Golf nightmares are a laughing matter to Dave McElhinny.

As I stepped up to address my golf ball, it gently fell off the tee. “Go ahead, take a mulligan!” one of my playing partners said. I quickly re-teed the ball, got in my stance, calmly took the club back, and the driver head got caught on the edge of a fence. I had to move my ball to get free of the interference, stepped back, got ready to hit yet again when a gust of wind blew it off the tee.

It was getting embarrassing. I quickly re-teed the ball, jumped into my stance, drew my club back, being sure to keep my head down and hips calm. Just as I prepared for my downswing, the shaft on my club became tangled in some overhead branches. Frantically, I wiggled, pulled and yanked until the club got free, tried to take an abbreviated swing just to get the darned ball in motion, when it unmercifully tumbled off the tee again.

The other three guys in my foursome, a group of serious golfers, had become noticeably agitated. Worse yet, a crowd had now gathered as several foursomes were now being held up by my inept ability to just hit the stupid ball.

I dropped to one knee and began desperately trying to put my Pinnacle on the tee, but it wouldn’t stay. Finally, I gave up on the tee and tried to hit it off the grass, but a suddenly uneven tee box that I hadn’t noticed before kept the ball rolling down to my feet where I couldn’t get a whack at. Everybody began shouting at me to move it along.

I felt the prickly heat of such an uncomfortable situation creep up my back.

When I awoke, my heart was pounding and it took several seconds to realize that I was having a nightmare ... no, make that a golfmare.

It’s a dream that I have every so often, one that I was sure was unique to me. That is, until the time when, after a day of golfing, I was sitting around with a handful of other players and decided to tell them about my ongoing woes on the links of Dreamland Country Club. To my surprise, their faces lit up, and they began to explain eerily similar tales of scream-inducing golf dreams.

One guy said he simply swings and misses over and over. Another said he just can’t pull the trigger; as if Franz Kafka were his caddy, he’s stuck perpetually standing over the ball, frozen, unable to swing. Another guy talked about how every time he gets ready to swing, his pants fall down.

Their inadequacies aren’t simply on the tee box. Two of the guys told stories about their inability to finish off short putts. The ball keeps rimming out as they sweat and swear, watching their scores go up with each missed effort.

Our dreams has become a hot topic among the group I regularly play with. Each of conducts our own amateur psychological diagnosis, trying to find out what these dreams symbolize mean.

Using my good friend Google, I explored the topic further. I was surprised to discover that even the professionals have similar nightmares.

Stuart Appleby and Tom Lehman, a pair of PGA stars, have each reported ongoing dreams of stepping up to the first tee and not being able to swing, trees, bushes, buildings and other immovable objects that restrict the backswing.

Aree Song, an LPGA player, tells of waking up screaming as she tries to putt when giant black bats attack her.

Even Tom Watson, one of golf's all-time greats, is not immune. He tells a story about putting on a green where the hole is raised up like a cone (sort of like the mole hole in miniature golf). Each shot either ends up coming right back to him, or goes past the hole and ends up at the other end of the green. He also regularly has dreams of being boxed in, unable to swing. And this guy has won five British Opens, two Masters and the U.S. Open. If he can’t solve the problem of the golfmares, then how can a weekend public golfer be expected to deal with it.

I soon realized this problem is much too large for me to tackle alone, so I enlisted the help of a professional.

I turned to Dr. John Rohar, a psychologist from McMurray, for some enlightenment. “There is a high correlation between things you experience and think about during the day and what you dream about at night,” he says.

“Performance anxiety dreams are very prevalent, particularly with athletes. But the dream doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with golf. Perhaps you are having negative thoughts about work, paying bills, an illness in the family or any number of things. At night, while sleeping, your brain may pick one thing as the focus of that anxiety and, as an avid golfer, that can be playing golf.”

“We live in a very competitive society with a lot of stress. Dreams are a way that your mind deals with all the hustle and bustle of your life. Don’t read anything more into it.”

“People try to interpret their dreams, such as if you play bad golf in your dream, you will play bad in real life. Not true. Uneasy dreams are the result of worry and not some kind of foretelling doom.”

That’s good news to me because if dreams did offer a glimpse of the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to walk into my house one day and find a grizzly bear, wearing a Red Sox cap, sitting on my couch playing the ukulele. (At least he wasn’t holding a five-iron). •