Dreaming Of Smoking

I dreamt that I was smoking a cigarette.

That's something I haven't done for nearly 40 years. It felt good, at first, just the way it used to. The itch that loves to be scratched. As a callow youth, the reliable buzz from that first inhale, and then the unconscious sucking for more, filled a void in my unformed personality. And then I woke up.

Both back then, and right now. Then I made the leap of understanding that smoking had become a part of me, but in the same way that a parasite becomes part of a host. Now, after seeing friends and family suffer with this monkey on their backs it makes me glad that I did quit. The smoking buzz is still there but there are other thrills in life—better ones—ones that expand possibilities instead of shrinking them. Make no mistake, there is something to smoking and, when you quit it, you feel a hole in yourself, as it were, a nothingness that may well be one of the scariest emotions a human can experience.