Don't dream it's over

Why I can't let go.

There are good dreams and there are bad dreams. Then there are those in-between — the dreams that haunt ex-crack smokers most. The ones we have of using.

I had one the other night. I woke up feeling disappointed. Not because I wasn’t high. But because, after being clean for more than a year, the dream still rents an apartment in the increasingly occupied high-rise of my head.

Since going clean, so many new tenants have moved in. Respectable tenants like the gym, school, and mended relationships. Yet there I was, in the privacy of my own dreamscape, smoking crack.

Dreaming feels like cheating. The easiest, cheapest, sneakiest way for an ex-addict to get high. I make a handshake deal for a piece of dope, scurry back to some shadowy lair and fire up the pipe. All the while, in the back of my head, I know I’m dreaming. But I’m okay with that. If I can’t get high in the real world any more, at least let me smoke my dreams away.

I’d wake up dizzy, holding my breath, cheeks puffed full of imaginary smoke.

I’d exhale nothing into my pillow. And feel like nothing.

When I got clean, those dreams visited every night. I woke up angry, aching for the real thing. It would have been a lot easier to lapse then, too. There weren’t so many dominos to topple. All those days clean. All that hope and love my family invested in me.

Sorry, friends. Once a fuck up, always a fuck up.

But as I raised those pillars of recovery, the stakes became too high. I had invested too much in the world of the living. I thought the dreams were done with me.

Someone at a recovery meeting once mentioned ‘the addict brain’. I understood it as a part of us that’s always conspiring to survive. We may suppress it, but it abides, looking for an opportunity to trip us up.

A professor I had in grad school had a tiny addict in her head. She told me she gave up cigarettes 30 years earlier — and she still dreamed of smoking.

How sad, I remember thinking. Imagine your whole life spent pining for that one thing. Why deny yourself? You only live once. Have a damned cigarette already.

After all those years, the addict was still renting space in her head.

Maybe someday there will be a new treatment that incinerates the inner fiend. But maybe the addict brain is actually an important part of us. Like a heartbreak that — no matter what your friends say — never heals. Instead, life grows around the abyss, shaping the person you become.

If not for crack, what kind of person would I be today? A hockey dad with a two-car garage who can tie his own tie — who lives and dies without ever knowing who I truly am? Maybe that won’t be a tragedy if I don’t realize I’m starring in it.

Crack almost killed me. It will probably keep trying. It may have also saved my life.

This troublesome tenant even lured me back to school with a thirst for knowledge that I could have never mustered in my youth. Certainly, education isn’t transactional any more. I don’t just want the grade. I want to learn and understand and be better.

In fact, just this month, in a class I wouldn’t have bothered signing up for in the past, I learned about the way some Indigenous communities tell horror stories. In their tales, the monster is never vanquished. Demons are never completely exorcised, only diminished.

The ‘hero’ learns, instead, to live with the monster — to gain an understanding of its nature, and make an accommodation.

There’s an understanding that the world is light and dark and all things in between. You can’t just hoover up all the scary bits and expect to walk only in the light.

There is no eternal numb-shine of the spotless soul.

These days, when this doubtful guest appears in my dreams, I know it’s only to be acknowledged. Respected.

We’re in this together now. And together, we’ll face what dreams may come.