From the Desk of The DBeazy One-Man-Think-Tank

It started in the fall of 1978. The West Marion Trojans opened the football season against the Columbia Wildcats.  I was a sophomore and was starting in my first high school football game.  I think I weighed about 130 pounds, but that may be stretching it a bit. As far as West Marion was concerned, it was a huge game. If the Trojans had played the Wildcats before, it had been several years, and this was before the state of Mississippi played for a State Champion in Football. I remember that West Marion was a member of the Apache Conference, but I’m not sure of the name of the conference in which Columbia High belonged.

Columbia was stacked that year. Led by Quarterback Mike Landrum, who later spent a few years with the Atlanta Falcons, they were big, strong, fast, and touted as the team to beat. Then there was West Marion High. Located less than 5 miles away, separated only by the Pearl River in Marion County, Mississippi.  The Trojans were led by second-year coach Royce Foster, who was coming off of a dismal first-year performance with only a win or two.

After the build-up, the preparation, the hype, and hoopla that led up to it, Friday came, then a pep rally, the marching band, and cheerleaders. Like a vapor, the events of the day were gone and I found myself standing on the number 20 on the Trojan side of the field. Hearing a whistle followed by a thud, I looked up to see a football coming in my direction. Almost in shock, I fielded the ball and I remember thinking, “They did this shit on purpose. They kicked the opening kickoff to the smallest guy on the field.” Realization of this fact simultaneously scared and pissed off this 14-year-old, and I took off running. Now I mentioned early how big and fast the Columbia Wildcats were, well, the Trojans were huge and though I wasn’t big, it might have worked to my advantage.  I fell in behind Trojan blockers, and we moved up the field.  There was pushing and shoving, reaching and grabbing, but no one could get a grip on me. I followed my blockers, and I remember at one point I was running backward before getting turned around and making for an opening. Once in the open, I gave it all I had, picked up speed, sidestepped a defender and found the sideline.  Finally, way on into Wildcat territory, a defender walked me down and lowered the boom, sending me off the field and into the cheerleaders. The first face I saw was a senior economics teacher, Mrs. Ella Leflore. She was picking me up and yelling. Everybody was attacking me, pounding me on the back, then a tall, lanky, red-faced Coach Royce Foster was in my face, screaming something to the tune of, “Way to go, Bracey,” though I’m pretty sure there were some choice superlatives in his dialogue.

The game was a good one.  The Trojans won the battle, but eventually, lost the war on one of the most spectacular high school football plays I have ever seen. The Wildcats had brought everything they had, and by the fourth quarter, Mike Landrum took off to the short side of the field, rounding the corner, and I saw one of our defenders advancing with tremendous speed and with a good angle to knock Landrum out of his shoes, and he almost did. But not before Landrum launched a pitch to his trailing tailback.  I was across the field and running in the direction of the play.  Almost 42 years later, I remember the ball just floating in the air and the Wildcat tailback ran through the ball, taking it in his arms and scoring the winning touchdown.

Despite this story sounding a lot like a football story, I assure you it is not.  Consider this an extremely long introduction or build-up to the story I am leading to.

From that late summer night back in 1978 and my fateful kickoff return, a recurring dream began and continued to haunt my slumber for years and years. At first, I thought it was just a football dream, but later in life, as I matured and learned more about human psychology, its meaning became clearer to me.

As always, the scene opens with me standing under the lights of a football field.  My heart is pounding, nerves strung as tight as a banjo string in an igloo. I’m set to receive the opening kickoff, and all of a sudden, the ball is right in front of me, spinning on the ground. I approach it, squatting a little to pick it up, while surveying the defenders approaching, dodging blockers and getting through. With a concentration on their approach, rather than the ball, I inadvertently kick it a bit, causing it to escape my gathering clutches to the end that my hands clasp each other, rather than the ball. I can’t find it, where did it go? The coached advice would be to find it, fall upon it and take the loss. Yet the object of the game in its simplest form is to advance my team’s position, and a lesson that football teaches as in life, if you cannot get the job done, there is always someone waiting to give a go, so I keep trying. This time, I approach the ball more deliberately and with caution to avoid the previous mishap, but I can hear the footsteps.  I can hear the cracking sounds the protective pads make when contact is being made between players, and I look up to see, bracing myself for a hit, and the ball wobbled away again. I catch up to it; pick it up, and all of a sudden it is like I’m in quicksand. Of course, it is like the dream of falling in that I wake up before I get hit.

A similar recurrent dream started later in life when golf was my sport of choice.  As in the football dream, I would dream about being in a tournament and when it is my turn to “tee off,” I would realize that I didn’t have a glove, or I would look down and find that I was barefooted.  Then I wouldn’t have a golf ball or at least the one that I had would be damaged and it would be unplayable.  The list gets ridiculously long of the things that prevent me from starting and in the process, holding up the players in my group, and even more stressful, holding up the entire field behind us. This dream also comes sometimes with a baseball game scenario.

Sometimes, during periods of financial stress, another variation of the dreams interrupts my slumber, only these don’t involve sports. I had a dream not long ago and I am assuming that it is due to the financial instability in the world today as a result of the pandemic in which we were at the time, expecting, and now, enduring.

