Dreaming of Tennis

To the best of my recollection, I have never dreamed about tennis when sleeping. I was shocked into that revelation by the number of times that novelist Scarlett Thomas mentioned that she dreamed of tennis “as usual” in her memoir 41-Love, from last Thursday. I do have vivid dreams and generally remember something about them in the morning. It is a mystery to me that tennis doesn’t seem to dominate my subconscious thoughts.

I dream about my work a lot. I suspect that the people in my career life would not be surprised by that. I also have a couple of identifiable recurring themes in my dreams. Those are probably a window into my psyche.

My first recurring dream is set during college final exams and revolves around suddenly remembering a course I forgot to attend all semester. The crazy part of that dream is that I liked school and always went to class. Additionally… I am 55 years old. While I pulled down a couple of graduate degrees while working, it has been almost 20 years since my last formal coursework. Based on the frequency of that dream, I suppose I am subconsciously petrified of not being prepared for things.

My other recurring dream is that I am driving a car, boat, or some other vehicle only to find that I am unable to brake and steer it with any precision. The internet suggests that this is a sign that things might be spinning out of control in my real life. In fact, every time I have that dream I wonder if it is an indication that it is time to pull back on something I am currently doing. This dream usually occurs during my busiest seasons of life.

I recently upgraded my Apple Watch to a model that has built-in sleep tracking. Now when people ask me how I slept, I do the geeky engineering thing of checking my data before answering. The most illuminating thing for me from my recent sleep tracking is that I previously thought I needed 7 hours of sleep each night, but the data indicates that my real number is slightly under 6.5 hours.

I used to think I had insomnia until I read a study from Behavior Research and Therapy in 2017. The study revealed that people who believed they have insomnia suffered the most negative effects of that condition. Other people in the study who had clinical indications of insomnia in their sleep patterns, but did not self-diagnose with it, were spared the majority of the negative effects. Armed with that insight, I decided that I in fact did not have insomnia and stopped worrying about it. It actually worked.

To bring this rumination back to tennis, earlier this year I wrote about another research study in “Service and Sleep Consistency.” It determined that test subjects who reported the most sleep before taking a racquet sports service accuracy test the next day performed the best. Once I started tracking my sleep with my new Apple Watch, I noticed a definite correlation between the nights when I hit my sleep target and the number of times I double-faulted the next day.

Last weekend I competed in 55+ 9.0 Nationals in Orlando. I had exactly one double fault all weekend. (That is actually a fairly shocking fact for me.) That one instance was the morning after the only night on the trip when I didn’t hit my new data-derived sleep target. Correlation isn’t causation… but I am becoming somewhat diligent about honoring my bedtime just in case.

Is it weird that I don’t dream about tennis? Are there people in my orbit who dream about tennis all the time as reported by Scarlett Thomas? What does a tennis dream even look like?

1. Insomnia identity, Kenneth L Lichstein, Behavior Research and Therapy, October 2017.