|
TUESDAY, 6 OCTOBER
|
| Dear friend, |
|
I had the teeth dream again last week. I sat up and ran my tongue along every tooth in the dark. They were all there, though the feeling that something had crumbled would not leave.
|
|
People have been trying to explain this one for at least two thousand years, which is a lot of disagreement for one dream about your mouth. Nobody has agreed on what it means, so here is what they said, and the one paper that tried to end the argument.
|
|
|
|
|
What People Have Said for Two Thousand Years
|
|
In one study, 39 percent of people said they had dreamed about their teeth falling out at least once, and 16 percent called it recurring. The versions differ, but the shape stays the same: teeth crumble in your mouth, or fall into your hands one by one.
|
|
|
Sometimes you pull a single tooth and the rest follow. You wake up and check, because everybody checks, and the need to know what it means is just as old as the dream itself.
|
|
Artemidorus, writing in the second century, divided the mouth tooth by tooth: upper teeth stood for the important people of a household, lower for the less important, and losing them meant paying off a debt. In the Talmud the reading is blunter, because teeth falling out meant the death of a family member.
|
|
People have said things like this for a very long time, and whether that makes any of it true is your call. But the readings share one thread. Teeth do work you never think about: speaking, eating, smiling, looking like somebody in control, so when the sleeping mind wants to talk about your standing rather than your mouth, it reaches for them.
|
|
| “ |
Teeth do work you never think about: speaking, eating, smiling, looking like somebody in control, so when the sleeping mind wants to talk about your standing rather than your mouth, it reaches for them.
|
|
|
