Good things come in nightmarish packages

So I am getting ready for a first date. I am clearly very nervous, as I am convinced this guy is completely out of my league because he has clearer skin than me and way better hair (not hard to achieve, sadly). I live on a houseboat, by the way, so it is kind of rocking a little as I apply concealer to my dark circles in an attempt to make myself look lively and human (in conjunction with blush, anything is possible). As I swipe on a bit of too-sticky lip gloss (I hope if we kiss, he will just get stuck forever and not be able to escape my lip-grip), I notice a little something in my tooth. I dig around with my tongue, probing for the invader. But it feels weird, like my tooth is loose or something. I nudge it a bit to test it out, and it does feel overly sensitive. Oh, well. I have bigger things to worry about.

I rush off of my houseboat and toward my intimi-date. On my way, I run into a friend, who points out that my front tooth is looking rather odd. I touch it gently with my forefinger, just to realise that it is loosing up even more. Crappity crap crap. This is not looking good. With ever step I take, I can feel it heading south. As I round the corner toward the restaurant, out it comes. I catch it, bloody and gross, and at the same time glimpse Mr. Right in the distance. I'm in a total panic. Then I wake up.

My heart is racing as I feel around in my mouth for any potential missing teeth. Nope, everyone is accounted for. Whew. As an American, teeth are very important, you know. They must all be there, white and straight. Poor dental hygiene is tantamount to poor care of the Netherlands, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know what I mean, please Google "manscaping".) It is just not tolerable. Needless to say, this seemingly harmless nightmare jolts me every time. It comes regularly in different forms. Job interviews, public speaking events, TV appearances... You name it, my teeth have fallen out there. Sometimes one, oftentimes more. And once, I even panicked in my dream, then told myself (in the dream) "This is only a dream", at which point I woke up to find my teeth missing, and low and behold, I was still dreaming! Yes, it was a tricky dream-within-a-dream! God I am good at fooling myself sometimes...

Anyway, the point is, I wake up every time in a near fit, yet relieved to find all of my teeth still occupying their fleshy little caves in my jaws. And that is the true joy of a nightmare. Who cares how shitty it is while it's happening? You wake up, and it's gone, and you feel great about it. "Good thing that was just a dream..." And then on with your life feeling slightly strange that you dream about teeth, but satisfied to know you still have them.

Good dreams, on the other hand, are the real killers. You're sitting there listening to Mr. Right whisper all of the cheesy sweet nothings he can conjure up (he still thinks he has to work for you in your dream, because in your dream, you are not desperate). You are eating it up, knowing that you are totally deserving of this. You are out of his league. He knows it and you can see his feelings of pride in having captured you for this moment in time. Your eyes meet, and it is definitely magical. Of course you are in some weird place, like the changing room at the public pool or the bleachers at the local baseball stadium (it is a dream, after all, and not everything can be normal). But you still feel like there is nowhere you would rather be. Then, somebody knocks on the dressing room door, and you are jolted out of the arms of Mr. Right for good. You wake up.

At this point, all I ever want to do is go into some kind of drug-induced hibernation. Anything to get me back there for as long as humanly possible. Because clearly what was happening there is better than taking Mollie to pee, showering, finding a new pimple, noticing my balding eyebrow is diminishing ever more, showing up at work to a day of meetings and nobody noticing my new haircut, and worst of all, realising that none of what happened was - or will ever be - reality. This feeling of emptiness is...well, super bad.

So why is it that people complain about having nightmares? At least you woke up, right? At least it was fake. All that came of it is that you realised life really isn't all that bad. You aren't quite as desperate (though maybe moderately desperate) as you were, you don't live on a crappy houseboat that rocks, you are not intimidated by guys with nice hair (at least not all of them), and you have all of your teeth. And if you have even worse dreams than mine, you realise that people are not trying to kill you or your family, you are not dying of Ebola, your plane did not crash, you did not fall into the Grand canyon, or whatever. You get the point. Your life isn't so sucky after all.

But good dreams serve only to remind us of our shortcomings in reality and what we are missing. They leave us with a little hole where we continue to wish for those feelings to return. And because it felt so real, we try to rationalise ways that it could have really happened. ("Could I have been roofied afterwards and just not remember?") But our loved one is still dead, we are still single, we don't have a new puppy, we do not have the career of our dreams, we are not married and living in a home big enough to have a full-size dining table... We are just the way we always are, but with the knowledge now that we wish we had something else.

So I personally am going to stop my moaning when it comes to bad dreams. I don't care if I am always the outcast and have missing teeth. At least I will always wake up to something better. As for the good dreams, they will continue to be my real nightmares.