Barber: Anxiety, tension invade athletes' dreams

Levi Leipheimer was supposed to be riding in the Tour de France, cycling’s greatest stage race. So what was he doing back in the United States? How had one of the sport’s most distinguished athletes, an Olympic bronze medalist and three-time winner of the Tour of California, allowed this to happen?

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I’m doing the math, like I’m not gonna be able to fly back to Europe and make the start of the next stage,” recalled Leipheimer, the longtime Santa Rosa resident. “And just feeling like I’m screwed. Because even if I did make it, I’ve just traveled across the ocean twice.”

The stress became unbearable. Then Leipheimer woke up. He had been dreaming again, re-entering a recurring nightmare that overtook him at the strangest times, when he was far from the Alpine roads of France.

Professional athletes are tested in ways that most of us can only imagine. Their jobs frequently involve pain and risk of injury. Public failure hangs over them like a swaying piano, adulation whispers to them like an untrustworthy friend. It makes sense that the emotions that consume their days would also invade their nights.

“This job takes so much of our time, so much of our thought process, that we’re always thinking about it,” Raiders offensive tackle Austin Howard said. “And it does come over into our dreams.”

Over the past nine months, in locker rooms and over the phone, I asked dozens of athletes about their dreams. Not daydreams. Not aspirations. But the shadow plays staged in their minds after they fall asleep at night.

To be honest, many couldn’t remember any of their dreams. This, too, makes sense. The daily physical exertion of pro athletes leaves them exhausted - for some, too tired to remember what they thought about during the night.

Among those who did recall, many put sporting spins on dreams common to us all.

Leipheimer’s horror story would fit into this category. Who hasn’t dreamed about being late to a college exam, or a job interview, or a flight? It just so happened that the cyclist’s receding horizon was the Tour de France. Giants pitcher Jeff Samardzija used to dream that he was late to a meeting - when he played football at Notre Dame.

“I’d always wake up with the sweats, feeling like I’m late or something,” Samardzija said. “You know, 3 in the morning. But baseball is a little too laid back, I think, to have those late dreams.”

Here’s another archetype: Have you ever dreamed that you are trying to run, and your body just won’t work right? Like you’re moving in slow motion? That one sucks if you’re dreaming about rec-league softball. Now imagine you’re Kim Conley, Santa Rosa native and two-time Olympic runner at 5,000 meters.

“I wouldn’t say a lot. But I do have them sometimes, and it’s something a lot of runners relate to,” Conley said. “It happens to all of us on occasion, and it’s more of a nightmare. You dream where you just feel like you’re running through sand, or you’re not hitting the ground beneath you, and people are running past you.”

Another twist on a common dream is one that my wife can certainly relate to. I do the jerk in my sleep. Kara and I will both be drifting off when suddenly I am in freefall, and my muscles spasm in a full-body jerk. Five minutes later I’m fast asleep, and the wife is still trying to de-escalate her heart rate.

So many athletes reported variations of this.

“Like, I never showed up to practice naked or anything like that. But I literally would dream of sequences,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said of his NBA dreams. “And it would always be like actual sequences in a game, and the ball would be coming my way and I would wake up trying to catch the ball.

“Literally, I’d be asleep and I’d go like that,” Kerr continued, making a flinching motion with his arms. “Somebody was passing me the ball. ‘Jeez, go back to sleep.’?”

Raiders long snapper Jon Condo has similar experiences. He dreams of football, but can remember only the snippet that shakes him from sleep.

“A lot of times when I have dreams, I wake myself up if I get hit,” Condo said. “And it’s not like I can think of a specific play or anything like that. It’s just like I know I’m playing football, and I get hit in the side, and I actually react to it.”

When he isn’t trapped 6,000 miles from the Tour de France, Leipheimer has falling dreams, too. And we have to assume they are more intense for someone who has broken numerous bones in tumbling from bike to pavement.

“Big crashes in cycling, I’m sure you’ve seen it, like in the Tour de France - like, big pileups, where there’s multiple riders. When you’re in the middle of that, it’s like you’re sliding and you’re just bracing for impact,” Leipheimer said. “And that’s the moment that I would dream about. Not hitting the ground, but about to hit the ground. And you wake up and you feel like you’re a foot off the bed, you know?”

Shawon Dunston, a Giants coach and a veteran of 18 MLB seasons, is a jerker, too. But only some of the time.

“I have dreams of baseball,” Dunston said. “My wife tells me. She says I jump in my sleep. And then when I wake up she told me, ‘You was playing baseball.’ She said, ‘What’d you do?’ I said, I struck out. Struck out or made an error. Then she’ll see me sleeping and I’ll be smiling. She’ll say, you playing baseball? I say, ‘Yeah, I had a couple hits.’?”

By now, Tracie Dunston can practically call Shawon’s nocturnal play-by-play based on his body language and facial expression.

Some dreams are more off the wall, of course. Your subconscious doesn’t always make sense. Why should an athlete’s?

For example, Howard, the Raiders lineman, has had dreams in which he is playing alongside his oldest brother, Marcel, a moment that never came to fruition in real life. Sometimes they are side by side at, say, right guard and right tackle. Other times they are bookending the line at the two tackle positions.

