Teeth falling out in a dream

What the old dream books say

The best known of the ancient dream books, the Oneirocritica, was written by Artemidorus in the 2nd century. He treats the mouth as a house and the teeth as the people in it. The upper teeth stand for the more important members of the household and the lower for the less important, so to him a tooth falling out pointed to a loss in the family. The same idea, teeth as kin, runs through the Islamic tradition of dream reading attributed to Ibn Sirin, where which tooth falls can be read as which relative. I should say that this is tradition and nothing more, and what I find interesting about it is that it is a tradition about other people rather than about the dreamer.

The English folklore version, that dreaming of a tooth falling out means you will hear of a death, is folklore, and it should be taken case by case to define its meaning to the individual.

Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, filed teeth dreams under what he called dental stimulus dreams and read them in his own way, which was sexual, and in a way almost nobody follows now. The 20th century paperback dictionaries took a different line again, and it is the one you will have heard, that teeth stand for confidence and appearance and how you come across, so that losing them is a worry about one of those. That is the version that became a cliche, and the reason it became a cliche is that the underlying association is genuinely common. Teeth are bound up with how we look and how we speak, so I would expect a fair few people's own associations to land there, and that is fine when the association is theirs.

There is also one piece of actual research that is worth knowing about on the subject of teeth. A small 2018 study in Frontiers in Psychology asked whether teeth dreams were linked to psychological distress or to something more mundane, and found they went with tension in the teeth, gums or jaw on waking, and did not go with how distressed people were. Which is a useful holistic reminder that the body is in the room too. If you wake from this dream with a sore jaw, the dream may partly be reporting on the jaw.

What a Jungian would ask instead

Jung never published a list of what teeth mean. Dreams are compensation mechanisms. When you spend too long near one of the extremes, they tell you it is time to travel back towards the centre. So the question is what attitude in your waking life had tipped far enough that the night had to push back, and the person he asked what the image brought to mind was the dreamer.

So the questions I would put to a teeth dream are not about teeth at all. What were you doing when they came out, and who was watching? Did they fall on their own or did you pull them, and were you ashamed, frightened, or oddly calm about it? A dream where your teeth crumble while you are trying to speak to your father is a different dream from one where you calmly take them out and lay them on a table, even though a dictionary files them under the same word.

“No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.”

C.G. Jung, Approaching the Unconscious, in Man and His Symbols (1964)

Three made up dreamers, the same dream

Let me make up three people, because it is the quickest way I know to show why the lookup fails, and because I cannot tell you about real ones.

The first has a presentation on Thursday and has been rehearsing it in the shower. She dreams her front teeth fall out as she opens her mouth to begin, and her first association is "I will not be able to get the words out". The cliche fits her, and she does not need me or anyone to tell her so.

The second, let us say, has just turned forty and lost his father in the spring. He dreams his teeth come out one by one into his hand, and his first association is his dad's dentures in a glass by the bed in the last weeks. For him the old dream books, with their teeth as kin, come closer to home than the classic anxiety reading ever could, and if I were sitting with him I would want to ask about the grief before I asked about the teeth, because that is where his associations went.

The third is a dentist, and her teeth fall out in a dream, and her first association is a patient she is worried she has misdiagnosed, because teeth are her work.

I do not think any of the traditions were wrong, they give the general gist and that has its uses, but not one of them was written with these three people in mind.

Before you look anything up

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language. You look it up and you get the translation. A dream image behaves more like a name than a word. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning sits in the relationship.

I have never had this dream myself, as it happens, but when I ask myself what teeth are to me, the first thing that comes is that they are what you bite into life with, so to speak, and if I ever do dream of losing them I suspect that is where I would start.

So, before you read another entry, give your teeth a minute on your own. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your own teeth, the ones in your mouth, rather than teeth in general? Then the second thing, and especially the one you judge yourself for thinking. Then look at where those land in your life this week. The fine detail is where the meaning actually lives: the feeling the image carried, and the illogical nuances the dream handed you. That is the gold dust.

Questions people ask