Sunday, October 7, 2012

Drunk dreams


I awoke from a terrible dream this morning that my wife had started drinking again.  I was re-living in the dream the nightmare of being with her at a concert where she was drunk and stumbling.

These dreams are not new.  The venue may change but the recurring theme is that we are to meet somewhere, but I can't find her.  When I do find her, she is drunk. The dreams are vivid and realistic.  Fortunately, this is the first such dream that I have had in a long time.

I've read that dreams about something traumatic are common among those who suffer from PTSD.  A therapist once told me that she thought that is what I had from all the years of being around alcoholics.  I don't know whether that is true or not.  I have often been baffled by my dreams though.  The ones that I remember the most are troubling and leave me with a feeling of fear and great anxiety when I awake.

I wonder if the events of the past are encrypted in the neural pathways of my brain to such an extent that no amount of recovery will erase them.  Maybe not.  I have found in recovery a way to understand the nature of my anxiety around alcoholism.  But there are still unresolved aspects that no doubt spill over into dreams.  Yesterday, I was meeting with a fellow I sponsor who is doing his fourth step (a searching and fearless moral inventory of self).  He brought up his feelings of guilt and shame towards his parents and brother.  Some pretty stark and ugly emotions are discussed in the process of recovery.  Maybe those emotions in the unconscious mind spill over into the dream world as a reminder of what I have experienced.  Maybe there is something that I can learn from these dreams.

What I realize after waking from the "trauma" of a drunk dream is that:

• Drunk dreams are not unusual for either an alcoholic or a person affected by someone else's alcoholism
• Drunk dreams aren't reality but a recycling of something from the past.
• These dreams are a part of processing emotions.
• I can use the dreams as tools for self-discovery and spiritual progress.

Here are some more thoughts on the power and purpose of dreams from Gayle Greene, Ph.D. :

When people are awakened out of REM and given a word to associate to, their associations are more novel, more original than in other stages of sleep; they "ignore the obvious and put together things that make a kind of crazy unexpected kind of sense." Dreams..... are where we bring things together in fresh, often startling ways, drawing on stores of knowledge from the past, the present, the possible, to find new associations. Dreams may help us find new patterns and create combinations that break through well-worn ruts. 

I swear, I write better when I awake out of one of those intense, thrashing-it-through dreams. Even a troubling dream, a dream that churns up stuff I'd rather shove under the carpet, even a dream barely remembered, much less understood, seems to provide some kind of fluency, dream energy, fuel for thought. Those are the days that the words and images come, tumble out so fast that my fingers on the keys can barely keep up. I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work. 

And creativity isn't just for writers or artists, it's about basic survival, about finding new paths, figuring out what to do when something goes drastically wrong on the highway, in a marriage, in a work situation. We live in a complex world. We need our brains to be firing on all cylinders; we need to think creatively, flexibly, as we negotiate relationships with colleagues, co-workers, family, friends.

Much food for thought.  I know that the visions of that dream are still in my head. Maybe by putting these thoughts down,  I have a better understanding that what was once a reality for me has been transformed into a new awareness in recovery.

17 comments:

  1. whew...that had to be a pretty intense dream man...and dreams do allow us to see things that settle on our subconscious and confront it...

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    1. It was intense and so real. Upsetting really.

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  2. I have one recurring dream. and that one is due to PTSD it does not have anything to do with drinking.it has to do with a beatting that I had many years ago at the hands of my father.it has been a while since that one showed up though,so maybe I'm finally getting over that trama.I hope that you are doing okwith your dreams.

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    1. Those dreams are so disturbing. I'm glad that your traumatic dream has not been around lately. Good.

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  3. Syd, I used to consider PTSD a lot of bunk, but now I swear I had it for years after the worst of Andrew's addiction. All the blogging/rehashing of the details was very cathartic. Also put in perspective that things were much better now.

