I’m not much of a dreamer myself, I tend not a dream much (or rather, remember my dreams much) at all. I find I sleep too deeply for that, since I usually have dreams that I remember when I’m lightly dozing, waking up every 10 minutes, but I rarely have the time for that these days. I rarely have dreams that are so vivid that I think they could have been real, like a memory of something that actually did happen, but I had one recently that I actually forgot about, and then it suddenly came back to me and I had to check that it was in fact a dream and not a memory.
The dream itself was fairly short, or at least the segment I can remember. It’s scary because it actually happened in the context of being in bed, asleep, so it’s easy to place it as a memory of something that happened in the middle of the night than as a dream. Anyway, I was in bed, and a tooth was starting to feel sort of itchy, like, at the nerve, so I started massaging it with my tongue. I get that feeling sometimes when something goes under the gum, like irritating popcorn bits. Then the tooth started to come loose, and I could even taste the tanginess of areas of the mouth my tongue is not supposed to come into contact with, and the tooth was swiveling, and I touched it with my fingers and tried to align it so I could bite down and keep it in place until morning when… when I would do something about it I suppose, in a sleepy half-panic. I evidently woke up that morning but didn’t remember the dream, until now. I just checked my teeth, I couldn’t tell whether it was dream, or memory. It appears to have been dream.
It is actually not the first dream I’ve had about my teeth coming out… and in fact, it is one of very very few typical dreams. The other of which are falling, and being chased. Being chased is easy, since it harkens back to the days we feared predators, or it might be the alternate sensation of chasing something but it’s more the feeling of running with anxiety and maybe when we wake up we just choose the representation of ‘being chased’, but I’ll group them together. The falling dream seems to be, at least sometimes, a result of the falling sensation that occurs when the brain disengages motor control and puts us in paralysis for the purposes of sleeping without flinging ourselves around. This also leads to the fun hypnic jerk, which as far as I ever learned, was due to this disconnection, which causes a twitch in the body as a reflex action. Sometimes this is so strong that it actually wakes the person up again (thus completing the pattern of the falling dream, waking up just as you hit, or somesuch).
Why “teeth falling out†is part of this collective unconscious dream grabbag, I don’t know. It appears to be just as common, and some of my friends (of whom I’ve asked) have reported similar dreams, something involving the teeth. There are many interpretations of this, but I never put much faith in dream interpretation, so I haven’t looked into it. A popular theme is that of anxiety, so you symbolically lose your teeth as the anxiety causes the loss of your self-determination or similar. I don’t know, if it was that, everyone would dream of their mouths exploding every night (perhaps we do).
I don’t know if sexual dreams are considered part of canon in that dream grabbag. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, since the being chased and teeth and falling would sure cover three of the four basic instinctual emotions, fear, fight and flight. My prof jokingly referred to them as the Four F’s, but I suppose the last one could be rendered as Fornication easily enough without resorting to slang. I have had laughingly few sexual dreams that I can recall, worse still because I seem to self censor them. It’s not that are covered with black bars or strategic houseplants, but that they can’t be seen. Further, in the dream context, I’m not aware of not being able to see things, I merely accept the censored parts as symbolic representations. Like, for example, I had another dream about being abandoned by friends (my subconscious is just rife with problems, eh?) but one of them was indeterminate, as a person, just a symbol for another friend but not a specific friend, and no memory of a face or anything recognizable to identity the person in the waking world. Same thing for those sexual dreams, in fact, I seem to put a lot of effort in the surroundings… in one of them, even in the dream, I remarked how incredible this girl’s room was, it was huge, with all kinds of pillows, decorations, paintings, knick-knacks, just amazing, and I even thought, in the dream “wow, this is a lot of stuffâ€, where did all that come from? I don’t know, and why do I censor myself, is my imagination really that poor, is it intentional? Not that I’m incredibly eager to star in my own x-rated dream, but I’m still curious what goes on in that rats maze in my head.
I’ve only ever had one lucid dream, it was really weird, it wasn’t completely lucid because I couldn’t really control everything. But part of the dream was in this room with this big pillar, and I got control enough that I flew around spiraling up the pillar, but somehow I feel it was more like I was dreaming that I was having a lucid dream or something. I’ve never managed it again.
As far as I know, only three people have ever dreamed about me, that I know of. My mother dreamed about me killing the dog accidentally (thanks), a friend dreamed about me in some vague sexual context, probably as a warning. Another friend dreamed that I was in her house, breaking stuff and insulting her parents. So all and all, people have a great subconscious opinion of me.
To close, here are quotes from Waking Life, a movie I suggest you see, if you have the patience for it:
Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?
Wiley: Yeah.
Man on the Train: I haven’t seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore.
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Man: As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough