Skip to main content

Recurring Dream


I am optimistically calling this memory—pushing it safely into the past—which is not inaccurate. I haven't had the dream in a long, long time. Used to be frequent, this recurring dream of mine. I remember that it never failed to freak me out. I would wake from one of these dreams and feel diseased, tainted, unkempt in a mud-hut, Third World kind of way. I would experience a vague dread and need to take a cold shower to wake up and shake off these feelings. Before I could get up, though, I would have to check my teeth to make sure they were all there and none of them loose. The dream was simple: I would lose or be on the verge of losing my teeth. Often, the teeth would just be loose and not fall out. Sometimes, I would find them in my dream-hand. I remember one time, in the dream suddenly my teeth were rocking violently in my mouth, the gums giving way to them, unable to hold on. I clamped my jaws tightly together, knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak—if I let up the pressure keeping my teeth in place—the teeth would fall out and I'd be left without a smile at best; at worst, unable to chew or speak properly. When I woke from that dream, my jaws were truly locked together, sore from grinding. I don't know what the dream is supposed to mean. I remember that at one point I looked up the symbol in some sort of dream encyclopedia, but I no longer know the proposed significance. I think it did make some difference (in terms of portent) whether the teeth fell out or were only loose. I had both versions of the dream many, many times, particularly in my twenties. As I said, I haven't had it in a while, which is good. It's interesting, though, how deeply this dream experience always affected me; how it got at some archetypal fear, made me think of ruin, of my own mortality (though as I age the dream happens less). I wonder how much of this is cultural. Probably a lot. I know that Americans rank very high on the global chart of the teeth-obsessed, and that I'd be rich if I had a dime for every time I heard that "Europeans have bad teeth." To say nothing of people in places with neither orthodontists nor basic dentistry. It does sometimes seem frivolous to worry about teeth, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. I try to keep my twice-yearly preventive appointments, but don't pay for services or products to whiten my teeth. Still, I am concerned. I want to keep my teeth; keep them in my mouth where they belong. I don't know what's prompted this memory tonight, but there it is. Now, it's time to sleep. And hopefully to dream of something entirely different—no insufficiencies, no gaps, no gaping black hole where a smile should be. A world where smiles come easy and complete.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
7 comments
Read more

Black Kids Read, Too

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Touch Typing

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...
3 comments
Read more