Using Dreams in Early Sobriety

Estimated. read time: 11 min

“Dream on

Dream on

I dream on

Dream a little, I’ll dream on”—Aerosmith

I love dreams! Whether they are nightmares or not, something about the magical world my mind wanders through when I am asleep has always fascinated me. I am one of those people who wake from a dream and instantly try to go back there. It never works, and the dreams fade so quickly that sometimes I forget why I want to be back in them, but I always try.  I don’t think I want to live solely in the dream world that I create, but sometimes I think it would be nice to hang out a little longer.

One of my all-time favorite dreams, which hasn’t happened in a while, is that I can fly. I don’t fly like Superman with one arm stretched out in front of me. I fly kind of like swimming underwater, but really fast. I get to do all kinds of twists and turns while zooming through cotton-candy clouds, though not pink ones. (Why that last part may be significant check out Nina’s story here.) Despite never having a had a birds-eye view of where I live, I can see the town from 100-feet in the air, and dive to ground level, inches above the grass or a sidewalk before rocketing to a safer height.

When one of my dreams turns into a nightmare, I can often change it. I see some flaw in the nightmare, like none of the people have feet. Then, I change the nightmare into a suitable dream. (Ever notice how people don’t have feet in dreams? They just kind of levitate above the ground. Just me? Okay.)

Early recovery almost wrecked my love of dreams. It all started in rehab. When I accepted that I was, even without my permission, an alcoholic, I began to have using dreams. For those of you who know about using dreams, mine are often incredibly realistic. For those of you who don’t know, a using dream is simply a dream where an alcoholic or addict dreams about being in active addiction again. In rehab, the connection was obvious. My brain was deprived of the thing it had not missed in 28 years, and my subconscious mind provided it.

My first using dream, though a little fuzzy, now, involved drinking vodka straight from the bottle. Not one of those expensive charcoal-filtered, glacier-water-added vodkas. The bottle I remember had a black label with the word “vodka” written in white letters. It tasted cheap and burned from my teeth all the way to my stomach. It was wonderful!

Then, I woke up scared that I had relapsed in a treatment center. I was confused, and could almost taste really, cheap vodka on my tongue. After a few minutes of looking around my room, I realized I couldn’t have possibly relapsed, but the feeling of guilt lingered. I ended up getting out of bed at 3:30, smoking a cigarette and getting ready for the day three hours before we were even supposed to be up. I did not want to fall back into that dream.

Being a good alcoholic, I also didn’t want anyone to know it had happened. If you read my post, “Three Words…” you know that I was winning rehab. I was not going to let anyone know I had this embarrassing issue. I went through the next couple of days, and the experience began to fade. I started to feel more secure, and then BAM, it happened again. Only this time it was different.

In this dream, I was at a party of some sort that had music playing, a semi-crowded dance floor, and an open bar. In this dream, some people at the party knew I was an alcoholic, so I couldn’t just belly up to the bar and get loaded. I spent “the night” ordering a drink and never getting to drink it. I constantly had to walk away from the bar before it was ready because someone who knew I wasn’t supposed to be drinking came into view.

There were a couple of times where actually got the drink in my hand only to set it on a nearby table when the interlopers arrived. Then, I would see someone else pick up my drink and walk away with it. It was infuriating, and when I woke up, I was pissed off and relieved at the same time.

I had just spent what seemed like hours chasing a drink that I did not want to drink, in reality. The part that made me angry is that really I wanted to taste booze again, at least in dream form. Simultaneously, I was relieved that in this dream, I didn’t relapse. Maybe, it was a sign that I was getting better.

At breakfast, one of the other clients mentioned that he had using dreams for the last three days. He said that they were so real, he could feel, taste and smell everything in the dreams. For him, the dreams were a hint that he was not ready to quit. That sent my mind whirling. What if my dreams were just signs that I would relapse?

Another person chimed in and said she had spent her entire dream trying to score drugs, but people kept selling her roaches. She would hold out her hand after giving someone money, and the person would drop a roach in her hand that would crawl up her wrist before she could slap it away. She had an intense fear of roaches, for some reason, so her dream was a dual nightmare. That didn’t quite fit my experience, but chasing a drink all night was certainly aggravating.

Someone else said he used in his dream and felt nauseous and hung over when he woke up. He viewed it as a way of remembering how horrible he would feel after a bender and the booze had run out. He said that in real life he often drove to a liquor store before dawn and suffered through the shakes until the doors opened.

At the morning’s group, it was if a hidden microphone in a saltshaker at the table broadcasted our conversation to our counselor. The counselor asked us if we had any cravings or using dreams. The seven people in the group looked around the room and said nothing.

