Up until I had quit for ten years, I found the second hand smoke of other people pleasant. And only then did I stop having dreams about smoking. The common dream was that I had forgotten that I quit smoking and managed to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes before suddenly realizing that I just reversed the ten years of effort that it took to quit.
I am now nearly forty years free of tobacco. More significantly I am nearly forty years free of alcohol. I realized back then that it took just a couple of drinks and the resolution to quit smoking would disappear.
I forgot about those dreams. I would wake up disgusted until I realized it was only a dream.
[[The common dream was that I had forgotten that I quit smoking and managed to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes before suddenly realizing that I just reversed the ten years of effort that it took to quit. ]]
Yup- i still have that dream- I think it’s a repressed fear that we will ‘accidentally forget we quit’ that causes these common dreams like this-
I quit alcohol 20 years ago- that was a tough one to quit too- but I think ciggs was tougher- although i still have dreams abotu drinkin too and still every now and again think ‘I coudl handle it’ — thankfully htough I’m at the point now that I admit i can’t
When i quit ciggs, I was addicted to hydrocodone too that i had taken for years due to muscles problems caused by a health condition- I quit both ciggs and hydro at the same time- it was hell- but fortunately I was not working, so i had the free time to lay in bed for awhile to get me through the roughest part
Every 1/2 hour i had to keep telling myself i was a 1/2 hour closer to beign free fro mthe addiction- 1 hour further from being addicted, 2 hours, 5 hours, 8 hours- and so on- did that for a couple of days- it was the only thing powerful enough to make me realize that i had power over my circumstances- reminding myself that although it was rough, I WAS beating it- I was making progrses- I had to keep my concentration on the fact that as each hour passed, i was that much closer to being free-
Now when i get hte cravings, i can remember back to how much hell i had to go through when quitting- that and hte fact that i couldn’t possibly afford to keep smoking now financially and physically