Ironically, while drinking had ruined my ability to dream healthfully, it was in my dreams that the beast made its last stand to try and get me to drink some more, and I did drink in the dreams - and felt drunk - but woke up stone sober. At first, the dreams were anxiety producing, but they soon became interesting and curiously repetitive; eventually they stopped. I knew I had ended a huge part of my lifestyle - what I had once considered part of being an interesting, fun, and explorative human being - boozing and smoking pot. I had turned against it because I realized it had put me in a death spiral regarding any decent, successful future; and to get out I had to kill it. So I starved it, while fully experiencing the withering away of a huge bank of chemically enhanced pleasure memories. I learned from the dreams that many memories were only accessible to me when under the influence. As the drinking/drugging dreams ended, they would be lost forever. It took several years for them to finally fade away. I now look back with ambivalence to that thirteen years of gross drinking and smoking. Somehow, I feel my beast died the way the T2000 dies in the molten iron at the end of Terminator 2, but much more slowly. As it died, I felt the sadness of the loss. But that feeling was dwarfed by the huge changes for the better in getting on with the rest of my life.