We All Steal Each Others Weird Dreams

It's a bizarrely common scenario: You're off in dreamland, minding your own dream business, and suddenly, your teeth start falling out. Maybe you've found yourself in a classroom, slowly realizing you forgot to study or put on any clothes. Those are weirdly specific things, right? Why is it that just about everyone can recall the distinct sensation of rapid onset tooth decay and educational nudity because it happens over and over in our heads?

Except maybe it doesn't. Getting answers isn't easy because getting answers about anything related to dreams isn't easy, but we actually probably don't dream about any of these things any more often than other things. Our minds cycle through so many images and scenarios while we dream that, when experts examine the documented contents of people's dreams, they find that these supposedly common scenarios occur only a fraction of a percent of the time. We think they're much more common than they are because they're so dramatic, so we remember them more than boring dreams about doing taxes or whatever.

Even if it's not that common, though, it's still weird that everyone (or at least about half of people, according to one Chinese study) dreams about their teeth falling out, right? It turns out that it might just be a self-perpetuating thing. One guy dreamed about his teeth falling out (probably because he was grinding them in his sleep or something), told some deeply uninterested person about it, and then that image was stored away in the old, dusty library of their mind, so it eventually popped up among the countless other images they dreamed some night. After it happened enough times, it just became a thing that everyone dreams about precisely because it's known to be a thing that everyone dreams about. And also probably the teeth grinding.

Top image: Alexandra Gorn/Unsplash