Greek tradition
Teeth in Greek dream interpretation
The teeth entry is the single clearest case of a modern dream-dictionary reading whose ancestor is eighteen centuries old and goes uncredited.
What this page is
What follows describes what the Greek material says about particular images, where it says it, and what the method around it required. It is not a claim that a dream about any of these things means anything, and Artemidorus's own framework holds that most dreams mean nothing at all.
Artemidorus does not claim it. He credits it, at Book 1.31, saying the fullest and best set of principles is the one proposed by Aristander of Telmessus, and Aristander states the analogy directly: the mouth is to be thought of as a house, and the teeth as the people in the house. Everything else follows from that one image. Aristander was a real figure and not a minor one, the chief seer and dream interpreter at the court of Alexander the Great, and his own dream book is lost. What survives of it survives because Artemidorus quoted it.
The mapping is elaborate. The upper teeth stand for the more important members of the household and the lower for the lesser. The right side is read for men and the left for women, though he records that right can instead mark the older and left the younger. Incisors signify the young, canines the middle-aged and molars the old. The teeth also stand for possessions as well as people, with molars for treasure, canines for objects of little value and incisors for household goods.
Losing a tooth is then read as losing whatever that particular tooth stood for. Which tooth, which side and which row are the whole of the question, and the answer changes with each.
Put this beside the Islamic reading of teeth as relatives, mapped by row and by side, and the resemblance is not a coincidence: it is transmission. The same analogy travelled, and the modern dictionaries repeating it are at the far end of a chain that starts with a Greek book explaining that it is an analogy.
Worth knowing
Tooth-loss dreams are among the most commonly reported dreams worldwide, including in cultures with no contact with this tradition. An old reading is not an observation, and the age of this one says nothing about whether it is true.
What is actually recorded about dreaming of teeth
Teeth falling out is one of the most reported dreams in every population studied, and one of the few where the research is genuinely interesting: it correlates with dental irritation during sleep more strongly than with any of the meanings usually offered for it.
The teeth entrySources and reviewed references
2 references. What these labels mean
- 1.Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams)Historical dream record
Artemidorus of Daldis (200)
Cited for: The earliest surviving systematic dream dictionary, and evidence that dream interpretation has been organised by symbol and by the dreamer's circumstances for at least eighteen centuries.
- 2.Dreams and Experience in Classical AntiquityAcademic book
William V. Harris (2009) · Harvard University Press
Cited for: How dreams were recorded, classified and used in Greek and Roman practice, including temple incubation and the interpretive traditions around it.