The Nightmare and the Monster

Oh, just so you know, sometimes I scream bloody murder when I’m sleeping.

I have to tell you this because otherwise you might think that something is actually wrong. Nothing is wrong. It’s just what I do—sometimes. Now, I will have no memory of this alleged eruption of terror that occurs, say, two or three hours after we’ve fallen into peaceful sleep. But, since it’s been reported to me throughout my life with the kind of remarkable regularity and consistency that core scientific principles are built around, I have no reason to disbelieve that it’s something that actually occurs in this world.[1] Ever since the golden days of middle-school sleepover parties—what with their hours of playing Super Nintendo, two liters of Mountain Dew,[2] Doritos in a big bowl, and (hopefully) a late-night glimpse of Cinemax’s soft-core adult programming—people have been telling me about (let’s call it) my “peculiar habit.” And it’s not an isolated scream either, like the way that bare-chested men in movies wake up from their possibly-foreshadowing nightmares. I guess the only way to describe it would be as a screaming fit—but less like a childish temper tantrum, and more like a man who watches as his worst nightmares materialize into reality before his eyes.

It’s hard for me to describe in any detail what it’s like from my perspective, since whatever it is that happens eludes memory, and, for all I know, even direct representation in my consciousness. At best I hold onto lingering suggestions of terror, the same way we all do when we spend a day almost remembering a really powerful dream we’re pretty sure we had the night before. This explanation, as you might imagine, is not very satisfying to those who are shocked awake by the panic and fear that someone else’s gut-wrenching terror-screams can induce. Not unreasonably, these people want a window into my soul, to know what I saw. I guess it’s the same reason that most people stare at horrible car accidents as they slowly drive by them. I don’t and can’t do that, because it freaks me the F out. I don’t always want to know the seriousness of the truth; I’m plenty happy to relegate experiences of the inscrutably awful aspects of reality to my unremembered dreams.

Because even when they are bad, dreams are still also and essentially magical things: in them, you feel for real what you know for a fact it is impossible to feel. I know what it feels like to fly with my mind, because I’ve done it countless times in dreams more vivid than reality. Based on my experience of dreams that I can remember, it seems to me that the major difference between the good and bad ones is not so much their content (though obviously that matters), but rather the extent to which you are comfortable with how that content appears to you. We all have dreams of everyday life—ringing up customers, saying have a nice day, tidying our desks—but more often than not dreams take on aspects of the fantastical, the impossible. In situations like that, it makes a big difference whether you can take in the fragmentary, incomprehensible materials, and treat them as if they were the mundane, unremarkably comprehensible details of everyday life. The same is true of what we might call the highlights-reel moments in sports. Because, more often than not the highlights-reel of any day’s Sports Center is going to display something so manifestly unbelievable that for a moment you are completely fucking dumbfounded. Like, whoah, what did I just see? Call this the Neo-Effect.

This is why the experience of watching the most incomprehensibly stunning moments in professional sports can approach the type of psychological discomfort that bad dreams inspire you with.

What is so bad, and magical, about bad dreams, is that they involve vivid sensual immersion into something that defies comprehension. We look into the “palpable obscure” of the void, and see it the way we never could in waking life, because to see those things in everyday life would give rise to the type of skeptical reaction that is almost completely banished from dreams. Or, rather, if we do begin to feel the weight of skepticism, suspension of disbelief is shattered, and we either wake up, transition into a different dream, or, for the lucky few, become lucid-overlords of the dream world, controlling all aspects of the environment and personal sensation. When we don’t give in to disbelief, we instead experience something like absolute belief at the same time as we experience the denial of comprehension. It’s not quite a paradox—but that doesn’t mean it’s any less troubling.

If we don’t usually think of our experiences of watching sports in this way, it probably has more to do with the convenient shortcuts our conscious mind allows us to take in our everyday perceptions than it does with the actual nature of what we are watching. This, in fact, is one of the central contradictions of a culture that feverishly desires to see displays of excellence in sports as part of our everyday life: the more normal it is for individuals to channel their genius into sport, the more “normal” it becomes to see incomprehensible displays of skill; that is, the more likely we are to see the abnormal. But most people don’t want their everyday life—usually associated with things like domestic peace and middlingly mundane stability—to be assaulted by perceptions that significantly exceed the expected. Thus, in the same way that anyone adjusts to something new, we normalize the abnormal. But we do so at significant risk to our aesthetic experience of sports, because there is no one, or stable, way in which the best moments in sports display novelty. It’s not like moving away from home for the first time and adjusting as one set of stable social relations are displaced by another equally stable set of social relations. Rather, it’s more like watching as God created each new thing in the universe (which was itself also a new thing).

It’s not uncommon to think of God in creation in roughly the same terms as those we use when we think of an artist in creation: they each bring forth something totally new out of nothingness or chaos. Obviously, we’ve stopped caring much about the avant-garde developments of official art culture.[3] On the other hand, we don’t usually think about the artistic genius that true greatness in sports requires. That’s a shame, I think. And, it’s why I am so fond of this recent commercial by Nike called “Nightmares Never Sleep.”

This commercial reminds us of something that is easy to forget: sports, and their best athletes (like Dwyane Wade) are monstrous and terrifying. And not just to their opponents, but to their audience as well. We see this not only when the audience flees as if from a sudden explosion,[4] but also when the camera is pointed at the court from the perspective of the abandoned stands.

