Ah, yes. The standard fairy-tale line: Dreams do come true. It sorta makes the soul feel all soft an' gushy inside, don't it? Sorta like sitting next to "a pot-bellied stove on a frosty morning" (from 1959 Rock Hudson film Pillow Talk). Because of this line, Disney has lived as long as it has. If people did not believe in their own dreams coming true or feed off of the hope supplied by such insipid, naive characters as Cinderella and Snow White, Disney pictures would probably have done about as well as "It's a Wondeful Life" did during the Depression. But here we are, and the belief that dreams come true continues to be fostered in surround sound and often in 3-D.
Well, if dreams do come true, I certainly hope they are the daydreams. Those are the ones you can control, you know, the ones that are deliberately infused with aspirations and objectives and female movie stars with long black hair and English accents (hey, she's not in all of them). Night dreams are too odd, too fluid, too uncontrollable, too Lewis Carroll-esque. Most of the time, I can't even remember what I dream about at night, and I think it's because my mind doesn't want to.
But what about the nightmares? Eek. If those come true. Not only will I at some point in my life lose all of my money to an embezzler, wake up and find I haven't actually graduated from college because I slept in and missed an important day of class (dreaming about waking up is an interesting and somewhat different sort of experience), and unwillingly jump off of a waterfall without a parachute (like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive; "He did a Peter Pan off of this dam, right here!") but my teeth are eventually going fall out. Not even in the natural way. Old people lose their teeth because they're, well, to put it nicely, old, but as far back as I can remember with any degree of lucidness (which is basically a memory of my teenage years and maybe a little before) I have been having dreams that my teeth are falling out in unexpected and spooky ways.
Once I dreamed that I bit something and my teeth were already gone; another time I bit something and my teeth all bent forward and broke off. Sometimes they're simply dangling from my gums like enamel wind chimes, sort of tapping against each other and jangling (as much as teeth can, I guess).
Last night however ("a miserable night, so full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams" [Shakespeare's Richard III]) , I had my--how can I say this--most horrific tooth dream ever. My teeth had not fallen out this time (though it might have been better if they had, since that is the usual course of action and I am getting used to it by now anyway); no, in this dream, my teeth were all different sizes and colors and were twisted in different ways. My gums were bloodied and part of my mouth was permanently uncloseable (like Harvey Two-Face in The Dark Knight), so my Quasimodo bicuspids were forever before me in the dirty mirror.
I am still cringing even now simply thinking of it. I wish I could not think of it. I even tried to make the residual impression of the dream go away this morning by brushing, flossing, and rinsing vigorously with my trusty alcohol-free Crest Pro-Health CPC (what ever that means) Antigingivitis/Antiplaque Oral Rinse, but it didn't do any good at all. The teeth still haunt me. Oh, the teeth, the teeth! "I see thee still" (from Shakespeare's Macbeth).Oh, dear, how "wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep" (Ibid.); "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have had bad dreams" (Shakespeare's Hamlet). All I can say is this: if a dream really is a "wish your heart makes" (from Disney film Cinderella), then I need to see a cardiologist about a bypass.
Dreams come true, eh? I sincerely hope not.
No comments:
Post a Comment