Why do we keep dreaming about our teeth falling out?
Given how varied and ridiculous dreams tend to be, countless people experiencing stress dreams about their teeth falling out should be virtually impossible. But there is a brain-based explanation...
I’m one of those people who honestly believes that there are few things less interesting than hearing about someone else’s dream. However, many people think otherwise.
Which is why it’s become knowledge that countless people regularly dream about their teeth falling out. This is seemingly a very common dream occurrence, and has been inspiring psychological analysis for decades.
However, when you think about it, isn’t the whole point of telling someone about a dream was that it was so bizarre, so chaotic, so beyond the realms of the possible, so weird? There’s a whole industry dedicated to interpreting them, they’re so surreal and unpredictable.
And yet, countless people experience essentially the same dream, of having their teeth fall out, so often. What’s that about?
Thankfully, we’ve moved on from the days of Freud and his cocaine-infused theories. Neuroscientific and psychological advances mean there are a few potential explanations for this bizarre dental-dream phenomenon.
Teeth, stress, and the purpose of dreams.
I’ve written about the current understanding about the function of dreams here. But, to summarise, one of the leading modern theories about why we dream is that it’s all about memory consolidation.
The new memories we accumulate during the waking day need to be filed and sorted, and integrated into our existing system of memories, like a new delivery of books being placed on the right shelves in a bookshop or library. And this happens when we’re asleep, and that’s what dreaming is.
It’s old and new memories being linked up, and activated in the process, hence the ‘utterly bizarre but still feels familiar’ quality of the typical dreaming experience. It’s all existing memories, old and new, but in a random, chaotic arrangement.
And if you’re experiencing a period of significant stress, as we all invariably will for whatever reason, your newest memories will be derived from experiences infused with stress, and all the associated emotions and anxieties.
A significant emotional quality tends to be how your brain recognises memories as significant, or ‘important’. And one key role of dreams is to help you process these emotions, to integrate them into your existing mental systems, so they don’t hang around, causing disruption and confusion.
This explains why dreams can often be so emotionally intense; it’s your brain trying to get to grips with the build-up of emotional experiences, which is especially important when it’s a stressful time.
However, a lot of our physical response to stress involves our teeth in some way. Teeth grinding, tension in the jaw, dry mouth, etc. We may not even be consciously aware of this, but it would mean that, during periods of prolonged stress, the memories we’re building up would have a recurring undercurrent of ‘teeth’.
Have you ever had an important discussion with someone in a public place, with a particular song playing in the background, meaning that song takes on a degree of meaning, and is in your head a lot? In stressful periods, our brains are picking up the background music of ‘Teeth…teeth…teeth…teeth…teeth…teeth…teeth…’ etc.
So, if your unconscious brain is trying to process a lot of new stress-infused memory, it’s going to end up regularly saying “Huh… teeth. OK then” And your dreams end up reflecting this.
Add to this the times when your teeth and dental issues are the literal cause of your ongoing stress, and you can see why stress dreams about teeth falling out are actually rather common.
Teeth stress is familiar stress, which is sometimes preferable.
At this point, some readers may be thinking “But I don’t grind my teeth or anything while stressed, yet I still dream of them falling out?”
OK, fair enough. Another explanation is that it’s due to a form of unconscious psychological displacement.
Just now I explained how dreams are essentially your brains way of sorting and processing new memories, like a delivery of books to a library. But the memories in our brains are not big chunks of information, welded together. It’s believed that they’re more like complex combinations of individual ‘units’ of information that were part of the experience, that can be sorted seperately. This allows the brain to do more with less, and save resources.
Like, if you’re married, you see your partner’s face very day. But rather than create a new copy of their face for every memory that involves them, the bundle of units that is the memory that involves them is linked to the existing memory unit that is ‘partner’s face’, already stored in the brain, and used often.
Basically, with a delivery of books, you wouldn’t put a whole box full onto a shelf; you’d unpack the individual books, and sort those seperately. Your brain is often doing that with the individual elements of a memory.
Sure, the books that were packed together will often be shelved together, because they were boxed together for a reason. But not necessarily. Not in the brain, anyway.
One argument is that, the memory of a particularly negative emotional experience, if stored in the memory as-is, would keep causing disruptive emotional upset in the long term. Because if you can recall a traumatic experience in precise detail, it would keep being traumatic. That is literally why PTSD is such a problem.
It’s believed our brains resolve this by detaching the negative emotional elements of a recent memory, and connect them to memories with similar emotional qualities, but which are less recent and specific.
Sort of like, if a new member of a work crew is trying to carry more weight than they are physically capable of and holding everyone up, the boss would take some of the heavy items from them, and pass them on to more experienced workers, so everyone can make progress. Your brain adopts this strategy for memories with too much emotional ‘weight’, and redistributes it during the dreaming process.
So, if you’ve have had a particularly upsetting experience with an especially toxic partner, or a near-miss car accident, you’d be inclined to think about that, to dwell on it, for some time, and thus keep the negative emotions constantly refreshed.
What your sleeping brain will do to resolve this, is detach the negative emotions from that specific memory, and connect them to a more generic, familiar, and manageable experience or scenario. Like, say, being lost in a storm, falling from a great height, or your teeth falling out.
Because that is a regular source of low-key anxiety. We’re constantly told how important dental hygiene is from a very young age, and warned about the many things that put it at risk. Brushing teeth, flossing etc. is a constant, recurring aspect of our daily lives. Countless people are afraid of the dentist.
So, it could be that our sleeping brains help us deal with stressful experiences by saying “OK, this memory has WAY too much negative emotion, let me just take a bunch of it and store it over here, by the teeth falling out scenario. We deal with that one all the time”. And so, dental distress occurs in our dream, but in a way that actually dilutes the impact of more stressful recent experiences, so it’s actually good for us.
This process is believed to be a regular aspect of dreaming, and why recurring nightmares are such a reliable indicator of oncoming mental health problems.
Basically, the fact that we can, and do, talk casually about dreams where our teeth fall out, is a big part of why they happen at all.
You can read about this issue in much more depth in my book, Emotional Ignorance.