of touchdowns, thereby single-handedly turning around the entire season and making it to a bowl game.
When I woke up I knew I had to be dreaming and it was all too good to be true. I mean come on, anybody who knows me knows I couldn’t possibly intercept the ball and run it all the way back for a touchdown. Geez, who was I trying to kid?
Then again the other night I had a dream I was racing my sister in a half marathon. Believe it or not, this dream is more implausible than the first one. First off, my sister is on the track team and runs for fun. I know, I don’t understand it either. Secondly, I’ve never ran any distant greater than a mile. Running the mile takes all my energy and takes twice as long for me as it does for most people.
Anyway, I kicked trash in this race. I gained some considerable distance when we were running down a hill and ended up winning the race by a landslide. The strange thing about this race was I was actually enjoying running because for some reason I didn’t have to breathe. I wish running was that easy in real life.
When I woke up I was feeling all pumped up and was about to call my sister up and taunt her about beating her in a race, when I looked down and saw I wasn’t in shape enough to run to the bus stop without getting winded. So I flopped down to the floor and did a bunch of sit ups instead.
Looking back on these dreams, I see I have some issues. First off, I should probably see somebody about my OCD. Next, instead of just dreaming about being athletically talented, I should go work out and get in shape.
Nah. I’ll take my chances with wishing upon a star. After all, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
Seth Hawkins is a junior majoring in public relations. Comments and suggestions can be sent to him at 3:30 in the morning so he can see if he can read e-mail in his sleep as well. Contact him at sethhawkins@cc.usu.edu