Dream a Little Dream

As the fingers of darkness wind around the houses and eyes become heavy and tired, I am normally not sleeping. I can be found staring at the ceiling or gazing at the stars, wondering what everyone else under the blanket of darkness is dreaming, and who else is seeing the same sky as me. I’m a bad sleeper, yet I am happy to lay I the silence and listen to the breeze whispering its hushes so the rest of the world falls asleep. When I do I never remember my dreams, more a catatonic state of things I thought about during my repose.

Recently I’ve been dreaming. And it’s not very pleasant.

I keep having the same recurring dream, and waking trying to catch my breath. Fear grips me and my heart is a moth fluttering against a lightbulb; pounding over and over again as it tries to right itself.

It’s not even particularly scary, but it rips me back into consciousness time and time again. I’m in Cornwall (don’t ask why, I don’t have a clue!) and I’m with a girl I don’t recognise. Interestingly, my sister informs me that your brain doesn’t have the capacity to see new faces, so I must have seen the face before, maybe in passing – on the tube or in an airport. She is someone my mind has taken a still of.

I stand in her garden, which is the garden of a house I used to live in, and I am crying. My hands are cupped, and when I unfurl my fingers all my teeth are there. There is no blood; they are clean and pearly, but they are no longer where they should be. All that’s left is gums. And I can’t get back from Cornwall. The dream culminates with me holding my teeth and worrying that my Mum will wonder where I am (she doesn’t even live in London), and then I wake up trying to catch my breath and furiously chasing my tongue across my teeth to check they are all still present and correct.

I’ve mentioned it to a few people, and they all say it means I’m going to come into money. I Googled a dream finder and it said I was conscious of a secret I was keeping. I liked the sound of that; it evoked memories of being read The Secret Garden as a child, of an old key and a secret that I was never to tell. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I don’t have a secret I am keeping. That I know of.

You can take negatives and positives out of everything, and teeth falling out seems to have different suggestions in different cultures. Some say a dream about teeth falling out symbolises a fear of becoming older, or a life change or compromise that might become costly, whereas some see teeth dreams as positive, and indicative of a want to explore feelings of loss, or a need to nurture yourself and those closely around you.

I don’t believe that a dream can have the same meaning for everyone. The human mind is such a complex and intelligent system that there is no way a theme in a dream can mean the same thing in different people, regardless of age, sex, location and upbringing. It’s simply not feasible.

But I do agree that a dream is the subconscious trying to tell you something. I am a firm believer in ‘funny feelings’ and as I have got older I have learnt to trust them, like faithful old friends turning up to whisper quietly and influence which path I take.

My kindred spirit in South Africa also posted about unusual dreams today, have a read.

Tell me about your dreams.