Dreaming about
being drunk

Alcohol loosens the rules, which is why people drink at weddings and why so many regret the last hour of a party. Dreaming about being drunk carries both halves of that, usually either a wish to let go and be less careful or a fear of losing control of a situation you're in, and the same dream can slide from one to the other.

How the drunkenness felt is the best clue you have. A warm, giggly buzz with friends is a very different dream from staggering home alone or slurring in front of your boss. Whether you drink in real life matters too, since the dream means one thing to someone who enjoys a glass of wine and another to someone who has given up alcohol.

What dreaming about being drunk means

Drunkenness changes how free you feel, how much control you have and how other people see you, and the readings follow those three.

A wish to loosen up

If you were happily drunk in the dream, dancing, laughing, saying what you think, it may be about wanting fewer rules in your life. It comes up often for people who are always the responsible one, at work or in the family, so it's worth asking where you'd like to be a little less sober.

Losing control

When the drunkenness was frightening, with the room spinning, legs not working and words coming out wrong, the dream is about control. Something in your life may feel like it's running ahead of you, like a relationship moving too fast or money slipping away.

Fear of embarrassing yourself

Being drunk in front of the wrong people is a social fear, of saying the wrong thing or showing a side of yourself you usually keep hidden. It often comes before a big event where you'll be watched, such as a wedding, a work party or meeting a partner's parents.

Dreaming about being drunk when you're sober

If you've given up alcohol, a dream of being drunk can be upsetting, and you may wake up guilty, as if you'd really slipped. Dreams about drinking are very common in people who have stopped, especially in the early months, and they're usually the mind working through the change, not a forecast of relapse. If you never drink, the dream is using drunkenness as a picture of chaos or freedom, and the readings above apply.

Dreaming about being drunk in public

Getting drunk at work or at a family event points to the fear of being seen at your worst. Were people laughing, or worried about you? Laughter leans toward embarrassment, worry toward not coping as well as you pretend.

Dreaming about driving drunk

Being behind the wheel of a car while drunk is one of the most anxious versions. Driving in dreams is usually about how you're steering your life, so driving drunk points to decisions you're making without thinking clearly, maybe in anger, in a rush, or under someone else's influence. If you crashed, look at what in your life feels close to going wrong.

Dreaming about someone else being drunk

A drunk partner, parent or friend usually points to how you see their behavior, unpredictable, unreliable or out of reach. If someone in your life really did drink too much, the dream may simply bring back what that felt like, since dreams follow the people and worries that fill your days.^[1] If they were happily drunk and you weren't, you may feel left out.

Dreaming about being drunk according to Jung and Freud

Both men had a theory about a mind whose guard has dropped.

Jung: the shadow behind the careful face

Jung's shadow is the side of you that you've disowned to keep a respectable face, and in dreams it likes to arrive as someone who doesn't care about the rules.^[2] Being drunk is that figure with the keys, the one who says what you think, dances, cries or slurs, and a dream of being drunk at work is the careful person and the disowned one swapping places in front of your manager. He wrote nothing about drunkenness dreams, so this is his idea applied.

Freud: what slips past the guard

Freud held that a dream has to disguise its wish because part of the mind would object to it.^[3] A drunk dreamer is that objector off duty, which is why the disguise tends to fail in these dreams, with the slurred sentence or the thing blurted out at the party. Applied his way, he'd ask what you said or did drunk that you'd never do sober, since that is where the wish would come out. He didn't write about drinking dreams.

Other readings

Artemidorus, the diviner whose 2nd-century Greek manual is the oldest of its kind to survive, read a little wine from small cups, short of drunkenness, as a good sign. Drinking a lot, or sitting among heavy drinkers, he took as the cause of many evils, since drunkenness leads to brawls and brawls to war.^[4]

The biblical and spiritual meaning of being drunk in dreams

Full of new wine at Pentecost

The Bible has a famous scene where joy gets mistaken for drunkenness. At Pentecost, when the apostles start speaking in other languages, some of the crowd mock them as "full of new wine", and Peter answers that it's only nine in the morning.^[5] The story is about being overtaken by something bigger than yourself, and some people find that echo in a dream where the drunkenness felt joyful and strange.

Questions to ask about your drunk dream

Look at these details first.

• Did being drunk feel fun, frightening, or embarrassing?
• Do you drink in waking life, and has that changed recently?
• Who saw you, and how did they react?
• Is something in your life asking for a looser grip, or a firmer one?

Oniri asks how the drinking felt and who was around before it reads your dream, since a happy blur and a lost night lead to different answers.