Even better is how the commercial transitions from normal to terrifying. First, it is not insignificant that Nike and the medium of television commercials are both at this point in human history completely normal things to experience. We expect to see them, and are usually not disappointed. Nike, unlike other stable brands such as Walmart and McDonald’s, has chosen to use their dominant cultural position not to give us bland advertisements that operate entirely within the comfortably known, but to take us to the darker places of human consciousness.[5] Second, the way the commercial looks in its first seconds is roughly approximate to the way that televised basketball normally looks. Perhaps it is more stylized, featuring somewhat impossible camera angles to capture the rebound and subsequent pass to Wade, but this augmented perspective is slight enough to barely register, if at all. Once the viewer’s attention is hooked, however, and their expectations about how basketball normally looks are at least partially activated, the commercial rapidly transitions to a more terrifying register. The framing becomes more cinematic; time slows, and seems to anticipate the coming action as much as the opposing players; Wade’s shadow grows in a way that both terrifies and transfixes those who don’t run; his eyes dilate, the floor boards shatter when he dribbles the ball, and blizzard-like winds rush over the court (even though the players remain loose and agile); skin bubbles like lava; the image of Wade (now a dream terror) moves down the court, and convulses into a Cerberus-like phantom before splitting into three actual, if shadowy, basketball nightmares; one of the three forms he takes is the jump man himself—MJ. You can only see this last detail for a second (actually less than a second), thus, it registers in consciousness the same way that all the materials of bad (or even good) dreams do: barely, and therefore with the greatest amount of suggestive force.

We move from the normal to the nightmarish in 60 seconds flat—and in half that time for most of the commercial’s television appearances. I’ll let you tell me how this is supposed to sell products. For me, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable, perhaps in a vaguely good way (like how you feel immediately after waking up from a nightmare—relieved that it’s not real, impressed by its magical force). Moreover, I feel the way I sometimes do (without recognizing it) when someone, say Dwyane Wade, fucking obliterates his opponents on a scoring drive to the net. Unbelievable I’ll say, probably out loud even though I’m watching the game by myself, when what I should be doing is screaming uncontrollably. Unfortunately I only do that when I’m completely unconscious.

Nike, apparently, is really interested in showing us just how strange and terrifying sports really are, because they’ve featured this aspect of sports in several of their recent commercials. Take, for example, this Adrian Peterson commercial, ostensibly released in order to sell Nike Pro Combat athletic gear.

Terrifying, right? It’s terrifying in the same way as an episode of Lost is (including its soundtrack, which reminds me of the loud low-brass slides featured prominently in the perpetual moments of confusion in Lost). Its “story,” insofar as there is one, operates at the edge of comprehensibility, and is comprised of mere suggestions and unexplained provocations. Here’s what I mean:

Our first sense that we are watching something stranger than a stylized black-and-white football battle hits at around the 5-second mark, when the mood of the music takes a turn for the eerie in the same moment that we catch a glimpse of a strangely-featured face, partially obscured behind the facemask of a football helmet. None but the most die-hard Adrian Peterson fan will recognize the man behind the mask at this point. That’s because this commercial depends on the power of hints. Our only visual hint about the strangeness of the strange thing we are seeing is displayed in a moment almost too quick to comprehend. From there, even though the soundtrack constantly forces us to question this perception, it’s mostly a recognizable football commercial, where one player distinguishes himself as the best one on the field. That is, until the end—which pays off our curiosity with some more unexplained hints.

As Peterson walks off the field, amidst the rage of disappointment of the losing home team, he pulls off his gloves, almost angrily, and casts them aside as if to say I’ve washed my hands of this. (Perhaps he has been coerced to greatness?) His unexpected mood is made more mysterious when in the locker room the camera stops to take an extended look at his face, which wears an expression that is both surprisingly rich and furtive. It’s not quite disappointment, nor is it meditative. It’s a look into the distance, the way you might look after being aggressively cross-examined by a hot-headed interrogator for 12 hours. His posture is stooped not just with exhaustion, but something that nearly suggests defeat. The total image appears to be one of despair, but also somehow more than that. We get the sense that a great deal of the story has not been given—which is to say that the commercial evokes a sense of a whole, even though we are only given a mysteriously fragmentary part (perhaps not even the most interesting part).

All of this is complicated, and made nearly incomprehensible, by the unexplained hexagonal skin pattern covering Peterson’s body. It seems as if it matches a similar pattern on his pants, but that barely explains anything. I’ve deliberately not looked into the actual product that this commercial is promoting. I want to understand the viewing experience as if it were separable from the profit motive that is clearly at the (however obscured) root of this commercial. So, from my perspective, supposing that the skin matches the pants because the commercial is trying to suggest that Peterson inhabits the product, or that the product has taken over his body the way a virus does a host, it doesn’t make me feel like buying technical athletic gear by Nike—it makes me wonder about the back story. How and why did all this happen? And why does Peterson seem to be so defeatedly distant from it? I feel bad for him, and interested in him. To invoke another TV metaphor, it’s like how you feel right as the first segment of an episode of The X-Files breaks for commercial. But that’s all this is—a commercial. There is no resolution, no plot development, no greater understanding reached or even suggested. With only 90 seconds to work with, the commercial has chosen depth of experience over breadth of narrative. It’s not a necessary result of the commercial form, but obviously this kind of suggestive fragmentation lends itself well to short intervals between regular television programming. Kind of like the short intervals of magic unconsciousness between waking life, when, sometimes we experience something so haltingly unknown that it short-circuits disbelief at the same time as it defies comprehension. In situations like that, it’s probably best just to scream apples and bananas, and forget about it in the morning.

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[1] Unlike evolution and global warming, which are just theories.

[2] By the way, what the fuck is this?

[3] Somehow performance artists pulling sharpies out of their asshole as they force-feed themselves extra-large mouthfuls of Twizzlers has not caught on.

[4] Their terror seems to exceed the action on the court, a clever use of dream logic—what are they seeing that defies representation?

[5] And oh how I wish other companies would follow suit—the commercial can be a beautiful, and challenging medium, if taken seriously by gifted artists.