Dreaming About a Relapse

What, if anything, was my subconscious telling me?

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

Last weekend, I had a dream about relapsing.

I was chugging vermouth straight from the bottle, wondering to myself whether I was drinking too much or too little. As I questioned it, I realized that I had already drunk an entire bottle of wine earlier in the day. I was confused as to why I still didn’t feel very drunk.

Suddenly, I remembered that I was supposed to be sober. Then, I had another realization, that I had been drinking all week. I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and failure. How had I relapsed? Why was I drinking alcohol again? Would I be able to quit?

That’s the point at which I woke up. It was a nonsense dream, not quite in any chronological order, following that confusing dream logic that doesn’t quite match up to any reality.

When I woke up, I was still disoriented from the experience and not quite sure what was real and what was fantasy. Had I actually relapsed? Was I still sober?

It took me a moment to feel fully confident that it had all been a dream. In reality, my sobriety was safe and intact.

What Do These Dreams Mean?

I used to have dreams like this one all the time. When I first quit drinking, I’d dream about relapsing several times a week.

Fortunately, with time, the bad dreams became far less common. As I prepared to write today’s newsletter, I dug back through my old blog posts to see if I had ever written anything similar. I found one from all the way back in 2018, when I was just reaching two years sober. [See: Dreaming About Drinking.]

By that time, the dreams had already become infrequent. In that post, I said that they were down to only occurring every few months.

Now that I’m over seven years into my sobriety, these bad dreams are rarer still. Before this weekend, it might have been years since the last time I had a relapse-related dream.

When I have dreams like this, sometimes I’m tempted to read into them a little too much. When I dream about a relapse, I immediately start to wonder if it’s a sign that I’m struggling with my sobriety.

Is the dream a reflection of my subconscious desire to drink? Is it a warning that a potential relapse is just around the corner in real life?

To put it plainly, no.

The truth is that I’m extremely secure in my sobriety right now. I haven’t had a craving in ages. I’m happy with my life, have minimal stress, and have no desire to drink whatsoever.

As someone in sobriety, I think that there’s always going to be some amount of risk that I relapse, but I don’t believe there’s any particularly heightened risk right now.

So, why was I dreaming about a relapse?

Sobriety is obviously an important part of my life, and it’s something I think about a lot, so it makes sense that I’m going to dream about alcohol every once in a while.

Relapsing in particular was on my mind recently because I was just writing about it last week for my newsletter. The fact that I then dreamt about a relapse doesn’t mean that I’m at increased risk, it just means that I was thinking about it recently in order to write that newsletter.

We tend to dream about things that we’ve been thinking about. I don’t think there was any deeper meaning to my dream than that. It was just a reflection of something that had been on my mind.

I know that to some readers, that might sound unduly dismissive. However, in my opinion, this dismissive attitude is often the best to take.

If we dwell too much on these types of dreams, they can actually end up damaging our sobriety. We can end up giving them more power than they deserve.

Our dreams are created by a subconscious process that is out of our control. When we start to overthink our relapse dreams, it can lead to feelings of guilt and failure even when we’ve done nothing wrong.

Instead, I think it’s better to stay focused on reality. I’m going to worry about what I’ve done in my real life, not in the dream world.

In real life, I’ve stayed committed to my sobriety. In real life, I haven’t had a sip of alcohol, let alone downed an entire bottle of vermouth. (Something I never did as a drinker either, by the way—I think this odd detail was inspired by a couple of my friends who love drinking straight vermouth.)

Is there anything that I can take away from this bad dream?

In the end, I think it was simply a reminder of just how awful a relapse can feel. In my dream, I was defeated and miserable. The idea of having to get sober again was completely overwhelming.

When I woke up and realized that it had all just been a dream, I felt a huge sense of relief. I spent the whole morning with a deep appreciation for my sobriety.

I can’t choose what I dream about, but I can choose how I live my life. If I continue to dream about relapsing, I’ll simply use those dreams as even more motivation to stay sober.