A Dream With Teeth

"The Mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven."
(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

The telephone woke me this morning. I was in a very vivid dream about my teeth. A sharp growth had appeared on one of my molars, like a stalactite, and I needed to get rid of it. I was quite obsessed by it, and went to a chemist's shop, under a railway bridge, by the London Wetlands Centre. (How obsessed I must have been, to visualise a non-existent pharmacist's two hundred miles from my home. But that's dreams for you...)

The phramacist was American, and there was a bit of a problem. I was picking up packages from a shelf, looking at them, turning the box in my hand, rubbing the ugly stalactite with my tongue and feeling its coarse growth. But I wasn't allowed to buy the treatment in the box. The pharamacist explained that the shop wasn't supposed to sell those treatments anymore. He had been sacked, and was about to leave and catch a plane back to the States.

I got into my car and drove away, still nervously probing the sharp extrusion on my molar. I had to stop for a red light at the traffic lights by Olympic Studios, then I drove on to an empty road, and began to work my way west back towards home.That was when the phone rang.


There was nothing unusual in my mouth. I checked this out very quickly during the phone call, half-awake, fielding a telesales call from someone I didn't know, mistaking his voice for a friend, realising my mistake, saying 'No thank you'.

And two hours later, I am still probing that spot in my mouth, unable to accept that there is no sharp stalactite of bone sticking out. The mind makes its own reality, and is a most peculiar thing.