{"id":940,"date":"2009-10-15T19:13:41","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T02:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=940"},"modified":"2009-10-28T20:50:43","modified_gmt":"2009-10-29T03:50:43","slug":"lucid-and-toothless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2009\/lucid-and-toothless\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucid and Toothless"},"content":{"rendered":"
Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div>

Dream:<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>Last week my teeth fell out.\u00a0 Not all of them — just the ones on the left side of my lower jaw.\u00a0 And they didn’t really fall<\/em> out. They just came loose in their gum casings like a suction force had been broken. I tried to hold them in place like rocks pushed awkwardly into a long trough, but every time I moved my mouth they clunked and crushed against each other, trying to chew themselves to pieces.<\/p>\n

It was ridiculously upsetting, but they’re teeth — impermanent little buggers that are dependent on their foundations to stay in place, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it once they were out of their holes.\u00a0 What bothered me even more was that the whole thing mirrored such a classic dream image.\u00a0 I actually paused to consider whether this horrifying experience might really be a dream, but then quickly dismissed that as wishful distraction.\u00a0 I needed to focus on the problem, not escape from it.\u00a0 So I just vented to everyone around me that it really really sucked that this wasn’t a dream<\/em>.\u00a0 They agreed and kept doting on me, frantic.<\/p>\n

I dug through my iPhone to look up my dentist, but I have a new dentist, and I couldn’t remember his name. So I just scanned through all<\/em> the names in the address book as quickly as I could trying to recognize one as him, but none were right. It was the middle of the night, anyway. I’d have to wait until morning.<\/p>\n

A little while later, I was halfway to the bathroom when I realized I’d just woken up. Which meant I’d just been asleep. Which meant I’d either fallen asleep with my broken teeth or I had been dreaming the tooth crisis all along. My money was on the former, but I checked my mouth anyway and my teeth were just fine, roots and all<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I was more disoriented than relieved.<\/p>\n

Today was weirder.
\n
\nNot a dream:
\n<\/strong>
\nOn a public bus this morning, there was a young, tattooed man reading a paper out loud and carrying on a nonsensical conversation with the back of the head of the older, conservatively-dressed woman in front of him.\u00a0 I sat down near that woman and offered some sympathetic eye contact.\u00a0 She smiled in return. The second time I looked at her, she said in a loud, clear, voice, “I CAN SEE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED. OR ELSE THEY’RE COWARDS. BECAUSE I TRIPLE DOG DARE.”\u00a0 I raised my eyebrows.\u00a0 She repeated the same lines.\u00a0 I looked out the window. She kept saying it: “I CAN SEE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED. OR ELSE THEY’RE COWARDS. BECAUSE I TRIPLE DOG DARE.”<\/p>\n

I looked her in the eye and said calmly, “We’re okay.”<\/p>\n

She nodded.\u00a0 I looked out the window.\u00a0 And then she said it all again.<\/p>\n

When I got off the bus, I seriously considered the possibility that this might be another dream. So I did the most rational thing I could think of in that moment: I told Twitter<\/a>.\u00a0 And Twitter did what it does best: it<\/a>. messed<\/a>. with<\/a>. me<\/a>. (And so did Facebook.)<\/p>\n

I won’t get into all the details of my personal day, but I’ll tell you it was unusual and surreal, and this did little to confirm that I was awake. But it did move through it, and time passed, and my hands were still my hands, and letters and numbers were readable, and my teeth were fine, and I didn’t see any deceased relatives walking around, and as far as I could tell I couldn’t fly, so I figured I was probably safe.<\/p>\n

\"balloonboy-1\"Then I got home and found out a barrage of jokes and news reports referencing a 6-year-old boy floating away<\/a> in a hot air balloon that looks like a UFO flying saucer shaped like a chef’s hat and made out of aluminum foil. And I got there just in time for the shifting of the “He’s in the balloon!” headlines over to the “He’s DISAPPEARED!” headlines. <\/p>\n

And the “I’m Dreaming” theory became a lot more likely again. So I started joking about it again. Ha ha. Funny.<\/em><\/p>\n

It stopped being funny when I saw a reference to Drew Carey being the host of the Price is Right. <\/p>\n

Drew Carey. The Host. Of the Price is Right. <\/p>\n

THIS ISN’T POSSIBLE!<\/p>\n

And apparently he’s been doing it for years.<\/p>\n

I think I liked it better when I had no teeth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

photo credit: http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/bahkubean\/<\/a> \/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.Dream: Last week my teeth fell out.\u00a0 Not all of them — just the ones on the left side of my lower jaw.\u00a0 And they didn’t really fall out. They just came loose in their gum casings like a suction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}