Dream: Basketball On The Field

Last night, I dreamt that I apparently was a senior in high school, deciding to play on the basketball team. Interestingly, when I looked for my shoes to attend practice, I discovered that I didn't have basketball shoes, only running shoes, which I wasn't able to find. Although I started out in a gym, gathering my things for the practice, when I started playing with the team, we were outside on a field that looked like a soccer or football field. And the team members were throwing around a ping pong ball, which was being blown about by the wind and often going over a steep embankment where the leveling process done when the field was created ended and the ground dropped down to the lower level it originally had. Since the ball kept going over the side, I was trying to get to the ball before it went over the edge to return it to the other team members. I wasn't moving very fast, noticing that my quickness was compromised and the ball kept going down the embankment. I retrieved it from below once or twice, but I was moving slowly enough that the team members started running down the hill themselves to get it.

I am interested in the way the sports images in my dream were mixed up; playing basketball with a ping pong ball on a football field that does not have basketball hoops. The team members were all young men, and the lack of quickness I displayed in my response to the ball going toward the steep embankment would indicate that I am experiencing the effects of aging, unlike my experience of being a senior in high school. The running around on the field and the way the ball tended to roll off the playing field seemed more like soccer than any of the other sports I mention, although I've never played soccer. And I felt fatigue when I chased after the ball, like my body did not respond very quickly to my impulse to chase after the ball. I hesitated to run up and down the embankment because it seemed physically taxing, which is not the way I played sports when I was 18 years old.

My dream shows me trying to play a game that I don't understand with young men with whom I identify as peers. It makes me think of the kind of situations I face in my life when I unconsciously let my inner child awareness come to the foreground of my consciousness. I tend to experience confusion and fear when that happens because that is my inner child's experience of life. It seems that my dream is an exploration of the experience of going unconscious and trying to live as if I were a child again. It doesn't work very well, because I start to notice that I feel confused and I am not able to sustain the illusion for very long. I get tired or bored of the game, then wake up to my adult consciousness. That's good news, all around.