Lucid Dreaming - A By-product of Years of Substance Abuse
My mom asked me today for an update on how my recovery was going, which is a great improvement from accusing me of using drugs if, by mistake, I stumble in front of her. I told her that I am really beginning to appreciate the clarity of life these days. But after that I did mention the fact that even though I have been clean for quite some time now I am having extremely lucid and often terrifying or detrimentally sad dreams which often end in me waking up to a pillow soaked with tears. Now this has been a pretty normal topic of discussion with my mom but usually it is when I have relapsed and stopped using and have what is known as "using dreams" in my first 30 days.
Using dreams are a phenomenon that almost all recovering addicts experience in early recovery, usually for up to 90 days, but these dreams I have been having lately are every night and have nothing to do with using but tap into the very far recesses of my subconscious and reveal past friends, encounters and experiences I have completely forgotten about, or so I thought.
Now what I am trying to get to the root of is what brings on these incredibly vivid lucid dreams? I have about half a dozen books on dreams which all try to make sense of your dreams, but really none of the books have even received more than a second look from me. The books like "10,000 Dreams Explained - How To Use Your Dreams To Enhance Your Life And Relationships" by Pamela J. Ball primarily operate in the way of almost a dictionary, if you will, and say for instance if you had a dream about water (dull) it would have a list of reasons why you are dreaming about water... Yeah, the problem there is my dreams are a lot more detailed than just "Water". I once woke up and had such an impactful dream that I wrote a 4 page recollection of the dream within 20 minutes and then looked into one of these books for an answer and was disappointed to say the least.
So what does a period of narcotic abuse do to our brains that make them produce such vivid, lucid and sometimes incredibly emotional dreams? That is a mystery that I will most likely be looking into for years to come, but I like to think I can sometimes put meaning to them.
For instance, one of my dreams was me trying to protect my family, who were inside our house, from an evil man or entity, whatever but every time I tried to attack this negative energy I would try to throw a punch and move towards the oppressor but my legs would not walk and my punches would fall to the side of my body almost like a rubber man. No matter how hard I tried I could not fight off this evil and eventually it overtook me and I woke up.
Now when I tried to put that into context all I could think of was it was me fighting my addiction but not being able to land a blow. At the same time I was trying to divert the pain and negativity away from my family but could not.
Another quick example is further along in my recovery when I was at least content with life at the time but when I would dream I would imagine myself literally finding someone or something that has caused me harm and for once the punches would land and I would beat it to a pulp...Maybe finally fighting my demons? Who knows...? Since then I have had more and more dreams with crazy settings and people from my past that I could recognize so easily but in real life haven't thought about in a decade. The dream world is definitely an interesting subject and I hope to learn more about it.
