Ever wake up from a dream thinking, “What the fuck was that?”
It’s a fairly regular occurrence around here. Sleep dreams have been slow smile worthy, like when I was dating Bradley Cooper. There was kissing, but Cock Block Joey had to pee and woke me up before anything got too interesting.
Dreams have also been terrifying, like the one I had repeatedly during my sophomore year of college where every important man in my life took turns raping me. None of them had a face, but all had some sort of identifying marker, like a pair of cowboy boots or a football jersey that let me know exactly who he was. The markers were the only things in color, with everything else happening in a gray scape in the parking lot behind Abel Hall.
The past week has proven hilarious for dreams. First, I dreamed my fingernails fell out whilst eating Doritos. The Doritos were nacho-flavored and since my fingernails are currently an earthy version of chartreuse, the bowl of chips was just a hot, crunchy mess. I continued to eat around the nails. Nom.
I woke confused, mostly wondering why the chips were in a bowl. The bag is a perfect littler traveler. I was also confused due to Cool Ranch being the superior Dorito. The nail loss must have been a punishment for eating the nacho-flavored…
Then last night I was fighting some sort of government corruption via time travel. It was during the Regan Administration and some fellow time travelers were turning in expense receipts that included fancy POS printed receipts, one of which had a Starbucks logo. I burst into the room in my black and white, pinstriped Donna Karan power suit glory and proclaimed something about them being “Decades too soon, bitches!”
There was some clapping and the cheating time travelers hung their heads and looked like the end of a Scooby Doo cartoon.
“She is so smart,” they muttered.
Perhaps too much political coverage and digging through receipts for tax prep?
I woke up thinking I was smart and wanting coffee.
Like every other day.
For years, I dreamed about my teeth falling out. I would spit out, roots and all, tooth after tooth, with them growing back in as fast as I could spit them out. Once I filled a dirty bathtub full of teeth, the teeth gleaming white in their own bath of bloody spittle against the rusty stains on the tub.
Waking from that dream always involved a deep breath with my hands on my cheeks as my tongue ran from tooth to tooth, checking for any looseness and accounting for all.
I’m sure there’s plenty of interpretation to the dream, hell, a psychic even gave me one without knowing it that involved me being heir to a throne and my brother killing me by pulling my teeth out when I was in one of my drunken stupors. My party transcended lifetimes, apparently.
I always assumed it had to do with how much my teeth bother me.
Big picture, crooked teeth are not the end of the world. I’m probably the only adolescent who lobbied her parents for braces. My mom did take me to the orthodontist once, but they had the pics of my brother’s Neanderthal mouth out to show me how good I had it. I was convinced it was a set-up.
When smiling for pictures, I rarely showed my teeth. Although the assumption might have been I was perfecting the flirty smirk or being sullen, when I smile like a regular person, all I see are my top front teeth, my upper right central slightly overlapping the upper left central, and my upper right lateral smashed in at an angle behind the central.
A bite of cheese would torment me as I stared at the wonky bite marks, wishing it formed a nice u-shape. The Bitches loved my being in a retrospective teeth and cheese mood, since they might get a bite out of it. I do wish I could be more like them in not caring so much about their appearances. Like you need to care about appearances when you are a German Shorthaired Pointer.
When one has the opportunity to use a cheese pic from the World of Stock, one takes it.
A hunk of Colby-Jack finally pushed me to do something about it. Maybe cheese really is some type of mythical wonderment, with near bacon-like powers. Or maybe I was finally ready.
Here I sit, mouth filled with Invisalign trays, dreaming about biting into cheese next Christmas and seeing a beautiful u-shape. Yes, it’s slightly uncomfortable and having to take these trays out to eat is affecting my grazing habit. It’s also taking me a bit to get used to them and not be so worried about how my speech may be affected. But in about one year, I can fix something that’s bothered me for almost three decades and I’ll always smirk before I smile when someone says, “Say cheese!”