Ian Wallace Interpretation:
Dream: Although you tend to live in moderation in waking life, you find yourself completely drunk or addicted to drugs and acting irresponsibly and out of character in this dream. You feel utterly out of control and are doing things you would never normally do if you were sober. There never seems to be enough drink or drugs and the more you have, the more you want. It may be that you are a non-smoker and find yourself chain-smoking. Even though you are coughing and choking, you keep puffing away and then light up another one.
Meaning: When you dream about drinking alcohol to excess or being addicted to drugs, there is usually some situation you are trying to escape from in your waking life. You know this situation is harmful to you and spend a lot of time thinking about how you can free yourself from it. But you keep getting drawn back into it again and again and just can’t understand why. Although the dream is about a dependency on drink or drugs, your addiction in waking life is usually to a particular person. Your relationship with this person is often romantic and, even though you feel strongly attracted to them, there is an unresolved tension between you that can get out of control very quickly. This lack of control is unsettling for you, so you may find it difficult to acknowledge whatever it is that is causing this disruption in your life. In the same way that an addict habitually craves a fix you have some deep need or desire that keeps drawing you back towards this person. Even though you know that this situation is detrimental to you in the long term, it is giving you a buzz that you just can’t seem to get anywhere else. This makes it difficult for you to maintain a healthy relationship and keeps pulling you back into addictive and destructive behaviour. Although you keep trying to end the relationship, you always go back for more and it makes you feel terrible.
Action: This dream is drawing your attention to an unhealthy situation in your waking life that you habitually avoid any confrontation with. Although your fundamental need is to be in a loving and intimate relationship, you are finding it difficult to escape the feeling that somehow you are just not worth it. Rather than openly dealing with the issue, it can seem much easier to think that somehow everything will work out absolutely perfectly for you. The less that you can depend on your self-worth, however, the more dependent you will be on other people to make you feel good.
Background: When we have an unhealthy emotional dependency on someone, we often use language describing a physical addiction. We hear phrases like ‘he’s a habit I just can’t break’ or ‘I need to go cold turkey’. This language also appears in popular song titles such as I Get a Kick Out of You, Addicted to Love, and Love is the Drug. Many addictions are attempts to fulfil an emotional need in a particular physical way but this can lead to compulsive behaviour and psychological dependency until the underlying emotional need has actually been satisfied.