“He’s eight years older than me, so this dream is unfathomable,” Howard said. “But for some reason I’ve had it a lot, maybe because I always thought it’d be kind of cool.”

Mark Melancon, the Giants relief pitcher, had been with the club just a couple months, and had yet to take the diamond with teammates, when he dreamed that ace Madison Bumgarner was out of whack.

“His mechanics were completely off,” Melancon told me at Giants FanFest on Feb. 11. “And I could see what was going wrong. … That was a real dream. I kind of woke up in a panic, like ‘we need to get this guy going.’?”

Maybe it was a premonition. About 10 weeks later, Bumgarner threw his mechanics completely out of whack by crashing a dirt bike and messing up his pitching shoulder during an off day in Colorado. The ace pitcher has not taken the mound for the Giants since.

If visions of the future seem improbable, rest assured that they happen to some athletes. Zaza Pachulia, currently a free agent after helping the Warriors to the NBA championship in June, said he rarely remembers a dream. But when he does, “Most of the time it happens just the way I dream,” the Georgian center noted. “I mean, if I have a good game in a dream, the next day I have a good game.”

That’s nothing compared to Kevin Jorgeson’s flash-forward. Long before he and Tommy Caldwell won renown by successfully free-climbing the Dawn Wall route on El Capitan, Jorgeson carved out a niche solving highly technical boulder problems.

The Santa Rosa native was outside of Bishop, working on a previously unclaimed climb called Ambrosia, when he encountered a riddle. On one of his final training runs on rope, a central piece of rock detached from the boulder.

“I had to completely rework the first half of the climb,” Jorgeson said. “I had to change it from where I’d come in from the left to where I’d come in from the right, and I was getting stumped.”

Until he went to sleep in the bed of his truck and had a dream in which he found, as he put it, “a little microscopic edge” of rock. Keep in mind that Jorgeson had spent almost no time on that portion of Ambrosia.

“I dreamt of a sequence through that section, and I went back with a ladder to get a good look,” he said. “And sure enough, it was there.”

If the dreams of Giants backup catcher Nick Hundley come true, it’s no accident.

For two or three years now, he has used visualization techniques to improve his game.

“If I’m catching (a pitcher the next day), I visualize catching that person,” Hundley said. “Or certain situations that might arise in the game where I have to make a play. And then whoever the starter is the next day that we’re facing, I’ll go through at-bats. I try to put myself in the stadium we’re playing at. I’ve played in every stadium now, so I can be pretty specific with it.”

Hundley runs these images through his head during the last 10 or 15 minutes before he falls asleep at night.

“So if that carries over into your dreams, so be it,” he said. “I mean, you’re repetitively thinking like that as you sleep. And there’s a lot of studies behind that.”

Visions of the future may be spooky, but dreams of the recent past can be more dramatic.

Several athletes spoke of reliving the day’s action when they settled down to sleep that night. The most intense recollection belonged to Simon Pagenaud.

Pagenaud, the eventual 2016 IndyCar champion, was racing at Texas Motor Speedway last August when, with a few laps to go, he found himself in a rare four-wide sprint alongside Graham Rahal, James Hinchcliffe and Tony Kanaan. Running in a crowd like that at 220 miles per hour can prove deadly in open-wheel racing. Pagenaud, the series points leader at the time, opted for caution and eased off of the accelerator.

Apparently, his brain wasn’t done processing the race. Fueled by adrenaline, he had trouble nodding off that night.

“I guess I finally fell asleep, and all of a sudden I heard ‘four-wide! four-wide!’ In my head I heard ‘four-wide!’?” Pagenaud said. “It was so vivid that I woke up saying, ‘Fordsy, just relax, just relax.’ Fordsy (Mike Ford) is the name of my spotter. And all of a sudden I realized I was in my bed, sitting up in the bed.”

There were minor distortions in the dream version of the Firestone 600. For one, Pagenaud had a strong car in the race at Fort Worth. Not so in his head that night.

“I was dreaming I was actually losing the rear end, and I had a lot of muscle tension in my dream,” Pagenaud said. “It felt just like real. I felt like my lower back was tensing up, and I felt like the dream things were getting out of control a bit.”

Further, Pagenaud awoke just as Ford was yelling “four-wide!” in his helmet radio. In real life the driver had surrendered the lead.

He has no idea what he would have done in the dream. Maybe he would have battled Rahal, Hinchcliffe and Kanaan for the victory.

Pagenaud said he has developed a deeper level of concentration for races in recent years. It helps him win. It does not help him sleep hours later. That wasn’t always a problem for the Frenchman. Starting with his days in go-karts as a teenager, he had many dreams of future glory.

“I have dreamt of racing Formula One, I have dreamt of racing IndyCars and winning races like I do now,” Pagenaud said. “So it’s quite incredible to be in that position these days, and actually living your dream. I’ve said it on TV, I’ve said it everywhere. I’m literally living my dream. And it’s an incredible feeling.”

A feeling from which Pagenaud hopes he will never awaken.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.