DREAM
I'm in a clean room painted a minty, robin's egg blue and decorated with flowers and Easter wreaths. I'm laying on a plain bed like you'd expect to use when getting a massage, but this bed has a bed sheet over it, and it's pressed up beside a window to a sunny, green yard.
I'm feeling very relaxed, like I'm on a vacation seeing friends.
Jordan Peterson's wife enters the room with a pair of pliers. I open my mouth and she proceeds to yank out one of my back teeth.
"Oh!" she says as she snaps backwards with the tooth. She seems really surprised at how that went.
Unlike one might expect, my mouth doesn't hurt--it feels better.
"My tooth doesn't hurt anymore," I say. There's the start of a second tooth growing in the space left. But I look in the mirror and I'm disappointed that I had to sacrifice some of my attractiveness to relieve the pain. I accept it though. I think this was the best decision I could make at this time.
INTERPRETATION
I bought Dream Dictionary for Dummies, and it really is a mixed bag of helpfulness. I think ChatGPT tends to have better responses for what dream symbols might mean. It says this: losing teeth could symbolize anxiety about how others perceive you. I think my concern as I looked in the mirror "reflects" this.
Personally, I have always read in dream dictionaries that teeth symbolize knowledge or wisdom. And the loosening of teeth means that you have to drop old concepts you've held on to and make room for new ones.
I think this dream symbolizes changing ways of thinking, and some anxiety I'm having about being drawn more and more into the world of comedy. Jordan Peterson is a pretty controversial public figure, and I think his wife symbolizes the subversive and controversial nature of comedy in this dream.
Stuff like hard science and STEM doesn't attract that much controversy, because it weeds out people without expertise, and its key topics are not social or emotional. But comedy is entirely about opinions and emotions, and the topics have to be pre-digested well enough for the majority of a general audience to get it within fractions of a second. That social/emotional concentration scares me, even though I love to find the humor in various things. It's one of the things that gives me the most joy.
To me, comedy is really appealing these days because it's where so much of the authenticity in American society is located right now. But there are and have always been controlling, authoritarian personalities in our world who can't emotionally manage the discomfort they feel when people don't think the way they do. I'm an agreeable person and don't like to see people suffer, even if their reasons for their own suffering are stupid and self-created. But as much as I crave the safety of completely avoiding emotional or social topics, I also crave intimacy.
I think the fact that I feel better when the old tooth is removed is me feeling good about letting this new little wisdom tooth grow underneath the old tooth--the old wisdom that tries harder to play it safe. And I think that I'm worried that other people's perception of me will suffer now that I'm different (now that I have a gap in my smile).
But removing the old tooth (heading in this direction) still feels like the right thing to do, even if this isn't a perfect situation.
