UFC fighter Rose Namajunas experienced vivid nightmares leading up to her recent fight against Amanda Ribas, in which she saw herself losing under bizarre circumstances, but managed to overcome the stress and win the match.
Rose Namajunas? Yeah, she’s got a UFC career that’d make most fighters green with envy. But her recent fight? It was like something out of a horror movie.
“Thug Rose” pulled off a big win last Saturday at UFC Vegas 89. She outscored Amanda Ribas in the main event. This victory ended her first-ever losing streak and marked her debut win at 125 pounds.
She’s a former strawweight champ, you see. But she’d been on a two-fight losing streak since November 2021. She confessed that this unfamiliar territory was stressing her out.
And this stress? It started showing up in her dreams. She talked about it on The MMA Hour. In these dreams, she saw herself losing three fights under weird circumstances. One of them even had her fighting a guy instead of Ribas!
Namajunas said, “Leading up to the fight, too, I have really vivid dreams a lot of the time. Sometimes I’ll visualize the fight, and for this one, I never had this happen before, but I literally saw in my dreams I lost the fight three times.”
The first two times, things were unfair. One time, she got robbed. The first time, it was like – this sounds crazy, but she was supposed to fight Ribas. Then at the last second, they switched it to a guy. She had to fight him, got beat up, and then ended up falling into a rear-naked choke and finishing the person. But they still gave it to them. Weird, right?
“The third dream that I had — nightmare, I should say — I had the feeling that I lost but I don’t remember what happened in the fight. It was just that post-loss feeling in the locker room, where it just sucks. I was like, ‘Did I get knocked out? Did I get choked out? What happened?’ So that was weighing on me a bunch leading into it.”
According to Namajunas, these dreams started about a month before the Ribas fight. They continued weekly. She even wondered if the universe was trying to warn her or tell her not to step into the cage.
But Namajunas is no stranger to vivid, fight-related dreams. She had them before her first championship fight with Zhang Weili at UFC 261 in Jacksonville, Fla. She defeated Zhang with a spectacular head kick in the first round and became a two-time strawweight champion.
Namajunas spoke to Barry, her coaches, her team, and close friends about the dreams. This helped her process them, which was crucial as she sought to avoid a third straight loss and an 0-2 mark in her new weight class.
Defeating Ribas put Namajunas back on track. She’s already targeting another pair of ranked opponents. With flyweight champion Alexa Grasso and Valentina Shevchenko occupied for the foreseeable future, Namajunas is back in the mix among potential challengers.
“I’ve always believed in myself, I know who I am, but sometimes you just doubt,” Namajunas said. “I was definitely doubting. So now I feel like I have my confidence back and I feel like now I can build off of whatever it is that I did. I’m very excited to start making plans for the future, for whatever’s next. I’m definitely going to be watching the girls [in the main event of UFC Atlantic City] this weekend, Manon [Fiorot] and Erin [Blanchfield]. I’m excited.”