Toothache in a dream: what does it mean?
A pain that cannot be located precisely, cannot be ignored, and for most of history could only be ended by removing the tooth.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud gave dental dreams real attention and treated them as among the most common there are. He would want to know whether the pain in the dream was in a specific tooth or everywhere.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might take a pain that cannot be pointed to as the material, since referred dental pain genuinely presents in the ear, the jaw and the opposite side of the face.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Real pain can enter dreams, and people in pain report more frequent and more unpleasant dreams. If you have toothache, it is worth seeing a dentist rather than waiting: dental infection can spread and is occasionally serious.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Saint Apollonia is the patron saint of toothache and is depicted holding a tooth in pincers, because her martyrdom involved having them broken. Shrines to her drew people in pain across Europe for centuries. Her feast day is the ninth of February and dentists still mark it.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
Toothache is one of the few pains that makes a person unable to think about anything else, and writing that honestly is more affecting than any injury.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The pain that cannot be located or ignored.
What are the genre conventions?
A swollen jaw and a cloth tied round the head, in something historical.
How to subvert it
Write the night before the appointment, which is worse than the appointment.
Try this
Two hundred words about being unable to think about anything else. Somebody is speaking and none of it is arriving.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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