Thank you Etta for the beautiful poem. I have not had a drink for 24 years and yet I still obsess about insomnia. In my drinking days I used alcohol to get to sleep and it only made things much worse, waking me up at 2:00 a.m. or so. Now I sleep but I sometimes have alcoholic dreams and at times my dreams, even the nonalcoholic ones, are filled with anxiety. I once had a psychiatrist tell me that when even a "normal" person dreams he comes as close as he will ever come to a mentally unstable state. I gather he was referring to the fact that, when dreaming, we are really not in control and are thus vulnerable to our anxieties. All this is worse, I recall, in the early stages of recovery. So all I can say is hang in there. It may never really go away but it does get better. And the good part about a bad dream is that you can wake up and say to yourself, "It was only a dream". That is not so if you are an alcoholic and if you are drinking. Then you are conscious, living a nightmare, and you never "wake up", or at least it never stops unless you happen to get into recovery.Your reality is a nightmare and you attempt to escape from it by sleeping, only to enter another nightmare and then, waking, you realize that the nightmare never stops.
W.