Craving cig but never smoked

My dream was that I shot my kid.

I was alone in the woods. It was somewhere up north as it was cold and snowy. The picture painted would remind one of Alaska or maybe Siberia. Very wooded, one sparse clearing of approximately an acre, all old wood. Mostly evergreens all in excess of 60' high. I had a cabin, no electric, sitting in the woods on the edge of the acre clearing. It was much like a hunting cabin, just a wood stove and a cot.

My kid was with me, but I didn't know where he was. He wasn't lost, I knew he was close. I just didn't know where he was and I couldn't see him. There was also a wolf nearby. I also couldn't see it, I just knew it was there and I knew it was hunting. As soon as I knew it was hunting, I knew it was hunting us. As soon as I knew it was hunting us, I knew it was hunting my son. I grabbed my shotgun, my 20g Remington, and headed to the hilly clearing to find my son and head off the wolf.

I didn't go far at all when I seen the wolf skulk out of the woods into the same clearing. I knew it was there, it knew I was there, we both knew what the other was doing. It was only a question of who was going to do it first. It bolted out of the woods towards a hidden gully in the clearing where my son must have been, so I reared up and blasted it before it could get there. It collapsed at full tilt and fell into the gully, out of sight.

I ran to it and all that was there was the wolf. Blood ran out of its side in a spray pattern of buckshot, the shiny wetness causing it's course hairs to glimmer. And as I looked at it, it began to melt. The hair receded, the legs grew shorter and thicker, and before my eyes, the wolf turned into my boy. He stood there in shorts and a T-shirt, little black holes peppered across the chest of his shirt. He didn't say anything, just looked at me confused. Then those little black holes turned red and began to run. He continued to look at me as if to say "why?" before he collapsed. When he did, he broke into a pack of four wolves.

These four wolves became my family up in the woods. I had to care for them. 3 of them, although my "family" and under my care, were dangerous. They were like wild wolves one foolishly took as a pet. Very nice and loving until they weren't. I was always on edge around them. But one was special. One was truly mine, and to take care of the pack, I had to take of this one more than all. To take care of myself, I needed to protect this one wolf. And with that thought, I woke up.

I was deeply disturbed upon waking. I talked to Wiz about different kinds of dreams; some are silly, some are dumb, some are terrifying, but how you feel about them makes the difference of whether they have meaning. Sometimes your brain just latches onto to something in your surroundings and it comes up in dreams. Those ones aren't worth interpreting. The ones that affect you, the ones that you feel you need to tell someone even though you know it's hopeless to do so, those are the ones that have a deeper meaning, and I knew this one did. So I had to translate it.

If the people here tried, knowing the things I've said here, they'd likely say I was worried about gun safety or worried about my forays into the woods with my kid. After all, that's what my dream was. But that's not how dreams work, and all of those imaginative details have nothing to do with the reality.

I began by "painting the picture", just as I told you to do. All that stuff about the cabin and the locale, the gun, the animal, the snow, all that stuff had to be identified, then one by one, they had to be translated.

The cabin and the locale was nothing. It was "filler". It was stuff my brain took from memory to create a scene that made sense. That entire backdrop was pulled from some Alaska based reality show I happened to catch a glimpse of on TV at work. Nothing more, nothing less.

The gun was important. It was my own gun, my Remington 870. But what did it mean? I had to think of how I feel about that particular gun in real life. In real life, it's one of my favorites. It's one of my longest owned guns, it's one of my first guns, it's my most useful guns. That gun is very much a part of me. It is my go-to. You could even say it's not even a gun, it's more a part of me. When I take a deer with it, I don't shoot a deer, the gun didn't kill a deer, I didn't use the gun to take a deer. I killed a deer. The gun is me, more specifically, the gun is me acting. The gun is my actions.

My son was my actual son. He didn't represent anything other than himself.

The wolf was important. It was a threat, a dangerous animal. But in my culture, it's also an animal of power. It represents courage, strength, and loyalty. In real life, it is an animal I respect and admire. But that doesn't matter. What matters is how I felt in my dream. And in my dream, I was terrified of it. The wolf represented fear.

The act of shooting my son, while disturbing, did not cause the in-dream reaction that doing so in real life would do. In my dream, I felt sorrow, but not "shooting your son" sorrow. I felt the soft sadness of putting down a family pet. I felt shame of having made a mistake. I felt regret at having made a bad decision. It wasn't world crushing as real life shooting would be. These were all very specifically defined emotions in dream. Sorrow. Regret. Shame.

