I had just done a backer/s audition. This one a reading of a new play with four characters. The director asked me to do it again later that evening, but not with the entire cast, only two of us reading all the parts.
It was after the second reading when I noticed a satchel with a pack of cigarettes in it and one cigarette in the pack. I was alone in the room. I took the cigarette out as my friend, who hadn’t been asked to read the 2nd time happened to come back. She’s the one who had left her satchel there. I handed back the cigarette.
Cut to:
I’m standing in line at a cigarette kiosk on the street in NY. I’m about to buy a carton of Marlboros. I can see them in their familiar red and white cartons. But it looks like there are only two or three cartons left. I hope I can get up to the head of the line before they’re sold out. Trying to get my cash together - can’t remember how much they are since I haven’t smoked in so long. Figure they’re around $25. (Now you KNOW that’s a dream!)
Cut to:
Walking in the NY subway heading for a train connection. It’s rush hour and there are a mass of people in front of me walking in the same direction. I light a cigarette (don’t recall how but a vague feeling that I’d burned my finger on a match stub), take a drag, look down and see I’ve already got a fresh one lit in my left hand. That’s odd, I think. Don’t remember lighting the other one. Then I think about how I’ve just blown my quit. And I’ll have to come back here and write my confessional. How awful that will be for the members. An Elder who did everything she’s been telling people NOT to do all these years. What will they think of me. Well, I just won’t tell them, is all. Or - I’ll tell them months later, after I’ve quit again. Then it won’t have such an impact.
Trouble is when I took that one puff I could feel the drug coursing through my body. And it felt good. And I knew I had awakened the nicotine receptors. And as I was walking toward my apartment building later I kept thinking I’d better keep my eye out. I desperately wanted another cigarette but was afraid I might bang into someone I knew from the site. And from now on I’d have to be a closet smoker, a pretender.
Even after 9 years, smoking dreams are not unusual for me. What WAS unusual about this one was that I deliberately chose to smoke. Deliberately chose to blow my quit. That was a first. Most of the time I “discover” myself smoking and though slightly disturbing it’s no big deal. I realize I’d been smoking for years, and enjoying it and just lying to everybody. There’s a tinge of guilt, but not a whole lot. This time it was a deliberate choice and there was much guilt in that choice.
Interesting psychologically how we unconsciously progress on this journey. The more active my cravings in the past, the less guilt I felt in dreams while smoking. Now that I have almost zero desire to smoke and hardly think about it at all, my subconsious has switched positions. I take this dream as a healthy subconscious reminder never to allow that smokemare to become a reality.
