So there I am last night on the golf course playing a round of golf.  That is all I remember.  Sometime later I am with Michael Moore, the documentary maker,  Farenheit 911, Sicko, etc..  Both dreams are a mixture of positive and negative so it lets me that whatever the issue is inside,  I have already made some progress.

Golf is a really interesting game.   Unlike most sports where you the highest score is what determines the winner,  you are a winner in golf for the fewest times you strike the ball.   The problem with golf is that everything you do counts and when you make a mistake, it really counts against you.  I guess you could say that about most sports.   In baseball they keep track of errors,  basketball, the number of fouls you make,  American football, the number of penalities, fumbles, and interceptions, and in soccer, the number of goals allowed.    But it seems like golf is the least forgiving.

So why would I have a dream about golf?     I think that the reason that golf came into my dreams is lesson that everything counts in life.   Every shot that you make in golf counts, whereas in basketball, the only shots that count are the ones that you make.   Kobe Bryant can have an off night and miss 20 shots, but if he makes the last one, with a few seconds left to go, he is the hero.      Not so many years ago I had a boss who used to keep track of the negative things that we all did.  You could see that when he first hired someone,  he would be all excited about what the person had to offer.   The new employee would be favoured in many ways and looked upon as an asset to the program.    As time wore on and you make a mistake like hitting the ball in a sand trap or out of bounds,   he would remember the trap and then call you to tell you about it as if you didn’t already know.   Every time you were off you would hear from him.   So the result was that after having hit a certain number of sand traps in your work people fell out of favour with him.   It is like each new bad shot affected him more than it affected the employee so after a certain number he felt that he had no other choice but to get rid of them.

You may have gradually improved your score going from the 90s down into the 80s,  but all he could remember was the number of miscues that you had.      He didn’t seem to care about the overall score, only the mistakes.   And then there would come a time when he couldn’t take it anymore, so he would eliminate the person and start fresh with someone new.

Anyway, I think that this  left a bad taste in my mouth for counting because it is somehow associated inside of me with  just making mistakes and being blasted for them.     After that experience, I stopped timing runs, and didn’t like to do very much detailed data collection.   The dream tells me that it is not the counting and data collection that is negative, but it was just that one person used it in a negative way because of his own person issues.    So now I understanding that counting is good, like keeping track of workouts, etc..

The other dream, about Michael Moore, has something to do with the fact that in the face of a  negative leadership in the U.S.,  Michael Moore became  the first person that had people in other countries waiting in lines to see a documentary movie.    People don’t go to documentaries especially in movie theaters.    You may watch them on the National Geographic Channel, but not in a theater.  So he had a radical voice that went against the conservative leadership in power, which turned out to be the popular voice of the people.  So why is he in my dream?

Well, not every environment condones free expression of ideas even if the majority see them as valuable.  If they are not in line with what the leaders believe, then you are considered rebellious and the cause of disunity.    You know you are in trouble when an expression of a differing opinion is considered to be a sign that you are unhappy and creating divisions.   I think that the dream is trying to tell me something similar to the golfing dream.   Michael Moore’s movies were not for the leadership’s sake because they were not about to change their opinion in the same way that there is nothing you can do with a leader who is only looking at  and remembering your triple boggies.   The key is to communicate to ears that are open.    As Michael Moore has shown, there are a lot of open ears so I don’t need to focus on communicating with leaders who are not.