I have been having strange dreams in the last couple of weeks and was curious to understand what my subconscious was trying to tell me. This strange dream has been of all of my teeth slowly getting looser until they all fall out and I wake up. It was really bizarre because there is no reason that my teeth would fall out, I don’t even have any cavities! So I did a little digging.
What I came up with is that I was experiencing a stress or anxiety dream. These terms are often used interchangeably. I started with the broad question of why people even dream at all. And while there are theories, there is no definitive answer as to why we dream. There is however compelling arguments that dreams incorporate knowledge from conscious activity into them. For example, many people are able to identity other people within their dreams by name, as mentioned in Psychology Today. Some people also theorize that dreams help us internalize information from our waking hours and sort it.
Stress Dreams or Anxiety Dreams then could be attributed to the presence of excess stress or anxiety in one’s life as evidenced here and here. That’s really all that causes these types of dreams. There are many different studies both professionally and not that attempts to analyze dreams and their specific meanings. And while there is no proof specifically that one type of dream is caused by stress versus others, these themes are the more cited ones:
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Being chased
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Being publicly naked
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Losing your teeth
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Studying or having to do with school
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Falling
And of course there are others as well. It is how your subconscious deals with the stress or anxiety that you have been feeling. And while these dreams are not all together preventable, reducing stress and anxiety, in whatever capacity that means for you, and having a nighttime routine is suppose to help reduce their frequency.