|
TUESDAY, 20 OCTOBER
|
| Dear friend, |
|
I checked my teeth before I opened my eyes. They were all there, which did not make me feel much better. I drank the glass of water on the shelf by the bed and lay there for a while, running my tongue along the backs of them.
|
|
This is a dream a lot of people describe, and it has been explained for about two thousand years, which has not stopped it from coming back every few weeks (probably says more about the dream than the explanation). Here is what people have said about it, and what one study found that disagrees.
|
|
|
|
|
What People Have Said for Two Thousand Years
|
|
Teeth do work you never think about. They let you speak, eat, smile, and look like somebody with things under control, so when the sleeping mind wants to talk about your standing rather than your mouth, it reaches for them.
|
|
|
People have said for a very long time that each tooth lost in a dream is something lost in waking life: a person, a possession, a piece of standing. Whether that makes it true is your call, but the reading is old enough to deserve hearing on its own terms.
|
|
Artemidorus of Daldis wrote the whole thing down in the second century, tooth by tooth: the mouth is the house, the teeth are the people in it, upper teeth the important ones, lower the lesser, front teeth the young, molars the old. If a debtor dreamt of losing a tooth, it meant the debt would be paid.
|
|
I think about that detail often. In a 2012 study, about four in ten people said they had dreamt of their teeth falling out at least once, and about one in six said the dream kept coming back. People have been having it for two thousand years and reading it the same way, so when somebody finally tested it, in 2018, what they found matters.
|
|
| “ |
They let you speak, eat, smile, and look like somebody with things under control, so when the sleeping mind wants to talk about your standing rather than your mouth, it reaches for them.
|
|
|
