Heroin in a dream: what does it mean?
Dreams of using are common in recovery, distressing out of proportion to their content, and not a relapse.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
Freud
Freud built his account on wishes that will not be put down, and would treat the persistence as the material rather than the substance. He would attend to what the dream permitted that waking life does not, and to what happened immediately afterwards in it.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.Jung
For Jung a compulsion can image energy bound to a single point while the rest of a life goes unattended, and the dream that repeats the using is displaying the loop rather than recommending it. What the dreamer does on waking is usually the more useful question.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).Modern
The plain reading comes first and matters. Using dreams are commonly reported in early recovery and sometimes for many years, they are familiar to the people who work in recovery, and they are not evidence of intent or of failure. They tend to become less frequent over time. Anyone shaken by one is better served by their support network, and services exist.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.Mythological
Opium has a long documented history as medicine, as trade good and as instrument of policy, and the moral framing attached to its users has shifted repeatedly according to who was using it. That history is worth knowing before treating the subject as a character question.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Frazer; Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
In literature
Recovery writing is a real literature and its best work is unsentimental about the dreams, which are one of the details that convince readers who have been through it. The romantic tradition around this particular drug has done a great deal of damage.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What it does in a story
It supplies an antagonist inside the character, so every scene is about something even when nothing happens. Its risk is monotony, because the loop is the subject and loops are hard to sustain across a book.
Genre conventions
Memoir uses the specifics and is generally strongest. Crime uses it as motive, which is nearly always the laziest available treatment. Literary fiction uses the family, which is where a great deal of the actual damage lands.
How to subvert it
Write somebody fifteen years clear who still has the dream occasionally and finds it merely tedious.
Try this
Write the ten minutes after waking from a using dream. Four hundred words. Only what the character checks and who they ring.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.