Find your version below — the details of the dream change the answer. This is a page in the teeth cluster; the homepage lists the rest. The classical sources behind every line are cited at the bottom.
One tooth was loose, or several were
One loose tooth maps to illness of the one person that tooth stands for. Several teeth moving is read as illness among relatives. The family map — upper jaw for men on the father's side, lower jaw for women on the mother's side, right and left as closer or further kin — is the same map used on the one tooth or the whole mouth page.
The teeth were loose, but they did not fall
This is the distinctive reading, and both books agree on it. A tooth that moves in its place is illness. They withhold the death or long-absence reading until the tooth actually falls or is lost. Loose is a prior stage, not a synonym for teeth falling out.
They were loose, and then they fell
Once the tooth comes out, you are in the falling-out ledger: debts, longevity, or — if you cannot find the tooth — death or a long absence of the person it stands for. Blood or pain shifts the reading toward people rather than money; that is on the teeth falling out with blood page. Whether the books treat the fall as a death omen depends on conditions they print on the same page, not on looseness alone.
A denture, bridge, or brace felt loose
Neither book has a separate "loose denture" or "loose brace" headword. The closest checked lines are these two. The 1992 compilation says that replacing a tooth with a bridge means recovering losses, or balancing one's business. Al-Nabulsi has a nearby clause: if silver or gold teeth grow in place of one's own, it may mean a loss of wealth, or that the dreamer will need to bind something of his teeth because of illness or an accident. Those are the lines we have; they are not a medical reading of an appliance that felt loose.
The gap widened, or the teeth shifted in their places
Al-Nabulsi has a clause for teeth that leave their places and switch ranks — upper becoming lower, lower becoming upper — read as the women of the household taking precedence over the men. A separate clause about picking between the teeth (not a widening gap as such) is read as the family being scattered, or a loss of money. Zhou Gong's teeth chapter has no line for a gap or a shift.
Where the classical readings come from
The answers above trace to two texts: the compiled dictionary attributed to Ibn Sirin (Pearl Publishing House, 1992) and Al-Nabulsi's Arabic original, Ta'tir al-Anam. The checked passages, with page locations, are in the Sources section at the end — kept there so the first screen stays in plain English.
The Ibn Sirin compilation, in the "Tooth" entry (print p. 441, after a running head that sits mid-entry; the book-end index files "Tooth" at 440), says a tooth that moves in its place means an illness, and a fall or a loss means death of the person that tooth is attributed to, or separation from him. The same entry later says that replacing a tooth with a bridge means recovering losses, or balancing one's business.
Al-Nabulsi's tooth entry opens the same ladder on shamela page 177 (printed page 180): if one of these teeth moves, that is illness; if it falls or is lost, that is death of the person it refers to, or an absence after which they will not see him. On the next shamela page (178, printed page 181) he restates the plural: if his teeth move, that is illness of his relatives. On the same page, a mouthful of loosening teeth is paying a debt little by little; and teeth that leave their places and switch ranks are the women of the house taking precedence over the men. A later clause on shamela 179 (printed page 182) is the silver-or-gold teeth line already used above.
Zhou Gong's original-style chapter 3 ("the body, the face, teeth and hair") has two falling-teeth verdicts and no loose-tooth line. The corpus was searched for a looseness character as well; there is none. The page reports that absence rather than stretching a falling-out line to cover a loose tooth.
The move-then-fall ladder
The two Arabic books agree on this symbol more tightly than they do on falling out itself. Falling out opens with longevity in the compilation and with household death in Al-Nabulsi — two headlines that have to be walked back with conditions. Loose teeth do not have that fight. Both books say: movement in place is illness; a fall or a loss is death or a long absence. That ladder is the finding worth keeping in view, and it is why this page is not a rewrite of the falling-out page under a new title.
A second door sits on the same Nabulsi page: loosening as paying a debt a little at a time. That money reading is not a contradiction the book resolves; it sits beside the illness reading, the way several falling-out clauses do. We leave both in view.
Zhou Gong cannot break the tie. The chapter has no loose-tooth entry. Using "teeth fall, parents in danger" or "teeth fall and grow back, descendants thrive" as if they were loose-tooth verdicts would be inventing a line the book does not print.
