Tooth in Dreams

I was dreaming about tooth pain. It was a specific tooth. the top second-to-last molar on the right side. I wonder if there’s something specific about that tooth.

The circumstance of the dream didn’t seem significant. It was a primarily sensory dream- like the way I felt and the way my body felt was the story itself.

I’m anxious about my teeth. I think it’s some weird primordial fear of losing one’s teeth- if you don’t have teeth, you don’t eat, you die. And so the pain in this one particular tooth took all my attention. It was exquisite, in a way that only mouth pain seems to be. It’s akin to the feeling of peeling off a particularly nice scab. I don’t know any other way to describe it.

I wanted to kind of explore the pain, like we all do, either with the tongue or other parts of the mouth, to see if the tooth is loose or if the pain goes away under pressure or whatnot. Felt with the tongue, the tooth felt too big. It was at least twice the size of the surrounding teeth- oddly jammed between them like a bloated solid balloon. Next, I closed my mouth and tried to bring my teeth together but they would not occlude; the bloated tooth prevented my mouth from closing all the way. So I sort of decided to grind the tooth against the others, in a sideways motion.

Once it started I could not stop it. I could feel the tooth’s integrity was not that good. It seemed to have many faults, like a pane of glass that was dropped just on the corner; the fault lines were there and it would only take a small amount of pressure to shatter it.
Rather than shatter, the tooth crumbled like dry limestone shards. Exactly like that I felt the shards accumulating in the pocket between my teeth and cheek. The pain was intense, but again I could not stop it. I ground the tooth right down to the gum.

Now the pain was like the open wound aired, but still of an exquisite quality. I tasted blood and that weird bitter toothy pulp. I tongued the place where the tooth had been and it was sharp; the base was still there with some sharp tooth pieces. It was also dry and crumbly, and it seemed like a larger than strictly reasonable pile of tooth shards were still in my mouth.
Like a mouth full of gravel, I started to spit out the tooth shards, then thought I’d better catch them just in case a dentist can put them back- (lol). So I caught them- 2 hands full! and put them in a bag.

Now my mouth was clear(ish), and less dry, but full of the taste of blood and bitter pulp. I felt for the tooth stump, but I must have pushed too much and removed it, because now there was just that fleshy gum hole where the tooth had been. I tried to look at it in a mirror, opening my mouth as wide as it would go. In the mirror, all my teeth appeared intact.

So I didn’t really lose the tooth I thought. It’s not real. I still have all my teeth. Yet the pain, the sensation, the taste of blood and pulp were all so clearly visceral to me. Still, I knew it was not reality.