Thoughts to nibble on

Bit of a lazy one tonight.  Still feeling the after-effects of not drinking enough water after last night (I am a lightweight.)

Anyone who has ever come over to my flat and used the facilities has, if they are even moderately observant, seen the following note written on my bathroom mirror:

For the record, no, it does not say, "crystal meth."

The full message reads --

"Dear Crystal Mouth,
Have you flossed today?"

A number of people have asked me to clarify between the meth/mouth thing, but fewer people ask me why it's so prominently written in my bathroom, assuming I just want to have good dental hygiene.  Given that my father practiced dentistry for a number of years, this is a reasonable assumption.  However, this is not the case.

My dreams, when I remember them, tend to be highly vivid.  It's like living in a parallel world for a few hours out of the night.  An even less pleasant world than this one.

A year or so ago, I had a particularly graphic nightmare that as I was brushing my teeth, the enamel slowly began to break away of its own accord with little to no force.  My teeth began to chip away at an exponential rate, leaving naught but a strange, crystalline surface.  I grasped at my mouth in horror, as if that might stop the decay, but to no avail.  The crystal began to give way as well, morphing and crumbling until what was left in my mouth was a bizarre lattice that twisted inside the cavern of my mouth, too disgusting to leave unveiled, but too fragile to possible shut my lips on.

It's a strange image, I know.  The closest thing I can find is this:

Image courtesy of Cwoz at DeviantArt

I awoke from the dream, my body prickling from the adrenaline and pure panic, ridiculous though it may have seemed.  It was a few uneasy minutes before I could coax myself back to sleep.

I've had many a dream about my teeth before - usually one or two become loose enough that it feels like I could wiggle them out with my tongue, but nothing more.  This was the first time I had actually dreamt that they had deteriorated in my skull.

When I was younger, my sister owned a Freudian dream encyclopedia.  Most of the explanations were pretty weird and just pointed to sexual repression.  But the ones about teeth interested me the most.  It's said that when one dreams about their teeth falling out or crumbling, it represents a feeling of powerlessness or of losing power.

Why should losing one's teeth represent losing power?  Shouldn't it be something like our limbs?  Truth be told, I don't buy into dream analysis that much, but it's hard even for me to ignore a motif that's repeated so often in my subconscious.  I've never really felt all that powerful to begin with, so I think we can rule out the "losing power" explanation.  So, powerlessness?  That might be a little more accurate, but it still seems a bit exaggerated.

And yet, some days, stability eludes me.  Solid ground seems near enough, but the floor falls away, and I'm left grasping for whatever is left.  But even that sounds like a better description for a symbolic dream than the one I had!

So then what are teeth to us?  A status symbol?  Dignity?  The initial steps of digestion, and thereby a means of absorbing energy/power?

Well.  Whatever the case may be, it makes a really freaking good motivator to not let myself get cavities.

Until the next.