How does alcohol affect your sleep?

Alcohol usually will cause some disturbance in sleep, although how and to what degree varies widely from person to person and the amount consumed. In some cases a small amount of alcohol can help one fall asleep, although sometimes it may cause them to wake up later and be unable to go back to bed.

Small amounts of alcohol can also cause dreams to become more intense than usual, more pleasurable than usual, or more displeasureable than usual–even nightmarish.

One may deduce from this that the effect alcohol has on us in waking life of lowering inhibitory thoughts and actions, so too does it in dreamlife, laxing the censoring part of the psyche and allowing more intense manifestations in the dream life as well.

In some people consumption of alcohol may make them more prone to hypnagogic disturbances in sleep. In the ancient and classical world alcohol was thought to help open one up with communion to spirits and the gods.

It seems unsurprising, then, that dreams become stranger or that one might even enter into a half-awake state during sleep where they see menacing spirits threatening them. While Dionysius is the god of wine, he was also the god of blood, violence, and insanity.

Large amounts of alcohol can make someone enter a deep sleep where they cannot recall any dreams at all, or make someone unable to sleep altogether, or only sleep intermittently.