I have written several columns over the past few years about golf, and one about dreams. Believe it or not, the two subjects merge for me in golf dreams.

Maybe I am atypical as a golfer or as a dreamer, but I have golf dreams fairly often, and they tend to follow a general pattern. The rule of thumb is that in most of my golf dreams, I rarely get to hit more than one shot, and sometimes not even one.

In the standard scenario, I am teeing up a ball when something happens to cause a delay. The ball might roll off the tee. The ground might suddenly change contour. Or I might become aware that there is a wall or a tree right in my backswing. Or maybe some people have chosen just that moment to appear in the fairway in front of me. The net result is that I either don’t get the shot off at all, or I hit a bad one, and shortly after that the dream ends.

I recently had two interesting golf dreams. In each, I made only one shot. In the first dream, I was playing with my old buddy Steve. Seventeen years ago he passed away unexpectedly. He still shows up in my dreams, probably because of the untimeliness of his death. Steve hit his tee shot and then I hit mine, and mine was to the left of his. We found our balls and then Steve pretty much disappeared from the dream while I got ready to hit my next shot.

My ball had landed in an area that looked like a beach volleyball court, but soon it somehow wound up even further left on an actual beach that was crowded with adults on blankets and in lawn chairs and with children playing by the ocean. As I got ready to hit my next shot, I rather presumptuously asked the people to move aside briefly so that I would not hit them. A lot of them began to move to my right, but I asked them to move toward the water instead because the green was toward the right. Politely they accommodated my bizarre request, but then as I got ready to make my shot, the ground started changing levels and I decided not to hit it at all. I apologized to the crowd and picked up my ball, and they reacted more understandingly than I deserved.

I went back to the beach volleyball area and prepared to hit my second shot, but now I saw several large, open casement windows between me and the green. I noticed two women on the other side of the windows and asked them to move for just a few moments. They explained that I should not hit through the windows because their enormous kitchen was on the other side and they had a lot of china and wine glasses that might get broken. I apologized to them as well and picked up my ball and went looking for Steve. I considered just recording my score for the hole as a par, but I figured a bogey would be more fair, since I was about to hit out of the sand and the green might not have been reachable even under better circumstances.

In my other recent noteworthy golf dream, there were two large teacups, each of which contained a piece of fruit at the bottom and a golf ball at the top. The fruit looked like a cross between an apple and a pear, but for some unexplained reason, I thought the fruit was a pineapple. I knew I faced a challenging situation, and I made the odd club selection of driver for the shot. I hit one of the balls out of the cup, but the cup barely tipped over and the ball rolled just a few feet away. Nevertheless, I was glad to be out of the cup, and I felt confirmed in my earlier suspicion that the driver had probably been the wrong club choice.

I’m sure that sports psychologists could waste a lot of their time and my money trying to analyze my golf dreams.

John McColgan writes from his home in Joseph.