A few nights ago I had a very freaky dream in which I elected to have all of my teeth pulled out of my mouth.

The dream wasn’t about the actual pulling, but rather about the aftermath.

You see, dream-me was missing a tooth and agreed to have all of my other, presumably healthy teeth pulled in exchange for a fresh new set of vibrant white falsies.

However, the quack dentist who’d convinced me to do such a drastic thing was delayed in having the new set to me.

For some reason I had not told anyone of my decision, and tearfully confessed to my partner after awkwardly living a gummy lie for a week.

Losing teeth is not an uncommon motif in dreamland, and many very scientific-looking websites (not really) tell me that dreams about tooth problems often stem from anxiety — about your appearance, how others perceive you, fear of rejection, fear of getting older, or fear of being embarrassed.

One site tells me because teeth are used to bite and chew, they symbolize strength and power. Thus, losing teeth relates to a sense of powerlessness.

Another, less Freudian theory about my toothless dream tells me I dreamt about my teeth because I had thought of them at some point during the day.

This is the interpretation I’m choosing to go with as I had indeed thought about my teeth at least twice that day: once with the realization I am long overdue for a dental checkup, and another time to ponder the apparent non-progressing growth of my wisdom teeth.

The idea that anxiety increases the frequency of dreams is another one that I subscribe to as both thoughts had got me a little worried.

In my university and college days, I would frequently have dreams in the nights leading up to major exams or assignments that would somehow add extra stress to my already overloaded brain.

More than once, I’ve dreamt that I spent two or three hours picking out what to wear to an important final, maybe another hour or so brushing my hair, and finally realized when I was done that I was absurdly late and had missed the entire thing.

The way all of these seemingly disjointed anxieties commingle with real information from our daily lives is what makes dreams seem totally reasonable while we’re in them and completely nonsensical when we’re awake.

It has to do with the complicated ways our brains learn and store information.

The declarative memory stores information you can “declare” you know without having to think about how you know it.

Newly learned information from recent experiences often make up this declarative memory.

In contrast, episodic memory stores the whole experience around when or where you learned something.

One theory about memory’s role in dreaming asserts memory formation happens in two different ways: through the procedural memory system and the “semantic” system.

Like in the declarative memory, the procedural system stores the how-tos that you don’t really have to think about — like riding a bike.

It’s the brain’s muscle memory, if you will.

Semantic memory applies general, abstract concepts to memories — instead of riding the bike, it’s the wind in your hair.

It’s that semantic system that one group of researchers from Harvard Medical School found played the biggest role in dream formation.

In a landmark study published in the October 13, 2000 edition of the journal Science, researchers had their subjects play Tetris for several hours. Some of the subjects had amnesia, and the others had normal memories.

Both groups reported seeing falling, rotating blocks in their dreams.

Since the amnesiacs can’t add things to their declarative or episodic memories, the researchers concluded that dreams are formed by things stored implicitly in memory — semantic and procedural information.

Without the anchors to reality in episodic memory, these semantic concepts seem disjointed and nonsensical.

The study’s authors say these types of dreams serve a purpose in integrating all the complex and confusing information we receive throughout the day without interference from pesky reality.

Dreaming takes away the conscious effort of uniting feelings with things you can declare you know with things you remember learning — and many times these things don’t fit easily together.

While this research doesn’t interpret the content of my disturbing toothless dream, I think this theory about how our dreams are formed does have some teeth.