No more nightmares?

By Joel Garreau The Washington Post

January 06, 2009 - 12:00 am

   
If we no longer lose our teeth, will we lose our dreams about losing our teeth?

Teeth have great power in symbol and myth. Primitive people commonly adorn themselves with the teeth and claws of conquered animals. You still see shark-teeth necklaces on the chests of young beachgoers - usually male, presumably attempting to declare their virility.

"The tooth is the only part of the body that, as children, we get money for," says Betty Sue Flowers, of the University of Texas, who edited The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. "There's no nail-clipping fairy. There's no hair-cutting fairy."

Since teeth are the archetypal means of attack, loss of one's teeth in dreams signifies "a fear of castration or of complete failure in life," reports J.E. Cirlot in A Dictionary of Symbols, the authoritative examination of the collective, social and religious meanings of images throughout history. Freud, of course, thought that our extremely common tooth-loss dreams were about sexual guilt.

"Meaningful symbolic interpretation of teeth in dreams usually comes down to one idea: To lose teeth is to become vulnerable, to lose the first line of defense," says Bernard Welt, professor of arts and humanities at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, where for 25 years he has taught a course about dreams. "Thus it is not surprising if someone who feels defenseless or abandoned emotionally dreams of losing teeth."

Yes, but does the end of tooth loss mean the end of tooth-loss dreams?

"To the extent that many dreams about losing teeth do seem to be inspired by seeing elderly people lacking teeth and incorporating that as a metaphor for mortality or aging or infirmity of later life, I think that proportion of the dreams would be expected to disappear," says Deirdre Barrett, of Harvard, editor of The New Science of Dreaming.

Welt is not so sure. "Obviously, people dream about being naked or partially clothed in public places - or about having to take an exam unprepared - without having these experiences," he says.

And for all we know, the rarer tooth loss becomes, the more nightmarish it will be.