Is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night after drinking?

Alcohol disrupts normal sleep cycles. It makes you pass out but it causes your brain not to enter normal REM sleep. So you are basically not getting the full deep sleep that your body and mind require.

Your body is telling you to have 2 more beers.

Know exactly what you mean. I find if I drink moderately, I may feel drowsy but it's difficult to sleep or I will wake up like you said - and then the tendency is to analyse the night, when of course you were feeling a little bit more loose so you wonder if you were ok. My solution was to get drunk enough to not have this problem. Either drunk enough so I don't remember going to sleep, or just stay completely sober. Not ideal I know.

Honestly, I think it's a sign that you need to cut back on the drink if it's having such a dramatic effect on your life

Alcohol is a depressant which simply means it depresses or slows the functions of your central nervous system, so breathing and heart rate are reduced for instance. The word depressant is commonly misconstrued in this case. Alcohol consumption will not directly cause a person to become emotionally depressed, however other factors coupled with alcohol use can, with the one exception, when prolonged alcoholism can cause depletion of b vitamins, essential to brain and bodily functions, which is about the only way alcohol itself can cause the mood disorder, depression. When you consume alcohol it crosses the blood brain barrier. After that the alcohol affects the neuro transmitter in the brain called GA BA which controls inhibitions, that is why people act more boastful, take off their clothes, etc when drunk, they don't have the GABA transmitter telling their brain they are acting like an idiot. Alcohol also interrupts your REM sleep cycle, so although you will fall asleep faster you are more prone to a restless unfullfilling rest kind of like you descibed. As to the other part, I can only guess that you are or were a bit self concious and thus developed a need to control factors directly involving you. There is nothing wrong with that, as I have similar tendencies. What happens in the middle of the night is when drunk you clocks out and a horrified sober you clocks in.Sober you is pretty sure drunk you had to have made an ass of yourselves, so you then try to piece together the evening, fueled by shame and dread you disect every detail until you fall back asleep, a few hours later sober you and drunk you reconcile the events of the evening, and you both determine they weren't so bad.

Depends on how much you drink and what you drink.

As long as you ain't drinking your own piss i would say its very normal.

It is unless you want to pee in your bed.