It began with a simple, odd statement.
“I often have dreams of my teeth falling out,” said a friend amongst friends recently. “ I do, too,” ano ther chimed in.
They weren’t nece ssarily talking to me, but I felt obliged to share my wisdom and clue them in on their common neurosis.
“That means you’re concerned about your family,” I said with confidence.
The crowd turned on me, doubting in unison my dissection of their nocturnal cerebrations.
I assured them I was correct. I told them I owned a mind myself, and thus inherently know how minds worked. They didn’t buy it.
My wife then spilled the beans. Years ago, I had read a book about dream interpretation and had memorized some of it.
We actually looked it up, and sure enough, under the heading “teeth falling out,” I was indeed correct in my prognosis.
So the tests began. For the rest of the evening, I was swarmed with dreams from the group.
In each instance, I would tell them what their dream meant, from my recollections from the book, which they would doublecheck, producing several “oohs,” “aahs” and “That’s baloney.”
Some examples of the dreams presented to me and my interpretations (all of which were correct, I’m not kidding):
• That you are shooting at someone with a gun. This means you feel bad about spreading gossip.
• That you are being attacked by an alligator. This is a sign that you are concerned about people liking you.
• That you are naked and no one else is (a common dream). This means you fear being discovered for a minor deception.
• That you are playing an oboe (an uncommon dream). If you dream you are playing an oboe, you are fearful that your eyes or ears will be harmed physically.
• That you are being chased. Another common one. Being chased in a dream means you are avoiding something important or not acknowledging something.
• That your outboard motor stalls. This means you are concerned about losing money.
• That you are falling. Having a dream about you falling means you are concerned about stability or security, or having control of your life.
• Dreaming about food. If you are dreaming about food, you are hungry.
Or, if you want to make this weird, you hate your mother.
• That you keep seeing a man in overalls. If men see a man wearing overalls in their dreams, it signifies they are insecure about the way they dress at social functions. For women, seeing a man in overalls means they admire military men.
If the man in overalls you are seeing is the late, great Junior Samples, it means you are concerned about future generations living a life without “Hee Haw.”
And aren’t we all?
• That you are eating ravioli. This means you are fearful of encountering a family of foreigners who are someway connected to the military.
Or that you’re hungry.
• That a group of head-hunting leprechauns are chasing you in a mall. This means you are crazy.
• That you can read minds and interpret dreams. This means you have wasted a lot of time reading a book about dreams.
• Len Robbins is the editor of The Clinch County News. He can be reached at lrobbins@clinchcounty news
