Winter 2020

In a lot of the dreams I remember, my teeth are falling out. Usually my fake tooth (left lateral incisor!) goes first, closely followed by anywhere from 2-5 others. It doesn’t always happen like that, though. Last night I dreamed I lost two molars from chewing on a Brach’s hard peppermint.

When I felt the first tooth crack away from my gums, I ran straight over to my mom. She knew what had happened before I even finished my sentence, and I uncurled my fingers to reveal the broken pieces of a tooth or two pressed into my palm.

In any of these dreams, I run straight to my mother. She is never not in this recurring dream, and that’s reflective of a real piece of my life: my mom is my greatest comfort. In the dreams, it feels like I don’t even have to look for her, she’s just right there.

Aside from this bit about my mother, I’m sure there’s meaning in the dream. I get told all the time that they are stress dreams; indicators of anxiety. They are certainly stressful and anxiety-inducing, but what’s funny about these dreams – and about all dreams and nightmares I think – is how warped all logic becomes, and how much sense something nonsensical starts to make there. My dream-self is never concerned about anxiety.

In fact, when the first tooth falls out, there’s nothing deeply strange about it to me. In real life, if I suddenly spit out a tooth, I’d be in tears, reeling over something so scary and kind of hard to understand (not to mention hard to repair). In the dream, I’m a little panicky, but the central feeling isn’t fear, it’s embarrassment. I always feel soo embarrassed and ashamed for having lost the tooth.

I don’t know what that means for me in a waking state, but I think it’s weird.

Now and then, in a dream like this, I’ll make it to a dentist or find a tube of super glue to adhere the tooth back to my gums (??) but no repair job is ever permanent. I spend the whole dream trying to conceal my humiliation. In last night’s version, the teeth didn’t get fixed, and I woke up at 10:30am after a long night of uninterrupted sleep (so rare for me). Inside of me was a deep longing for my mother, and a lot of worry about the people in my dream, most notably an ex. The feeling lasted for a few minutes — that I needed those people but didn’t have them.

The last time I brought my mom a tooth in real life, I must’ve been 12 or so, but I’ve since brought her dozens of them in my sleep. It’s a strange joy to lose teeth as a child. Sometimes we just yanked them out!!

A tooth is one of those things that, without its context (mouth, duh), kinda becomes an entirely new thing. As a kid I’d marvel at the root of it I’d never seen before. If anything, there was pride associated with shedding teeth. Apart from the dollar I’d be rewarded with, the tooth also represented my growing up.

Sometimes I was so proud of the teeth that the tooth fairy generously allowed me to keep them in a box or a little jar.