Navigating Identity and Disorientation: The Drugged Dream of Returning Home

Part 1: Dream Presentation

Dreams often materialize as unexpected messengers from our unconscious, and this particular dream carried with it a visceral sense of disorientation that lingered even after waking. As an international student returning home to Ukraine after a semester abroad, I arrived at my parents’ apartment three days ago during a winter vacation. The day unfolded like many others—3:30 p.m., I’d eaten a light meal and settled onto the couch to rest, though my mind still buzzed with the excitement of being home. By 4:00 p.m., the room had grown dim even though it was afternoon; the electricity had been unreliable in our city, and blackouts had become a winter ritual. I’d tried to distract myself with YouTube shorts, but the combination of the approaching darkness, my body’s unexpected heaviness, and the quiet domesticity of my parents’ home lulled me into a strange state of half-consciousness. Just as I teetered on the edge of sleep, I heard my father’s voice from the hallway, instructing my younger brother to hurry—karate practice was scheduled for 4:30 p.m., a familiar daily routine that now felt like a distant memory from my childhood. Moments later, my mother entered, her tone gentle but firm as she reminded me of my usual daytime energy, suggesting I should be more active rather than succumbing to afternoon slumber. Her words faded as my eyes closed, and suddenly I felt something profoundly unnatural: my body had lost all sensation, as if submerged in liquid weight, while my mind remained eerily alert. The room around me blurred into a dreamscape where my parents’ apartment walls seemed to melt into another reality. I found myself in a space that defied logic—a hybrid of two cities I’d once called home: Dublin, where I studied, and Katowice, where I’d lived briefly before moving abroad. This surreal landscape centered on Spodek, the iconic covered stadium in Katowice, its vast interior echoing with an event I couldn’t quite identify. I handed my belongings to a silent cloakroom attendant, my movements sluggish despite my confusion. Time warped here, the event feeling both endless and fleeting, as if my perception of duration had been altered by some invisible force. When the occasion concluded, I rushed back to retrieve my items, only to discover the attendant had given me someone else’s clothes—a mismatched jacket and pants that didn’t belong to me. Another attendant, a man in his fifties, tried to help, but his gestures were clumsy and unhelpful, and the language barrier between us felt insurmountable. In that moment of helplessness, I woke with a start, my heart racing. The entire experience had lasted precisely as long as I’d been asleep—twenty minutes, a duration that felt both real and illusory. The weight of my body, the drugged sensation, the merging of cities—all had felt disturbingly authentic, leaving me with a lingering question: what did this dream reveal about my state of mind as I navigated returning to familiar surroundings after so long away? I’ve never used drugs, but the dream’s visceral depiction of loss of control mirrored the anxiety I sometimes feel when balancing multiple identities: international student, Ukrainian daughter, and someone trying to reclaim her roots while living abroad.

Part 2: Clinical Analysis

The Symbolic Language of Disorientation

The dream’s most striking element—the overwhelming sense of being drugged—serves as a powerful metaphor for psychological disconnection. In dreamwork, substances like drugs often symbolize loss of agency or boundaries, and here the dreamer experiences a literalization of this concept through physical numbness and mental fog. The