This dream comes in different flavors, but are almost always loosely related, or tied to something valuable to me. The dream opens up with a nurse practitioner friend of mine. This guy would fall into the category of closer than an acquaintance, but not a guy who would be called upon to serve as one of my pallbearers, or at least our relationship isn’t at that point today. But this is why it is strange that he would inhabit my dreams. The scene opens with the two of us standing behind a large U-Haul truck in the parking lot of a strip mall in Columbia, Mississippi. The contents of the truck are not expressly given, but as dreams go, I just know that inside is my 6-month old Harley Davidson Ultra Classic motorcycle. It is, as my sister refers to it, “my mistress,” and is truly one of my greatest loves. And as dreams go, we are aware that a sudden and unexpected cold front was coming. So David and I, (David is the nurse practitioner) are suddenly inside the truck and onto the road that runs alongside the strip mall and while there is a slight hill that one encounters when going in a northerly direction from there, in my dream, the hill is not only much steeper, but we almost immediately encounter icy road conditions. For some reason, I’m driving and I’m in a helluva hurry, possibly because I think we are going to need some speed to get the big truck up the hill. Momentarily, I consider not proceeding, but the dream wouldn’t have worked any other way.  At the top of the hill, the road levels a bit and we encounter a short slope downward with a stoplight and out of nowhere, traffic.  Not just a car or two, but everywhere. There were cars seemingly going full speed, vehicles were sliding in every direction, there was a pile-up here and a car in a ditch, a car sliding past the U-Haul, yet surprisingly, I still had traction. Of course, as one might predict, I am forced to attempt a slow-down, but it was not to be. I scream, “Hold on Dave,” and the horror begins. Our slide begins and we barely miss one of those station wagons with the fake wood on the sides. We pick up speed, and it is obvious that the intended path straight through the intersection is not going to work, leaving my only option to try to make a right which would take me on a sharper downward slope, as well as a road which slopes down to the left as well. We cross a rise, tires screaming and we are out of control. The weight of the truck doesn’t allow the turn that I was attempting and the result is a 180-degree spin and ending with gravity pulling backward and then sideways and stops us ever so gingerly in a ditch, without a scratch to the truck or my girl in the back.

In reading a story about dreams, one might expect to hear about the old standard of dreams. That being a dream of showing up in underwear while everyone else is fully clothed and somehow, nobody notices. Though I’ve experienced that one on many occasions in my life, it is not one closely related to stress as the dreams I’m sharing here.

The final type of stress dream is what I call “the college dream.” Here, I find that I am enrolled in classes at Louisiana State University. I find myself in these dreams dealing with one of two scenarios. One would be that I am about to take my final exam, and haven’t darkened the doors of the class for an entire semester and am in a near state of panic because I know that I am undoubtedly going to fail most spectacularly. The second one is by far the most prominent of these dreams. In this version, I again find myself, again for whatever reason, going to class for the first time at some point almost midway through the term.  Of course, I know I am woefully behind and I find myself wondering if I even realized that I had enrolled in the class in the first place. I am also terrified of the embarrassment of having to explain why the hell I waited so long to decide to make it to the class.

I’ve talked about what seems to me to be a very active dream life. I don’t know if I dream more, less, or the same as the rest of the population, but I do know that my twin and I were sleepwalkers from an early age. From time-to-time, I will still sleepwalk. Just last week, I woke up one morning in a sleepwalking state and almost went outside in search of Angel, a Golden Retriever that we had years ago. But I will save the sleepwalking stories for another day.

I’ve done some research on dreams and such in my life, but find it hard to determine the real scientific studies from those of the self-appointed “medium” types. Though DBeazy has a lot of good common sense, I don’t profess to have the intellect of Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein. But interpreting the three classes of dreams that I have shared does not require a whole lot of thought. Or at least that is my opinion. You might consider that I’m only days short of a breakdown after hearing of the nocturnal workings of DBeazy’s mind. That may be the case, but here are my thoughts.

Stress is the kicker and stress is the killer. The dreams that began as a teenager playing football are a direct result of the pressure back then that I felt to win, to be the best that I could be, and to overcome obstacles like size, average ability, and lacking the natural talents that winners possess. But that is only an interpretation of the dream in its infancy. As I grew, as I matured and even entered adulthood, the dream evolved some as an outlet. It was an indicator that in the light of day, I was in over my head.  When the dreams move to the golf scenario, well, I believe that these came in times where I might have overcome the constant feeling of being in over my head, but generally felt ill-prepared to meet the challenges and responsibilities that I faced on a routine and even daily basis.

Truck dreams are easy to interpret.  The one that I shared is very typical and as I said, this type of dream is often a direct correlation of a financial situation.  The truck dream speaks of my inability to control every situation that life throws at me.  The birth of children, a change in careers, a divorce, 9-11, college tuition, Hurricane Katrina, more college tuition, the great pandemic of 2020, all are HUGE examples of times when a man feels the excess pressure of life and easily feels that while he was holding it together, barely, there are events that tend to bring down the full weight of the universe and place it on the shoulders of one human being. The dream screams of how quickly a life can be uprooted and spins out of control, to the point that any wrong move might spell financial disaster.

Then there are the “college dreams.” These dreams are closely related to the “out-of-control” dreams. To me, though, the difference is that while one is a product of something that the dreamer has no power to prevent, the other is a direct result of the path that the dreamer is on and a path that is wrong for said dreamer at that point in life. The “college dream” should serve as instructional. Whenever I have these dreams, I think that it is time for me to get my head out of my ASS, realize that I’m not where I need to be and evaluate where I am.  It is the time at this point for me to establish a waypoint out in the future and to embark upon whatever journey is required to reach that goal. It also helps to know that even though the new waypoint may turn out to be wrong as well, it is still moving away from a place that I know to be wrong.

Dreamers, I guess we all are. I realize that some dreams are merely fragments of our day, our week, or even our life. But DBeazy believes that some dreams are a result of those thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we press down, bottle up, and try not to confront. I guess ultimately, they have to come out. So, in my case, they appear in my dreams as mail in a cosmic “inbox;” things that need my attention.