you've gotten some excellent and insightful responses. my contribution is mostly to confirm, by my own experiences, what others have said. oh, and i can't use caps right now; one arm is incapacitated - sorry if this makes reading this difficult.

i am an alcoholic. i drank to excess to escape. it is often said that alcohol is but a symptom of alcoholism. remove the alcohol and the reasons we drank to excess or alcoholically remain. unless we deal with those issues, the drinking either returns or we replace the escape mechanism with something else - drugs, shopping, overeating, etc. in my opinion, the cause of the nightmares are the reason that you drank as much as you did. for hope only, let me share that i've been clean and sober for twenty-three years now and the nightmares stopped many, many years ago. good luck.

You can feel again . Feeling means good feelings and bad feelings.