A Different Kind of Drinking Dream

Over those past couple of weeks which were so hard for me I was having a different kind of drinking dream. Normally my drinking dreams are I'm in some kind of social situation and all of a sudden I realize I have a drink in my hand and I am horrified. I feel awful that I have to start my sobriety all over again and admit to my sponsor that I had a drink. During those hard couple of weeks though, my dreams were different. In them I would be actively and consciously drinking. I would realize at some point that I had been drinking 1 or 2 drinks a night for a while, maybe even a few weeks. I knew that my AA peeps and my sponsor would not approve, and I chose not to tell them. I chose to keep it a secret, thinking that my time in AA had taught me enough that I could control my drinking in moderation.

I woke from these dreams terrified they were true. I had to actively think back about what I had done the night before to ensure I hadn't drank. I had to remember the past few weeks before I knew it was just a dream. These dreams bothered me much more than my regular drinking dreams, because of my attitude. I feared they might be a precursor to going out on a binge. As a friend recently said at a meeting, "There is no such thing as a slip. You think the drink before you take it."

As I wrote in my last post about my way of dealing with the situation I'm in, I found myself feeling much better. The act of telling lifted a huge weight off me. I suppose it's similar to the way I feel better after sharing at a meeting. Facing my feelings by speaking them out loud (or typing them out loud as the case may be) frees me of them.

I haven't had one of those dreams all week, but I did have a different kind of drinking dream. I dreamt that my father died. I was at my grandmother's house with my parents and my children, it was Christmas Eve, and he suddenly died. I was screaming and crying and so incredibly sad and my mom just sat there. In this dream, she didn't care that he was dead. As I freaked out I thought to myself, "I don't know what to do with this despair. Maybe I should drink." Then I thought, "No, dad wouldn't have wanted me to throw away my sobriety because of this."

As disturbing as that dream was, I woke feeling glad that I made the right choice in it. No situation, no matter how awful, will ever be made better by a drink.