“Stan? What about you? Have you had any cravings or using dreams?” she asked.

I really wanted to lie. I also really wanted to know if I was bound to relapse. If that was the case what was the point in being here. Then, I was caught up in which one to share. The one where I drank or the one where I wanted to and couldn’t. I didn’t know which one was worse.

“I don’t know if I have really had any cravings, but I did have a dream where I drank vodka, and it was pretty horrible.” (Splitting the middle of the road with confession and pretending I didn’t like it. Still a confession of sorts).

“Was it horrible because you drank or because you don’t really drink vodka?”

It’s a trap, my brain screamed. How do you get out of this one?

“I liked the vodka,” I began. Truth is I didn’t know why I lied to start with. There was no point. “I didn’t like how I felt when I woke up confused that I was still here and somehow drank.”

“That’s pretty normal and so are the dreams,” she said. “Dreams are just that—DREAMS. If you weren’t an alcoholic, you probably wouldn’t have using dreams.”

The group continued from there with a discussion about how cravings and using dreams are completely normal in early recovery and the important thing to remember is that none of it is a reason to relapse. I felt better after sharing my experience and hearing from others in the group. We were all in the right spot if using dreams are normal. (Years later, I looked up using dreams and discovered that no one knows why they happen or what they mean. Here is one of about 15 articles I read.)

I continued to have the occasional using dream throughout my first year of sobriety. Most were not concrete and some were totally ridiculous. In one, I was drinking glasses of red wine and eating the wine glass as I drank. Not the stems of the glasses, though, I’m not a heathen.

When the dreams would happen, I would occasionally review my days preceding the dream to see if I was under more stress than normal or if I had been in situations that could trigger a dream. Whatever the cause, I could never really pinpoint anything concrete that preceded a using dream. Slowly, the longer I stayed sober, the using dreams faded behind other dreams.

Then, when I was a little over two years sober, I had my most vivid using dream since rehab. In the dream, I was drinking my favorite spiced rum—not just one drink or one bottle, but multiple bottles in all shapes and sizes. But, I was smart and hid the bottles underneath the trash bags in every trashcan in the house, in the bin outside, in the attic and in the space between the washer and dryer and the wall.

I woke from the dream completely sure, I had relapsed. I checked the trash in the bedroom and found no bottles. Instead of realizing it was a dream, I was even surer I had drank and just moved the evidence. I was in the shower, after two cups of coffee, thinking about how I explain to my boss that I need to leave to go to an AA meeting at noon to pick up a white chip.

This would be a problem for multiple reasons. I generally don’t mention that I’m an alcoholic in recovery because I teach school. (My ex-wife fixed this problem for me, but that is a different story.) I also can’t just leave work for an hour because I teach students who have already been kicked out of school for their behavior.

Still in the shower, letting the water run over my foggy head, the thought occurred to me that I didn’t have a hangover, I didn’t reek of stale rum, and I wouldn’t need a white chip because I didn’t drink. Still, I checked under the kitchen trash bag before I left for work. I had to be thorough. Nothing was there, of course.

A few days later, I was talking to a friend who has more 26 years in recovery. I told him the dream, still a little fearful and worried. His response: “Whoo hooo!! You got to use without picking up a white chip!! How awesome is that!!”

Suddenly my perspective changed. The dreams weren’t a prediction of relapse; they were a “free-lapse”, of sorts. Instead of fearing using dreams maybe they were a little like my flying dreams, full of experiences that I won’t ever have. I mean, I’m down for flying; gravity just ain’t about all that.

Once I had that spark of hope about using dreams, I was ready for the next one. Here was the only way, to be completely honest, that I can drink with literally no repercussions. It was exciting for me. I had a sort of way to be in both worlds again. Ironically, now that I was no longer fearful, the door to using dreams slammed shut. I haven’t had one since.

I tend to blame my friend for taking away the using dreams. He, like many others I have met in Alcoholics Anonymous, made the muddled mess in my head make sense. And, while I know there is nothing that can make sense of using dreams, hearing my friend’s reaction to my experience, took away any worry and shame associated with the dream.

Have I seen the last of using dreams forever, who knows? I have talked with several people who have twice my years in recovery who still occasionally have them. Everyone’s reactions to the dreams are different. Some people see them as a reason to be vigilant. Others see them as a last gasp of an old life banished to the void of nightmares.

For me, I think of them as an opportunity to do something I will never be able to do—drink without creating a real-life nightmare for me and the people I love. If I do get the opportunity to have another using dream, you can be assured I will tell someone about it, and I will remember what Nelly says, “It was only just a dream.”

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