“Using Dreams”

A subject that comes up regularly in my homegroup is using dreams. I don’t know how prevalent this is among other addicts, but I doubt it’s something that happens only to those who shared my drug of choice. (To any of my mainly alcoholic readers, email me—I’d love to know how often you have drinking dreams!) Marijuana addiction is becoming more widely recognized as an addiction in its own right. Meetings in other fellowships are becoming more accepting of it, and even in the rooms of AA I’m hearing more and more members share about the need to abstain from all mind- and mood-altering substances. It’s gradual, but there does seem to be a shift.

Attitudes in the medical community are changing as well. Legitimate symptoms of withdrawal from long-time marijuana use are coming to the fore and being agreed upon. The idea that pot is harmless and that giving it up is easy seems to be going away as the nature of long-term addiction to this particular substance is better understood. Of course, for those of us for whom marijuana was (is!) our drug of choice, we all respond to this news with a collective, “duh!”

One thing chronic marijuana use does is suppress the dream state. When we got off the weed, the dreams return—and they can be intensely vivid. This is, by the way, once we start sleeping again. For most long-time users, it takes a long time for our sleep to be anything resembling normal. For myself, it was easily two months before I slept all the way through a single night. But I digress.

Using dreams can be really intense. I’ve heard story after story about people who had using dreams, and while in the dream they went through the whole emotional rollercoaster of realizing they had relapsed, needed to resign their service commitments, tell all their sponsees to find new sponsors, etc. I’ve gone through it myself many times. Sometimes it’s taken me several hours to shake that feeling and file the dream away into the ‘not real’ category.

They can be scary, troubling, too. I knew a member who struggled with them, was so tired of them. He eventually reached out to his higher power and prayed for release. As it turned out, he never had another using dream again. How’s that for giving something over? I’ve never been bothered by using dreams to that degree, but I certainly had tons of them when I was brand new to the program. As time has gone by, I’ve had them less and less often, but I do still get them. 

Just the other night, I had one. I can’t tell you how long it had been since the last one. I was watching a movie and thinking about, “damn, people are smoking weed all OVER this thing!” Then, somehow, I was in the movie and the joint got passed to me. I decided (in the dream) that I’d been clean and sober long enough that it would be okay. And I wanted to see if I could take ‘just one’ hit. So I did, and I passed it on to the next person, momentarily proud of myself for being able to control my use.

Then it hit me (if you’ll pardon the pun) that, once again, I had been unable to say ‘no’—that it hadn’t even occurred to me to say ‘no’. I was still very much an addict and the fact that I’d just taken that hit was the ultimate proof. The dream devolved into the usual feelings of remorse at losing my clean time, having to give up my commitments, and on and on.

I can’t claim to be glad it was only a dream. Mostly I don’t feel too much about it one way or another. If anything, it was interesting to see that, yes, I do still having using dreams from time to time. I guess I’ve had enough of them now, and done enough dream analysis in general, to know if/when they’re significant of anything. This one wasn’t, so no big deal. And for that, I am grateful. 

I’m not sitting here obsessing about whether my disease is working against me—I know that it is; it always does. I’m not worried that I have a secret compulsion to go out and get fucked up again—I know I do. It’s not a secret; this is what it means to live with the disease of addiction. There will always be a part of me that wants to get loaded. But I can accept this about myself, and work the program, and when I do those things I know that I don’t HAVE to get loaded. It is possible for me to live a clean and sober life. I’ve been doing it for nearly four years now.

And I can know that a using dream is just that—a dream.