Vivid Dreams After You Stop Drinking, and Dreams About Drinking

You wake at 5am with your heart going. In the dream you were at a party with a glass of wine in your hand, halfway down it before you remembered you'd stopped. For a few seconds it feels real. Then the relief comes. If your dreams have turned long, loud and strange since you cut back or quit, there is a well-studied reason for it, and it has to do with the sleep stage alcohol was holding down.

Alcohol holds back your dreaming sleep

Dreaming is most closely tied to REM sleep, the stage where your eyes move quickly under closed lids. Alcohol pushes REM back. In lab studies, drinking before bed delayed the first REM period of the night at every dose tested, and moderate and high doses cut the total amount of REM across the night.

Your brain doesn't give up on REM. Once the alcohol has been cleared, in the second half of the night, sleep researchers often record a REM rebound: longer REM periods than normal.

Why the dreams get louder when you stop

If you drank most evenings, your brain spent many nights adjusting to a drug that pressed REM down. Take the alcohol away and that pressure lifts. In studies of people stopping after heavy drinking, the share of sleep spent in REM rose during withdrawal and often went above their normal baseline. This is the REM rebound on a bigger scale.

Vivid dreams and trouble sleeping are both common complaints in early abstinence. More of the night goes to the stage tied to dreaming, while sleep in the first weeks is often short and broken.

This isn't limited to people who drank very heavily. In lab studies where healthy volunteers drank every night and then stopped, some studies found a REM rebound above their usual levels, though others didn't.

Dreams about drinking

Dreams where you drink, often by accident or without deciding to, are among the most unsettling parts of cutting back. They are common. In a national US survey of adults who had resolved a significant alcohol or drug problem, 31.9 percent said they'd had a drinking or drug-using dream since. The typical version is a relapse scene, often with disbelief inside the dream that it's happening. On waking comes a jolt of fear and guilt, followed by relief once you realise it was only a dream.

What do they mean? Nobody knows for sure, and dream interpretation remains contested. The researchers behind that survey point out that these dreams have not been linked to a higher risk of going back to drinking. People mostly describe relief on waking, and the dreams aren't reported to increase the urge to drink.

Drinking dreams were more likely in people with a more severe drinking or drug history, such as those who started young. They also became less frequent the longer someone had been in recovery. If one leaves you shaken, treat it the way you'd treat a craving during the day: notice it, name it, and let it pass. Our guide on how to ride out a craving covers the same skills.

How long it lasts

The research on timing is patchy and comes mostly from people who stopped after long periods of heavy drinking. In that research:

• Acute withdrawal lasts about one to two weeks, and REM rebound is part of it. In one small study, REM dipped for the first two to three days and then rebounded by days five and six.
• The way REM was spread across the night had returned to normal by three months of abstinence in one study. In another, the amount of REM had normalised by nine months.
• Drinking dreams fade gradually. In the US survey, each extra year in recovery made it more likely that a person's last drinking dream was months in the past.

If you were drinking moderately, there is little research to go on, and nobody has mapped the timeline week by week. Most sleep problems in early abstinence do improve with time.

What helps

Keep your wake-up time the same every day, weekends included, and don't sleep in after a bad night. A consistent wake time is one of the core parts of the best-tested treatment for insomnia, and the NHS recommends it too. Stop tea and coffee at least six hours before bed, and avoid a big meal late at night.

Don't use a drink to quiet the dreams. Alcohol holds REM back while it is in your system, and REM rebounds once it has gone. In lab studies, tolerance to alcohol's effects on sleep stages builds within about three nights, so the dampening wears off fast.

If a drinking dream rattles you, remind yourself how common they are and that they haven't been tied to going back to drinking. For the wider picture of how sleep changes, see sleep, energy and fitness without alcohol, and if the problem is lying awake more than dreaming, read can't sleep after you stop drinking.

When to see a doctor

Talk to a doctor if your sleep is bad enough to affect your days for weeks on end, or if nightmares are making you dread going to bed. The NHS suggests seeing a GP if you've had trouble sleeping for months or it's affecting your daily life. Poor sleep in early abstinence is linked with going back to drinking, so it's worth getting help with.

Dreams happen while you're asleep. Seeing, hearing or feeling things that aren't there while you're awake is something else, and it can be a sign of alcohol withdrawal. If you drink heavily every day, stopping suddenly can be dangerous. Talk to a doctor first. Seek urgent care if you or someone with you has severe shaking you can't control, confusion, seeing or hearing things that aren't there, a seizure, or a racing heart with heavy sweating.