Big news: I got to compete in The Ohio Star Ball! Dreams really do come true!

In case you don’t know, the depth and quality of talent at The Ohio Star Ball is the best of the best. Literally. It’s the event that’s televised on PBS every year – basically the World Series of competitive ballroom dancing – and it’s intense. Really, really intense. Take my good friend, Karina Hooper (KH for short) for example.

Photo Credit: www.masterfile.com

Although KH is an extremely talented and successful silver level dancer, she was so anxious the night before her events, she had a terribly upsetting nightmare in which the heels snapped off her dance shoes at the precise moment she was to take the floor (GASP!) and she didn’t have a back up pair of shoes. So she had to scratch. She was still shaking when she told us about it.

Lots of us have anxiety-driven dreams when we’re under stress. When I was a springboard diver in college, I had a recurring nightmare in which I executed a simple back dive, plunged headfirst into the water and wound up just short of reaching the bottom of the pool. Unable to use my legs to push myself to the surface, I found myself frantically swimming upward, eyes bulging out of their sockets, heart pounding and the persistent thought NEED AIR NEED AIR NEED AIR pulsing through my brain. I usually woke up sweating after that one. 

My anxiety-driven dreams (a.k.a nightmares) are so vivid, it’s often hard for me to discern if they are dreams or really happening. This is especially true for the more universal dreams like the one where you find yourself naked in public or the one where you show up to take a test and discover you’ve forgotten to study. And then there’s the one where you’re standing in the on-deck area at The Ohio Star Ball waiting for your pro partner to show up only he never does and you end up dancing your waltz heat with a complete stranger because you’re too flustered to decline his offer to fill in even though you’re not especially good at following and it turns out to be an embarrassing fiasco and… oh wait. That really happened.

Big news: dreams really do come true.

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