Sinning in Your Sleep

Last night I was at the Polo Lounge, which should need no introduction. But for those who haven’t had the pleasure of making its acquaintance yet, it’s the fabled bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel that has been a purveyor of all things fine and liquid for as long as I’ve been alive. I was celebrating my birthday with a few friends, all of us dressed up for the occasion because, despite how long it’s been around, the Polo Lounge is still a place to see and be seen. The pianist was playing my favorite song at my request—“Just One of Those Things” by Cole Porter. Everything was perfect except for the fact that my father wasn’t still alive to be toasting me. So I picked up my martini and toasted myself.

I caught a glimpse of my image in the big, smoky mirror behind the bar and oh my, I looked fine. So did my friends, so I toasted them, too. My martini—my third, but no one was counting—was dangerously close to empty by then, and the bartender scurried over to top me off. It was a very dirty martini, just the way I like them: briny to the point of being liquid salt. The bartender made a big show with the cocktail shaker, his practiced hands a swagger of confidence. Huntley was his name and he lived up to it.

“Thank you, Huntley,” I said.

“My pleasure, Miss.” He’d been there so long, he knew to call every woman celebrating her birthday “Miss.” Never “Ma’am.” Reality doesn’t intrude at the Polo Lounge, unless you invite it in.

I tossed back my hair and stole another look in the mirror, just as I brought the glass to my lips. And then—why, God?—I woke up.

I was immediately flooded by guilt and remorse. How could I possibly have thrown aside 22 years of sobriety so lightly, so flippantly, as if it were “just one of those things?” I’d endured agonies of cravings, yearnings, longings, desires—and somehow overcome them by sheer grit and determination and multiple rehab stints and countless AA meetings. Why would I now, after all this time, have finally succumbed to temptation? What could I have been thinking? That was the problem: I wasn’t thinking. I was blithely ignoring my history—the humiliation of public drunkenness, the illicit hit-and-run affairs, the repeated DUIs, and for what? A moment’s vainglorious satisfaction?

My alarm clock went off, a shrill and only semi-effective reminder that I was awake and it was all just a horrible, ghastly dream…Or was it? What did I really do last night? I called a friend on my mental health support team, even though he lived in a different time zone and I knew I’d wake him up. “It’s just a slip dream, Terri,” he said, groggily. “You’ve had them before, and you’ve survived.”

“Slip dreams” is the AA vernacular for relapse dreams, and he was right, I’d had them before. But why now? And what did it mean? Where was I slipping up?

Still shaken, I poured myself a cup of coffee and googled “relapse dreams.” A slew of sites came up, mostly from rehab centers. But there, in the midst of all the ads, was a reassuring slice of science: a study from the Massachusetts General Hospital Recovery Research Institute, published in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. It said that relapse dreams are quite common in recovery, especially for individuals who have had more severe clinical histories of alcohol and/or drug abuse. Of the 2,000 participants in the study, over a third reported having relapse dreams after entering recovery.

Okay, at least I felt like a known statistic. But then the lead author of the study concluded that “very little is known from an epidemiological standpoint about the prevalence of such dreams, their relation to relapse risk, and how they decay with time in recovery…Given that these dreams can be deeply unnerving, more information could help treatment providers, those in recovery, and their families know what to expect going forward.”

So I was back to worrying again—why now, why me, what did it mean? On the one hand, I was pleased to learn that the study had found no definitive correlation between a slip dream and actual relapse. On the other hand, “very little is known…” Other interpreters of the study have concluded that dreaming about relapsing—and then waking up horrified—is actually a good thing. It’s a kind of virtual reality rehearsal for confronting future situations where temptation might exist, and that the shock and relief of waking up sober may initiate a renewed commitment to recovery.

It’s a murky area, dreams. I’m not really sure what my subconscious mind was trying to tell me, but I’m certainly going to try to find out. With substance abuse, complacency can be just as deadly 22 years later as after the fact. So, I’m going to shore up my recovery program by attending more meetings, reaching out to others in the know, talking to my therapist, and journaling about my anxieties. I’m not going to let my disease sneak up on me if I can possibly help it. I’ll go to the Polo Lounge again someday, of course. But I’ll damn sure be awake.