Question
I had a dream where I was driving to work and my teeth began falling out! At first I thought they were just loose, but soon I easily pushed them out with my tongue. I was horrified and nearly wrecked the car. Then I woke up and my teeth were fine, but I recalled the dream very vividly. What does this mean?
Answer
Many of us have been the victim of tooth-lose dreams and have carried this concern into the morning.
Here's a quote:
"Tooth dreams are open to many interpretations and have been handled successfully by very few of the modern dream interpreters."
This was written in the 2nd Century by the ancient interpreter, Artemidorus. Even the Vedas and texts 2000 years BC talk about tooth dreams. So you can see there is a long history of confusion. Freud and Jung explored the possibilities of tooth loss and hysteria, but modern dream interpreters take a different approach that is more direct.
What, we can ask ourselves, do teeth do? They hold, cut, grasp and generally
are the first way we had to do these things. But then we lost our first
set, just as we were gaining in self-control and power. And yet, shortly
thereafter, a new and larger world and set of teeth appear!
And so, if I have a tooth lose dream, I can ask myself:
1. What parts of my world and life are slipping
away?
2. What new larger world will this lead me
too?
Lose a tooth, gain a world!
2/19/98
Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The
Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet
Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for
the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.
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