The dreams were almost always the same: My teeth were loose or falling out, or I had a huge wad of chewing gum in my mouth that I was unable to remove. The gum dreams were more stressful: I would be in a gum-inappropriate environment and the endless struggle to remove it was fruitless and embarrassing. Loose-tooth dreams just mean you are getting old. Everyone knows that. But I had always had these dreams, and the ones about the impossible-to-remove, taffylike gum debacle occurred more and more frequently.

Eventually, my teeth actually become loose, and I began trying to figure out why. I went to see my dentist, who advised me to see a gum doctor. This seemed almost funny, in light of the dream imagery I struggled with for so many years. Nothing seemed to be amiss, and I was advised to "watch it" and see if anything changed. The teeth stayed loose, nothing changed, the dreams continued. My back molars no longer met the way they should and there was noticeable shifting and wiggling.

Finally, I went to see another dentist who wiggled my teeth, then stepped back and cupped his chin with his hand. "Hmm," he said. "I have been wiggling teeth for many, many years and I have never seen this before. I wiggle one, and they both move. Something is going on here, and I think I know what."

He was right -- something was going on and had been for most of my life. An aggressive cyst was growing inside one of my maxillary cavities -- it was a benign sort of thing in that it wasn't malignant, but it was by no means harmless. It had slowly been gnawing away at the roots of two molars, growing undetected for all of my life. It was called an ameloblastoma and would have to come out before it did more damage.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/13/CMGM9DDOM51.DTL

Burned by a Curling Iron

I was coming to the rescue of some kids who were being burned by a curling iron.....I rushed over and grabbed the curling iron by the hot rod and it burned into the skin of my hand, sticking sickeningly to the skin of the hand.

I awoke with a tingling sensation in the ring and pinky fingers of one of my hands. The numbness and tingling stayed in the hand even after waking for the day. It then began to spread and eventually across my torso and into the other hand and then down into my hips. At the hospital I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

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Dream of a 32 year old woman

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If anyone has had similar dreams, or dreams that preceded illness (or healing) , please let me know:

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Dr. Steve Parker

dreamcurrents(at)gmail.com

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(substituting "@" for "at".)

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In his essay "A Chapter on Dreams," Robert Louis Stevenson revealed that certain of the scenes of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and plot elements of much of his other fiction came to him in dreams. He amusingly referred to his "Brownies," the "little people" in his unconscious who had engaged in businesslike literary collaboration with him and were welcome successors to the "night-hag" who sent him frightening dreams when he was a child. Stevenson dreamed of Jekyll and Hyde in Bournemouth, England, while his body was racked with a fever following a lung hemorrhage and the delirium of his sleep's visions was possibly heightened by the drugs that his doctor had prescribed. Stevenson appears to have dreamed the idea of Jekyll and Hyde in great detail and clarity, and even attributed to his Brownies the invention of the powders that induced Dr. Jekyll's personality changes. He cried out in horror during his sleep, causing his wife, Fanny, to rouse him, "much to his indignation." He told her that he "was dreaming a fine bogey tale" and gave her a rapid sketch of Jekyll and Hyde up to the point when she had awakened him. At daybreak he passionately set to work on the story. He closeted himself in his sickroom for three days and then emerged with a completed thirty-thousand-word manuscript, which he read aloud to his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/29-2/dr.jekyll.html

Dreamtime Radio

One of the better resources for understanding dreams, Dreamtime has fourteen interviews with prominent dream researchers and clinicians.

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The sound quality is not always great because they are mostly telephone interviews, but listening to the shows is an easy way to learn what is in the current field of dream research and understanding.

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http://dreamscience.org/dreamtimeradio2/index.htm

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Beauty in Sleeping: From Dream to Millionaire

(There are numerous cases of the remedy for healing shown in a dream. This is one of them -- sparker)
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Madame C.J. Walker (1867-1919) is cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the first female American self-made millionaire. She was also the first member of her family born free.
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Madame Walker founded and built a highly successful African-American cosmetic company that made her a millionaire many times over. Walker was suffering from a scalp infection that caused her to loose most of her hair in the 1890’s. She began experimenting with patented medicines and hair-care products. Then, she had a dream that solved her problems:
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He answered my prayer, for one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big, black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up in my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out. I tried it on my friends; it helped them. I made up my mind to begin to sell it.”
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Walker was an entrepreneur, philanthropist and social activist. She best sums up her rise from a childhood in the poor south to being the head of an international, multi-million dollar corporation in the following quote:
"I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground."

http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm#paul_mccartney_dream

Scrambled eggs, You've got lovely legs

The Beatles were in London in 1965 filming Help! and McCartney was staying in a small attic room of his family's house on Wimpole Street. One morning, in a dream he heard a classical string ensemble playing, and, as McCartney tells it:

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" I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!"

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http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm#paul_mccartney_dream

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Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for Yesterday in his head, along with some strange lyrics. For a long time, he was sure he must have heard it elsewhere, he dream was so clear.The lyrics he had with the simple tune were -

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Scrambled Eggs

Oh my darling you've got lovely legs

McCartney mulled over the tune for a while, convinced he must have heard it on the radio or elsewhere. But finally he played it for his fellow Beatles, and none of them remembered the tune from anywhere else. They put it together with some more romantic lyrics -

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Yesterday

All my troubles seemed so far away,

Now it seems that they are here to stay,

Oh I believe in Yesterday.

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http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art19125.asp

The Wolf man

I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again." (Freud 1918)

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This was the dream of the famous "Wolf Man," Sergie Pankejeff.

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Parkejeff was an aristocrat from Russia: his problems in included his inability to have bowel movements and a severe depression.

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Freud's interpretation was that he had witnessed his parents having sex a tergo. The dream played a major role in Freud's tehreoy of psychosexual development.

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Several years after he finished seeing Freud, he had psychotic delusions that a doctor had filled a hole near his nose and would walk down the street staring at his reflection in a mirror.

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He was in and out of Freudian analysis his whole life; he told a journalist at the end of his life, "the whole thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I came to Freud." He saw Freud's interpretation of his dream as "far-fetched."

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Interestingly, this information about the failure of Freudian psychoanalysis in one of its cornerstone cases is not well publicized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pankejeff