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THE MATERIAL OF DREAMS
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symbolisms they are based, but the teeth would well fit in with the first of the two.[1]
Dreams in which one is flying or hovering, falling, swimming, or the like, belong to the second group of typical dreams. What do these dreams signify? A general statement on this point cannot be made. They signify something different in each case,
- ↑ As the dreams of pulling teeth, and teeth falling out, are interpreted in popular belief to mean the death of a close friend, and as psychoanalysis can at most only admit of such a meaning in the above indicated parodical sense, I insert here a dream of dental irritation placed at my disposal by Otto Rank109.
"Upon the subject of dreams of dental irritation I have received the following report from a colleague who has for some time taken a lively interest in the problems of dream interpretation:
I recently dreamed that I went to the dentist who drilled out one of my back teeth in the lower jaw. He worked so long at it that the tooth became useless. He then grasped it with the forceps, and pulled it out with such perfect ease that it astonished me. He said that I should not care about it, as this was not really the tooth that had been treated; and he put it on the table where the tooth (as it seems to me now an upper incisor) fell apart into many strata. I arose from the operating chair, stepped inquisitively nearer, and, full of interest, put a medical question. While the doctor separated the individual pieces of the strikingly white tooth and ground them up (pulverised them) with an instrument, he explained to me that this had some connection with puberty, and that the teeth come out so easily only before puberty; the decisive moment for this in women is the birth of a child. I then noticed (as I believe half awake) that this dream was accompanied by a pollution which I cannot however definitely place at a particular point in the dream; I am inclined to think that it began with the pulling out of the tooth.
I then continued to dream something which I can no longer remember, which ended with the fact that I had left my hat and coat somewhere (perhaps at the dentist's), hoping that they would be brought after me, and dressed only in my overcoat I hastened to catch a departing train. I succeeded at the last moment in jumping upon the last car, where someone was already standing. I could not, however, get inside the car, but was compelled to make the journey in an uncomfortable position, from which I attempted to escape with final success. We journeyed through a long tunnel, in which two trains from the opposite direction passed through our own train as if it were a tunnel. I looked in as from the outside through a car window.
As material for the interpretation of this dream, we obtained the following experiences and thoughts of the dreamer:—
I. For a short time I had actually been under dental treatment, and at the time of the dream I was suffering from continual pains in the tooth of my lower jaw, which was drilled out in the dream, and on which the dentist had in fact worked longer than I liked. On the forenoon of the day of the dream I had again gone to the doctor's on account of the pain, and he had suggested that I should allow him to pull out another tooth than the one treated in the same jaw, from which the pain probably came. It was a 'wisdom tooth' which was just breaking through. On this occasion, and in this connection, I had put a question to his conscience as a physician.
II. On the afternoon of the same day I was obliged to excuse myself to a lady for my irritable disposition on account of the toothache, upon which
