I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do they’re usually banal. Amy loves to bring up the time I dreamt about eating a very tasty sandwich. It was memorably delicious. And I ate it. That was it.
My only recurring dream, an example of which I experienced last night, involves my having a loose front tooth. In the dream, I am quite worried about both the cause — why is this happening? — and the effect — I will look disfigured; it will cost a lot of money to fix. People advise me to leave it alone, but I can’t stop wiggling it. I don’t recall, however, that it has ever fallen out.
It turns out that the loose-tooth dream topic isn’t entirely uncommon. I usually don’t put too much truck in dream interpretation since I don’t subscribe to the notion of archetypes or the subconscious. Searching for the “meaning” of this kind of dream has further cemented my belief that a dream analysis is either (a) a bunch of hooey, or (b) so unique to an individual that it cannot be abstracted to a general theory (likely both). As in astrology and biblical “scholarship,” dream analysis leaves the practitioner a comfortable margin of error, as can be seen by these highly divergent interpretations of the “loose tooth dream”:
I’ve been working out with dumbbells lately and now Amy has decided she wants in on the fitness action. Knowing our laziness, however, she realized that if we had to keep switching weights on and off the dumbbells it’d just give us an excuse to not do it at all and we’d sink back into our slothful existence. So, we headed out to Play It Again Sports over the weekend to pick up another set of dumbbell rods for her.
