The room is dark. Your forehead is bathed in cold sweat. Your heart is racing. You open your eyes, sure that you've just blown your clean time. You've had a "using dream", and it was just like being there-the people, the places, the routine, the sick feeling in your stomach, everything. It takes a few moments to realize it was just a nightmare, that it didn't actually happen. Slowly, you settle down and return to sleep.

The next morning is the time to examine what really happened the night before. You didn't use last night-but how close are you to using today? Do you have any illusions about your ability to control your using? Do you know, without a doubt, what would happen once you took the first drug? What stands between you and a real, live relapse? How strong is your program? Your relationships with your sponsor, your home group, and your Higher Power?

Using dreams don't necessarily indicate a hole in our program; for a drug addict, there's nothing more natural than to dream of using drugs. Some of us think of using dreams as gifts from our Higher Power, vividly reminding us of the insanity of active addiction and encouraging us to strengthen our recovery. Seen in that light, we can be grateful for using dreams. Frightening as they are, they can prove to be great blessings-if we use them to reinforce our recovery.

Hope and resilience so often seem to be interconnected.

In active addiction, our resilience was largely based on our dishonesty. Many of us bounced back from difficulties thanks to our capacity for manipulation, shadiness, and flat-out denial. Hope kept us going, too—even if our only hope was to not get caught. When our kid, a coworker, or current friend-with-benefits confronted us with the truth, trying to make us see how we hurt or disappointed them, we could not and would not deal with that. Same with law enforcement: "I swear, officer, that's not mine—these aren't even my pants." Anything that poked a hole in the story we told ourselves was to be soundly rejected. Or else, it was the beginning of the end—which clearly it was because here we are reading an entry from an NA book of spiritual principles.

Our resilience lands us—and then keeps us—in NA. When our powerlessness and unmanageability are revealed to us in Step One, we stay, despite the desire to escape. Through meetings, our first service commitment, relationships with other recovering addicts, and a Higher Power, we find hope that we can stay clean.

Instead of avoiding the truth, our solution is now to uncover it. The process of working the Twelve Steps thoroughly—whether it's the very first time we are diving in or the hundredth—involves actively and methodically confronting our disease, our ego, our flaws, our fears, and our mistakes. As a result, we often experience considerable pain, regret, and shame. But hope is here, too, among those revelations—hope for serenity, for courage, and for wisdom. We may not experience a "surge" of hope, as in the quotation above, but a spark will do just fine to keep us bouncing back and moving forward.