    We all deal with the trauma in different ways. I like how you try to see where these emotions come from, what they mean today, and what your reactions are now. Life is a constant process of self improvement that hopefully leads to peace and serenity in all things.

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    1. I need to use quite a bit of recovery to get my mind back to a good place after one of those dreams. And yes, the blogging and sharing about the dream does help.

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  4. Ugh....those "drunk" dreams drain me. I'm I wreck when I wake up from one and it takes a few days to get myself back together again. The PTSD idea....I too thought it was a bunch of self indulgent drama. BUT, I think now that its a name to be put to such things as drunk dreams. lol I think that if we want to call our rehashing of our traumas PTSD then ok....because the rehashing part, the going over and over in our minds these awful events...its real and it happens. Call it what we will.

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    1. They are draining and cause me to be shaken with anxiety until I am fully awake and aware that it was just a dream and not reality.

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  5. Lately I have been having dreams where I will say something out loud. I wake myself. seems odd. Don't you feel a sense of relief? That it was only a dream?

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    1. Marcia, such a sense of relief to know that the dream wasn't real. I tell my wife that I had a bad dream. She will ask what it was about. I don't tell her because it would only make her feel bad.

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  6. Syd, I think we can never do enough work or processing to erase what has made such an impression on our souls. I haven't had a drunk dream for a long time, but I always thank God when I have one because it is a wonderful reminder of where I am today. When I have dreams about other people being drunk, I don't have those same feelings of gratitude, I wake with worry. It is a hard thing to love an alcoholic.

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    1. You are so right. I can dream about what I have done and awake with awareness but to dream about those I love being in a terrible state fills me with gut clenching anxiety. Thank God, it isn't real today.

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  7. Sharing dreams is very powerful sharing, the deep recesses that need a voice. Truly enjoy Carl Jung.
    Jung claimed that dream analysis is the primary way to gain knowledge of the unconscious mind. He says that the dream is a natural phenomenon which we can study, thereby gaining knowledge of the hidden part of our mind. The images are symbolic of conscious and unconscious mental processes.

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    1. I know that it's in there, in my mind. I don't know if it will leave but at least I know how to process it.

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  8. Oh man,

    I am like the wife to which you refer. I am the stumbler, the gutter-dweller, the woman now in recovery.

    My husband often has dreams about me which he refuses to share. I wonder if he is suffering the same deep PTSD which has created grooves in his neural pathways. I did not know there was a program of recovery for people like him (and you, of course). And it seems as though it is a program similar to mine, so perhaps he can realize some of what I go through.

    I agree that creativity is a wonderfully healing activity. I have just begun to write, and it is a miraculous tool and even redemption to lay out my stories in such a way that they are kind of sadly beautiful vignettes, instead of nasty memories. My husband cannot read them, though. They cause him so much pain because unlike you, he does not have a way out.

    Thanks a million. Best of luck!

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  9. A disturbing dream is hard to shake, although it is better than the disturbing thing being real. I'm glad yours was a dream only.

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  10. I've been thinking about this post for some days now Syd. Dreams are not static or fixed, they don't just recycle the past -- my own 'drunk dreams' and dreams about my alcoholic mother have shifted and evolved as I have changed over recent years.

    What comes across to me in this dream is not the specific content (the drunken wife at the concert) but very deeply rooted fears of abandonment and humiliation, perhaps the fear that this might happen again, that this remains such a buried part of your Unconscious you are drawn back there to reslve something. I could be wrong. I don't think the past is set like an unchanging groove along neural pathways, I think that as you change, more of that old intensity is evoked along with buried material because healing is taking place at some deep level, painful but ultimately liberating. But of course I might be wrong.

    What you're describing does not sound like the frozen loop of PTSD to me -- I know my own experience of that and I sit in groups listening to women from north Congo and Rwanda talk about what is stuck or frozen in them as trauma. This feels different. Again I might be wrong and it would be interesting to see what else the dreaming might reveal as time goes on.

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Let me know what you think. I like reading what you have to say.