Dreams Are Cool ...

... but they're also pretty frickin' weird. Like the one I had last night.

I dreamt that my teeth were falling out. Not just one or two, but the whole mouthful of them. And in the dream, I could actually feel them hurting. They were really painful too, throbbing and aching. And then I'd put my hand up to my mouth and two or three would tumble out. They were huge ... all of them were molar-sized, or even larger, almost like stones, and they sounded like marbles when they clinked against each other in my hand. No sooner would I get rid of one handful that another two or three teeth would fall out, and I'd do the same thing again after plopping them all in a big bowl on the table. I was freaked out in the dream, really scared, but then I noticed after leaning really close to the mirror, that were small replacement teeth under the ones that had fallen out. Oh, I thought, this is okay then. I won't be a toothless hag.

I used to have this dream interpretation book I referred to constantly when I was a teenager. I lost track of it; I'm sure I still have it somewhere, and it's all dog-eared and the spine is all wrinkled. Since I didn't know where it was, first thing this morning I Googled "dream meanings & losing teeth" and got a slew of websites on it. I went to a few of them, and apparently, dreams where teeth fall out are very common, along with flying dreams, dreams of being late for an exam (this is a recurring dream for me, I have it very often, and it always panics me). Anyway, it said that it could mean a potentially embarrassing situation, or something about appearance. It could mean many different things.

I remember seeing an Oprah show once where she had this woman on who'd written a book about dream interpretation. I have that book too, and it's around here somewhere. (Hmmmm ... did I say my daughter was disorganized?) But anyway, I remember her saying that dreams have very specific meanings tailored to every individual who has them. Things have different levels of significance to everyone. That's why you can't really use a book to look something up. A cat may mean nothing to one person, and be hugely important to another.

Dreams come from our subconscious, and our subconscious speaks to us in riddles, in puns. They never mean what they appear to on the surface. They are never straightforward. It's almost like a game. Your subconscious is teasing you, and seeing if you can figure out what it's trying to tell you. They say that all the answers we need are right inside us, and one way they come to us is in our dreams. I'll buy that. I'll be damned if I can figure it out though.

You're supposed to ask yourself things like, What does this situation in the dream remind me of? Did someone or something make me feel like this today? Is there something I'm worrying about or thinking about?

I've also read that people recommend you try writing down your dreams as soon as you wake up so you don't forget any of the details. Hey, it's a great idea, but when I first wake up, the last thing I feel like doing is trying to scribble down a gazillion things. My dreams are often so complex and so detailed, I'd be writing for a half hour to get everything down. I actually did it for awhile, then stopped. Reading over my hazy notes wasn't enlightening me any, and it was pretty brutal. It's so true, though, that you lose everything. You think you'll remember this very vivid dream you had when you first wake up because it was so clear in your head, but then by the time the afternoon rolls around, you can only remember a fragment or two. I've also heard that you can keep a tape recorder or microcassette recorder by your bed so you can talk into it after waking up from a dream, rather than writing it all down. That sounds like the better option to me, and I have one of those too (a microcassette recorder). But guess what? I don't know where it is. :-)

Anyway, that was my dream. I have a stash of four or five dreams in my head that I've always been able to remember because they were so clear. I'll write about them in another blog. But dreams are really cool.