The wolf pack was important. In real life, a wolf pack is dangerous. But we're not talking real life here. In dream life, the wolf pack was family. They were things I loved, admired, where there to take care of, but they were also things that by their very nature of being wolves could cause me harm. All but that one. The pack represented my actual family, who I love, admire, and take of, and who do so to me, but by their very nature of being my family, will often do stuff to protect me that winds up hurting me. And the one which I had no fear of was my son.

After spending a week or more breaking this whole thing down, the disturbing feeling left and I was left with sense. I was going through custody issues concerning my son as a result of my divorce. I had to make a lot of tough decisions, what with his mother moving to Tampa and me staying in NY. And more than losing money, more than losing time with my son, the thing that kept me up at night was worrying that I was going to make the wrong decision by him. Worried that in trying to protect him from losing out on one side of his family life or the other, I was going to endanger him by picking wrong and leaving him with the weaker side. The gun - my actions - my choices in the custody fight. The wolf - the fear - the fear I'd make the wrong choice. Put it all together, and it was a dream based on the worry that my actions (my choice in custody) against what I thought was a threat (my ex-wife's decisions) was going to harm my son. It was worry that my family in trying to help me was going to hurt me. All of that twisted, messed up dream was my brain's very roundabout way of using simile and allegory to tell me something very plain and simple. That message was "Hey. You're worried. Don't be. Worrying clouds your thoughts, and clouded thoughts sow bad decisions. You keep lashing out at perceived fears and you yourself are going to make an actual scary scenario".

From that moment on, I've been rock solid in my thoughts and choices regarding my son, and haven't had a jacked up dream concerning him since.

So that's an example of how to interpret a dream. You need to break down all the little parts from where you are, who is there, what you or they are doing, and examine them individually. Pay attention not to what those things and actions in your dream are, but how they make you feel. It's the feelings that matter. The nouns, the things that are there, are just placeholders your brain uses to cause the feelings.

Like I told Wiz, it's like reading the Bible, or Aesop's Fables without the moral provided for you. A dream is just a self made allegorical story created just for you. It's up to you to figure out what it means. And since your particular dream is recurring, you really should work on figuring it out. Your mind is bothered by something you keep doing. If you don't know what that is, your dream is the key to finding it.

Good luck =)

AoS has gotta go see Face ... pay him ... and get this dream sorted out. He sure seems to have nailed it on his own dream.

btw I am wondering if the Wiz saw the question I asked him about dreams in his blog, but it made him angry that I was nosy ? Or he just didnt see it?

Quote: odiousgambit

AoS has gotta go see Face ... pay him ... and get this dream sorted out. He sure seems to have nailed it on his own dream.

btw I am wondering if the Wiz saw the question I asked him about dreams in his blog, but it made him angry that I was nosy ? Or he just didnt see it?

No pay, and meeting me wouldn't change things. Even if Ace was my best friend, I'd have to be inside his mind for me to do it properly. I can only give tools, show an example, and hope he can do it himself. I hope he does.

Quote: aceofspades

Just the usual stress of life

Well, it should not make you want nicotine or heroin or alcohol or methamphetamine or oxycontin. However, if you must give in to foolish whims do try to pick wisely.

I think you need to plant a rose bush in someone's garden or show up at a legal clinic or go rehab a sailboat or sign on as a deckhand on a yacht... much better than taking up smoking.

I do not plan on acting upon the dream and subsequent craving - I just found it interesting that if you google people craving cigs that have never smoked there are tons of hits

I had a recurring dream about winning a slot jackpot and not claiming it because I would get lost after getting my social security card I kept in the car. I finally put in my wallet and never had the dream again.

My recurring dream is Ace wins 30 hands in
a row and STILL they won't believe him.

Quote: Evenbob

My recurring dream is Ace wins 30 hands in
a row and STILL they won't believe him.

Sounds about right for WoV members.

Interesting post. Surprising number of people of all ages are experiencing the exact same symptom. While it isn't difficult to imagine people who used to like smoking suddenly getting dreams again, I had no idea.

Many of them are also curious why they should get these cravings.

There is quite a lot of speculation from amateur pschologists, but here is some advice from a woman in her 50's.

Well, the other day I began taking a good GNC vitamin, liquid B complex, Sun Chlorella, Biotin and Vitamin D, and the cravings have completely stopped!

Quote: Pacomartin

Interesting post. Surprising number of people of all ages are experiencing the exact same symptom. While it isn't difficult to imagine people who used to like smoking suddenly getting dreams again, I had no idea.

Many of them are also curious why they should get these cravings.

There is quite a lot of speculation from amateur pschologists, but here is some advice from a woman in her 50's.

Well, the other day I began taking a good GNC vitamin, liquid B complex, Sun Chlorella, Biotin and Vitamin D, and the cravings have completely stopped!

Yeah usually when we crave weird things it is due to the body craving some actual nutrient