What modern research adds — and what it doesn't
The one head-on study we can check is Rozen and Soffer-Dudek, Frontiers in Psychology 9:1812, 2018 (PubMed 30319507). The final sample is n = 210 undergraduates (76.7% women, mean age 23.4, SD 1.43, range 18–28). "Teeth dreams" were measured with item 18 of Yu's Dream Motif Scale: "your teeth falling out, losing your teeth, or your teeth rotting." That item does not name loose teeth as a separate typical-dream theme. A search for a study that isolates loose or wobbly teeth as its own item did not turn one up; if one exists, we have not found a checkable copy, and this page does not invent one.
What that 2018 paper did measure, from its Table 1 (Spearman rank-order, 1,000 bootstrapped resamples): teeth dreams tracked with tension or tenderness in the teeth, gums, or jaws upon awakening, r = 0.21, 95% CI [0.07, 0.33], p < 0.005. They were not associated with a direct self-report of grinding, r = 0.06, 95% CI [−0.07, 0.20], ns; nor with psychological distress, r = 0.02, 95% CI [−0.11, 0.16], ns. Other typical dreams in the same table were not related to dental tension. The authors treat the finding as preliminary and cross-sectional; they do not claim a loose-tooth dream, specifically, was measured.
The same paper cites Yu, Dreaming 22(1):18–52, 2012 (DOI 10.1037/a0026171), for prevalence: 39.0% of respondents had experienced teeth dreams at least once, 16.2% said they were recurrent, and 8.2% said they were regular. Those three figures are taken from the 2018 paper's citation of Yu, not from a fresh copy of the 2012 article in this run.
If your jaw or gums feel tight this morning, that tension finding is the closest empirical line we have to a loose or tender sensation in a dream. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a verdict on the dream.
This page reports what two classical texts say, and what one checkable study measured. It is not a prediction, a medical or religious ruling, and no dream book — classical or modern — settles what a dream means for the person who had it.
Sources (all passages checked against the cited pages)
"If a tooth moves in its place in the dream, it means an illness. If it falls, or if it is lost, then it means death of the person to whom it is attributed, or it could possibly mean that he will be separated from him and can no longer see him."
"Replacing a tooth with a bridge in a dream means recovering losses, or balancing one's business."
فإن تحرك منها سن واحدة من هؤلاء فمرض فإن سقطت أو ضاعت فإنه موت من ينسب إليه هؤلاء أو غيبته عنه غيبة لا يرونه بعد ذلك
If one tooth of these moves, that is illness; if it falls or is lost, that is the death of the person those [teeth] are attributed to, or his absence from him, an absence after which they will not see him. (Translation ours.)
وإن تحركت أسنانه فهو مرض أقاربه
And if his teeth move, that is illness of his relatives. (Translation ours.)
(ومن رأى) أن أسنانه تتخلخل فإنه يوفي دينه قليلاً قليلاً
If he sees that his teeth are loosening, he will pay his debt little by little. (Translation ours.)
(ومن رأى) أسنانه زالت عن أماكنها وتحولت من مراتبها فرجعت العليا سفلى والسفلى عليا دل على استطالة نساء أهل بيته على رجالهن
If he sees his teeth have left their places and switched their ranks, the upper becoming lower and the lower upper, that indicates the women of his household taking precedence over their men. (Translation ours.)
ومن رأى أنه خلل أسنانه دل على تشتيت أهله ووقوع الخلل بينهم أو نقصان ماله
If he sees that he picked between his teeth, that indicates his family being scattered and a breach falling among them, or a decrease in his wealth. (Translation ours.)
فإن طلع مكان أسنانه أسنان من فضة أو ذهب فربما دل على الإجاحة في المال أو يحتاج إلى شد شيء من أسنانه لمرض أو عارض
If, in place of his teeth, teeth of silver or gold appear, that may indicate a loss of wealth, or that he will need to bind something of his teeth because of illness or an accident. (Translation ours.)
齿自落者父母凶 齿落更生子孙兴
Teeth falling out of themselves: misfortune for the parents. Teeth falling and growing again: descendants thriving. (Translation ours.)
Modern layer: Rozen & Soffer-Dudek, Frontiers in Psychology 9:1812, 2018, PubMed 30319507, OA full text checked for this run (sample, item wording, and Table 1 coefficients above). Yu 2012 prevalence figures as cited in that paper (Dreaming 22(1):18–52, DOI 10.1037/a0026171), not from a fresh copy of Yu in this run.