On Fantasies and Fighting

I once had a dream I took out Clay Guida with an armbar. 

As dreams go, it was quite coherent; we were in the octagon, duking it out in something between a sparring match and full-on fight, until it ended in the triumph of my unexpected skill. As in other dreams, like those where I am speaking another language fluently, my jiu-jitsu was fluid, expert, exhilarating. But unlike the languages gushing forth from the recesses of my sleeping brain, in real life I have never studied martial arts and probably could not even explain how to execute an armbar. Equally puzzling was that I don’t think about Clay Guida in my waking hours; that is, I don’t think he’s especially hot or a big jerk or anything else. The experience of fighting him was neither hostile nor erotic but methodical and structured.

So unlike Josh Koscheck, whose cocky ass I would love to kick if I could, or Georges St. Pierre, who I’d be happy to wrestle for fun, or Ronda Rousey, who genuinely scares the hell out of me, Clay Guida is not someone I have strong opinions about one way or another. So what gives?  

It turns out that Clay Guida was not my first fight fantasy even if he was unique. I frequently have dreams I am fighting other people both verbally and physically. Invariably they are people with whom I have issues in real life. Figures from either my past or present become the targets of emotionally-charged confrontations: grade-school bullies who left surprisingly deep scars; mean girls who spread cruel and unfounded rumors; colleagues who behave like self-absorbed and entitled royalty. Some of them have to take repeated beatings or verbal assaults, like a boy at school who claimed to have a lifelong crush on me but behaved in an abusive and misogynist manner and whose older brother sexually assaulted a close friend of mine. On her behalf and mine, and for all women treated badly by men who confuse love with domination, I have kicked this guy’s ass to the moon at least a dozen times over the years. (In reality, there is only one person I have ever hit in the face, and that too was an abusive man who richly and completely deserved it).

But lest you imagine I am exercising a deep-seated hostility towards men, plenty of women have featured in my fighting fantasies.[1] In addition to the mean girls of yesteryear there are the prima donnas and divas and manipulative narcissists or sociopaths of today who create sometimes intolerable levels of stress, frustration, and anxiety. These are women with whom I do not deign to clash by day but by night benefit from a hearty lashing at my hands. And yes, I typically wake from such dreams with a sense of satisfaction, inchoate though it may be and perhaps inappropriate to admit.     

Reflecting on these dreams – from my bona fide defeat of MMA master Clay Guida to my nocturnal adventures in self-redress – I am led inevitably to larger musings about fantasies of fighting and what purposes they serve or meanings they hold with respect to the dynamics of interpersonal and social conflict.

Many researchers, journalists, and informed observers have remarked on the role of fantasy and myth in conflict. Chris Hedges, in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), has written achingly, brutally, about myths and fantasies inherent in the constructions of the self and other in violent conflict. Myths and fantasies are embedded in the autochthony or origin narratives of all nation-states, though usually the violence at the center of this process is mythologized as something not-violence. So the genocide of Native Americans by the expansion of settler colonialism, for example, is reconstructed in the secular mythology and fantasy of tolerant pilgrims sharing food and goodwill with docile “Indians.” The death of soldiers in war is sanitized and glorified as selfless and courageous sacrifice; appearing like the ultimate and perhaps most offensive fantasy for those, again like Hedges, who have witnessed mortally wounded soldiers crying out for their mothers as they face imminent (and ultimately unnecessary) death. And myths and fantasies themselves lead to and sustain war, from weapons of mass destruction to the lurking threat of Shari’a law taking over the state of Tennessee.

I realize I am guilty here of conflating disparate categories, such as conflict, aggression, violence and war; something in previous posts I have described as flabby and undisciplined thinking. However, as they all belong to a broader family of human dynamics, in some cases I think such conflation (or lack of differentiation) can be useful and generative.

Fantasies and myths – and dreams, too, as Jung reminds us – are symbol systems. As such they express in condensed, imprecise, and extremely powerful ways the deeper “realities” of social life. They betray the fissures and conflicts that we suppress, compartmentalize and gloss over as we muddle through together, interpersonally and collectively. Despite the very real conflicts we feel with individual others as well as both latent and manifest conflicts occurring on larger scales, it is a fact (often overlooked) that humanity spends far more time repressing and resolving conflict than actually engaging in it. And not all conflict, of course, is violent. 

So for instance (and this is purely hypothetical, of course) I may perceive a conflict with a colleague I strongly dislike and with whom I have tried – repeatedly, to my frustration – to improve my relationship. Concluding that she is unwilling to collaborate with me on the hard work of getting along, I now avoid engaging with her at all because it would seem to increase the chance of escalating our latent conflict to a manifest one. And escalating the conflict would just make my daily life more difficult. When I imagine attempting to dialogue with her I feel more agitated. Frankly, I would like to grab her by the neck, throw her back up against a wall, and growl that she needs to stay out of my way or I will rearrange her face in ways her plastic surgeon can’t.

This fantasy, it turns out, feels eminently more satisfying than any of the real scenarios available to me (including the one in which I actually do grab her by the neck and body-slam her into a wall). And it therefore contributes to my ability to avoid escalating the conflict in real life. I will never assault her physically and probably not verbally either. I am far too nice, professional, dignified and peaceful for that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t imagine it, and it also doesn’t mean that the imagining of it doesn’t play an important part in my ability to not actually do it. So fantasies, myths and dreams underpin our ability to engage in conflict and also may prevent us from doing so.

What then of my dream about Clay Guida? This fantasy was one in which structure was central (the disciplined rules of MMA) and emotion was lacking (I don’t hate or love Clay Guida one way or another). Within the firm and clear parameters of clear rules and norms, aggression and the use of violent force became their inverse: they were not-conflict. 

Within an MMA bout, paradoxically, conflict is defused as fighters channel aggression in way that often leads to greater mutual respect and rarely spills out into extra-curricular beefs. In daily life, though, as in war (which increasingly operates without so-called “rules,” not even formal declarations of such), conflict, aggression or violence are rarely self-limiting. That is, engaging in a violent confrontation with my colleague would not resolve our problems but would merely create more, just as sending drones to bomb terrorists into oblivion will not bring peace but further war.  

My dream about taking Clay Guida out with an armbar was unique and I have never had another one like it. But it pushed me to reflect more deeply on the many dreams I have had in which I cheerfully kicked someone’s ass and really meant it. I think it helps buttress my argument that MMA is, like other forms of ritualized and structured violence, ultimately a force for defusing conflict because it is inherently self-limiting. Whereas the actual exercise of violent conflict, especially in contexts where rules and norms do not abide, is self-perpetuating. 

Fantasies, dreams, and myths – at least mine, in this rather indulgent exercise in auto-ethnographic theorization - are a symbolic window into our deeper social realities and our psyches. As such, they can tell us something profound about ourselves, our own societies, and possibly humanity as whole.       

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[1] They are not MMA fighters, because plainly those women would beat me to a pulp in ten seconds.