I have a dream...

By Matt Cooper Last updated: 9th September 2009

I have a recurring dream about golf that, when it strikes, is so vivid and affecting that, when I wake from it, I can recall every emotion I felt in stunning detail.

The dream goes like this: I start a round of golf and I'm playing well, really well, so much so that I'm starting to feel like I am going to do something special.

Then I walk to the next tee and everything goes horribly wrong.

Instead of looking down a conventional fairway I am faced with a tee shot that is so absurdly difficult it is impossible to play: either the end of the tee box is blocked by an enormous bush, or the tee box is set at such an acute angle to the fairway that no shot is possible, other times the tee markers are placed so close to a fence or backboards that I am unable to complete a swing.

Imagine trying to hit the 13th fairway at Augusta National, not from the 13th tee, but from the 12th tee, with the tee markers pointing you at the 11th green.

I always remain patient to begin with, calmly prowling the tee area for the answer to my problems, but eventually my frustration grows and I become aware that time is running out and my good round is about to be ruined.

So then I begin to panic.

I was reminded of this dream last week when I played five good holes and then walked to the sixth tee only to find the narrow exit at the end of the tee box blocked by a tree.

It was early - about 7.30 a.m. - so I did wonder for a minute if I hadn't woken up yet, but there was no question about it: I was awake and I was "living the dream" (so to speak).

Of course, I was awake and the answer was simple: the tree had spent the evening being buffeted by the wind and was slowly keeling over, so I walked around it and hit 3-wood from the other side instead of driver.

But it got me thinking again about the dream and about how last year I discovered that, rather than being the unique fruit of my (admittedly rather) fertile imagination, the dream is actually very common.

When the subject was raised with a bunch of golfing friends of mine, the number of people who had encountered the dream was astonishing, as was the remarkable similarity in the content and detail.

"I'd have layed 100/1 that anyone else had that recurring dream," said one friend, before adding: "What the hell does it mean?"

Even more oddly I very soon discovered that the dream was not, as I might have expected, confined to hackers.

1996 Open Champion Tom Lehman has the dream and in it the over-hanging branch of a pine tree is preventing him from making a backswing.

Even winning the Open three times doesn't help - Sir Nick Faldo has "suffered" from the dream too.

Perhaps you need to hold the Claret Jug five times before you rid yourself of the demons.

Err, maybe not - because Tom Watson has revealed that in his dream, "I'm boxed in and don't have room to swing. Something vague is crowding me - the gallery maybe, or ropes, or something I can't pinpoint."

The Australian Stuart Appleby opened up about his version at the Masters a few years ago - he would line his ball up between the tee markers but couldn't execute a full swing because he was too close to the backboards.

"The guys are saying: 'C'mon, hit it'," Appleby explained. "And I keep saying, 'I can't, I can't.'"

And in the aftermath of his Open and US Open double, Tony Jacklin also encountered a version of the dream in which he would find himself playing golf in the narrow corridor of a hotel.

He was in a "must find the fairway situation" but didn't have the room to swing and the walls were out of bounds.

Once you get over your amazement at the frequency of this dream and start theorising it looks - at first glance - to be quite straight-forward: all golfers I know of struggle with the idea of stringing anything more than a few good holes together, indeed most have a mental block on the idea of turning three or four good holes into five, six, seven or more.

So perhaps the trees, bushes or too-close backboards are simply dream-like visualisations of this "mental block".

But I decided to seek a professional opinion, rather than rely on a bit of half-baked armchair psychology, so I talked to Ross Banner, a psychotherapeutic counsellor, and started by asking for his opinion of my rough assessment of the recurring dream.

Ross: You're quite close to the mark. Most clans or tribes were/are susceptible to very similar fears. For example, a tribe that lives or lived near the sea would have been afraid of water-born disasters such as a tsunami. Their culture would reflect that with water deemed as dangerous and demons they were afraid of would be from and of the water. Naturally, their dreams, too, would be focussed on what they were most afraid of.

Matt: And what about the fact that so many golfers experience not just a similar dream, but one in which the details are so alike? To the layman that adds to the world-of-the-strange factor, but is it as curious as we imagine it to be?

Ross: It would actually be strange if the content wasn't so similar. And whether or not the golfer is a professional or an amateur doesn't really matter either. The key is the competitive nature of the golfer and how much they want to win what they are competing in. In dreams there is content and process, and the content is the tangible things, in this case trees and bushes. If those trees and bushes became serpents then the golfer ought to worry because it would be getting serious.

Matt: Ultimately would it be right to say that this is simply an anxiety dream - a golfing anxiety dream? And is there anything we can learn from it?

Ross: We repress fear because it is scary, but when we are asleep we cannot suppress it. If you are dreaming about something it is getting to you so take things a little less seriously (if that is possible). Look to censor the fear when you are awake. If it became a serious problem it would be something to address with a sports psychologist.

Interesting stuff and nice to know that us hackers can have something in common with the greats of the game - even if it is nothing more than sharing the same fevered thoughts when we close our eyes.

For what it is worth, I made bogey after bypassing the tree, but I hit a career 5-iron to six or seven feet on the next tee.

Only to miss the putt for birdie which, given that it was my fifth missed putt from that range or closer, makes you wonder why I don't also suffer from Tom Watson's other recurring dream (yes, the poor bloke is afflicted by two).

In his second one Tom is attempting to hole a putt on a cone-shaped green, "and the hole is at the top of the cone, so the ball either rolls back to my feet or goes past the crest and 30 feet away on the other side."

I don't want to sound glib but no-one really needs an expert to work that one out ...

Ross Banner is a psychotherapeutic counsellor, an accredited BACP practitioner, Consultant Manager of the Epsom Counselling Service and works in private practice in Surrey.

Matt Cooper