dental dreams.
© 1995 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

I guess thinking about that awful toothbrush incident from last year had an effect, because I've started having dental-anxiety dreams again. I had the usual one where my teeth were loose, and I was wiggling them back and forth with my fingers, getting nervous about them coming out. Sometimes in this dream, one will actually come out, and I'll spend the rest of the dream trying to put it back in. Someone once told me that this kind of dream is sometimes a sign of a calcium deficiency. Maybe I have scurvy.

But the more notable, recent tooth-trauma dream was that some of my teeth had split vertically down the middle, and were coming apart that way. When I tugged at one side of them, they made a kind of tearing, sucking sound, and resisted with a sticky sort of membrane, kind of like the goop that's underneath a scab, or like Jeff Goldblum's Fingernails In The Fly. (Hey, another Cronenberg connection. Plate. Shrimp. Plate of shrimp.)

One night I had fallen asleep with the TV on, and woke up in the middle of the night to a scene of a middle-aged man waking up and walking in to the bathroom. He looks in the mirror, and sees that his gums look weird. He touches them, and a tooth comes out in his hand. And then he tugs out another. And another halfway. He begins a long drawn-out moan, and stumbles out of the bathroom. Then he looks down at his hands, and his fingernails are peeling off. He screams, and suddenly it's all back to normal.

I can't tell you how weird it was to be half awake, and see one of my recurring nightmares played out on the TV screen. I wasn't really sure I wasn't dreaming it myself: had I just wrapped a TV around a dream, and then wrapped the ``am I really awake'' thought around that?

Well it turns out that it wasn't a dream, it's a movie called Dark Angel: The Ascent, and it's actually pretty good in a really low budget B-movie kind of way.

Another wonderfully weird dental nightmare:

So this dental nightmare began with me standing in front of a mirror, looking at what had become of my teeth. My two front teeth were an inch or two long, like a rodent's.

``That's no so bad,'' I thought. ``They'll wear down eventually. This isn't permanent.''

Some time passed, and I guess it was the next day, and I had somehow managed to bump these protuberant teeth or something, and -- you guessed it -- they came out, with the usual wet sucking sound. They came out along with the teeth to either side of them, leaving me with my four front teeth missing. The visual effect of this was that my canines were much more prominent -- I had fangs! But this was not at all cool-looking. And then I noticed that my canines had begun to grow too, just like the middle two had, except that this time it was happening so quickly that I could actually see them growing. At about the time that they were getting long enough to interfere with my ability to close my mouth, they too came out, and I was looking ahead to a life of soft food. I was just beginning to wonder about denture technology when I woke up.