Dallas Bragg, a chemsex recovery coach, explains that using dreams are a normal part of recovery for men who have sex with men. They come in three forms: daytime fantasies, twilight memories before sleep, and full dreams featuring drug use. These don't signal relapse, but attaching catastrophic stories to them can cause harm.
All right, so what does it mean when you have a using dream? Big question I get from the guys in my program. Hey, I'm Dallas. I'm a chemsex recovery coach for men who have sex with men. So using dreams come in several forms. Sometimes in the middle of the day, when your mind drifts, you can go into a fantastical daydream. Sometimes when you're in the twilight state, right before a nap or right before bed, your mind will bring up chemsex memories that seem like a dream. And other times in the dead of sleep, you have some sort of dream where you're either using or even offered drugs. All of them are normal. None of them mean anything detrimental, which is the point of this video. So often clients will catastrophize using dreams and place a story on them like, I'm not doing enough in my recovery, or I'm about to relapse, or I'm in a bad place. When you add that kind of energy to a using dream, then it does become detrimental. I don't want to minimize how it feels. You know, once you come out of a using dream, it can be like quite scary and quite confronting. However, Chemsex has been a large part of your life, so of course the subconscious will bring up scenarios around chemsex. And especially if you are making your recovery a part of your everyday conversation, it is just a dream. Don't place any other narrative on it than that.
