If a single tooth fell out in your dream, the two classical dream dictionaries read it as one of three things: one debt, one relative, or one worthless deed. If the whole mouth went, the stakes change completely — a household, a line of descendants, or a reckoning of years. The count in the dream is what switches the reading, and neither book leaves it vague.
Quick answers, before the entries:
Al-Nabulsi: one tooth down means he pays back one creditor — or settles all his debts in a single payment. Ibn Sirin's compilation: one tooth down means one loan repaid, and the number of fallen teeth equals the number of debts. A loosening tooth is milder than a falling one: illness, not loss.
The debt reading scales: several fallen teeth mean paying several creditors, or one creditor many things (Al-Nabulsi). In the family reading, each tooth stands for a specific relative — which relative depends on which tooth (see the mapping on our main teeth page).
The heaviest line in either book, and also the most contested. Al-Nabulsi: everyone in that house perishes — immediately softened by his own exception list. Ibn Sirin's compilation: it opens the other way — longevity, living past your contemporaries. Same dream, opposite headline.
This is where one page of Al-Nabulsi turns against itself — two rulings, both his, both printed a few lines apart. Details below.
Both passages below sit on the same page of Al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-Anam fi Ta'bir al-Manam — the tooth entry.
"If someone owed a debt and his teeth fell out in a dream, it indicates that he will pay his debt. If he saw that a single tooth of his teeth fell, he pays one man his debt, or pays them all in one go. If his teeth fell, he pays a number of his creditors, or pays some of them many things."
Al-Nabulsi, Ta'tir al-Anam fi Ta'bir al-Manam (Dar al-Fikr ed.) — shamela.ws/book/1217/177 (printed ص180), tooth entry, debts passage. Translated from the Arabic; no standard English edition exists.
"If his teeth fell out one after another with no pain, that indicates deeds that come to nothing. If he saw them falling with pain, it indicates something leaving his house. And if all the teeth fell out, then all who are in that house perish — the companions, the free men, the travellers — and this vision for them indicates a long illness without dying. For slaves it indicates manumission, and for merchants and travellers, lighter loads."
Same page — shamela.ws/book/1217/177 (printed ص180), all-teeth passage. Note the three-way split inside one sentence: pain or no pain changes the meaning, and the death verdict ships with its own exceptions (slaves, merchants, travellers all get the same dream read as gain).
"If he saw that his teeth were falling and he took them with his hand, or with his beard, or into his lap — that indicates that his children will be cut off, and none will be born to him."
"And if he saw that all his teeth fell and ended up in his hand or with him, the progeny of that household will increase in number."
Both on shamela.ws/book/1217/177 (printed ص180) — first passage after the all-teeth ruling, second in the "wa-qilla" (another reading) block a few lines below.
Catching the teeth ends the line. Catching the whole mouth multiplies it. Al-Nabulsi prints both and never reconciles them — a single-tooth catch and an all-teeth catch are different dreams in his ledger, but his page does not say who decides when the second reading swallows the first. That gap is his, not ours.
"Falling teeth in a dream also mean paying one's debts. If a tooth falls, it means payment of a loan, while the number of fallen teeth represent the number of debts to be satisfied. If one's teeth fall without pain or a cause in the dream, then they represent worthless deeds. … If one collects his fallen teeth in a dream, it also means that he can no longer conceive children."
Ibn Seerin's Dictionary of Dreams, compiled by Muhammad M. Al-Akili, Pearl Publishing House 1992 (ISBN 1879405032), "Teeth" entry. The digital copy checked here is a 552-page scanned PDF (scanned 2010; the printed edition is catalogued at 511 book pages). A later compilation attributed to the 8th-century scholar, not his autograph.
So the debt arithmetic — one tooth, one loan; n teeth, n debts — is identical in both books, and the painless-fall-as-worthless-deeds line is shared too. But watch the two books part on the whole-mouth case: the compilation leads with longevity, Al-Nabulsi leads with the household perishing. And the "children cut off" catch-rule exists on the Arabic page in two forms (one-tooth-catch doom, all-teeth-catch increase), while the compilation flattens it into a single line: collecting fallen teeth means no more children. Same inheritance, tidied up.
Al-Nabulsi's page is exact about where blood matters:
"If the front teeth fell and there was with them pain, or the coming out of blood or flesh, then the affair he intends comes to nothing or is spoiled. If they fell without pain, what he owns goes away. … And if a single incisor fell into his hand, or he wrapped it in his garment, he gains a son, a brother, or a sister. … If there was blood, that is the sin of cutting family ties — unless he owes a debt, in which case he will be pressed to pay it."
shamela.ws/book/1217/177 (printed ص180) — مقاديم الأسنان passage and the ثنية passage.
A front tooth, falling with blood, is a project ruined and — read another way — a family bond torn. The same page's own escape: if the dreamer owes money, the blood stops being about kin and becomes about the debt. The compilation states the first half in its own words — front teeth falling with pain and bleeding mean "incompetence or inability to complete a project" — and has no blood-as-kinship-tie clause at all.
Two extra rulings sit on the Arabic page, reported as opinions ("it was said") rather than the author's own:
"It was said: whoever's teeth fell out has twenty-nine years of life remaining, or thirty. It was said: he dies within thirty days, or owes a fine of thirty dinars."
shamela.ws/book/1217/177 (printed ص180) — وقيل block. Same page also gives the tooth's legal compensation: the fine owed may match "the blood-money for a tooth in sacred law" (دية السن).
The same number, thirty, standing for a life remaining, a death deadline, and a coin fine in three consecutive clauses — this is how the genre works: one dream, several admissible readings, and no tiebreaker. The compiler's book has nothing like it.
Rozen & Soffer-Dudek, Dreams of Teeth Falling Out: An Empirical Investigation of Physiological and Psychological Correlates (Frontiers in Psychology 9:1812, 2018; PubMed 30319507), surveyed 210 participants. Teeth dreams correlated with dental irritation — tension felt in teeth, gums, or jaw on waking — while other dream types did not. Psychological distress correlated with dreams of falling and smothering, but not with teeth dreams. The authors call it the first empirical validation of the old hypothesis that teeth dreams track nocturnal dental stimulation.
Frequency, from Calvin Kai-Ching Yu's Dream Motif Scale survey (Dreaming 22(1):18–52, 2012, DOI 10.1037/a0026171), as reported in the 2018 paper: 39.0% of respondents had a teeth dream at least once, 16.2% recurrently, 8.2% regularly.
Note the collision of scale the classical books never had to face. They count teeth one by one — one tooth, one creditor; the whole mouth, the whole house. Research finds the theme is common (four in ten people) and physical, and it says nothing about counts: whether one tooth went or all of them is not a variable in any modern study. If your dream's whole meaning hinged on the arithmetic of teeth, the empirical record has no opinion. The two layers answer different questions; neither refutes the other.
One line of the 2018 paper's own history section is worth quoting beside these entries: the earliest documented interpretation, in Artemidorus of Ancient Greece, also linked lost teeth to payment of debts, and the Jewish Talmud read teeth dreams as a warning about family death. The debt-and-family pairing that the Arabic books spell out tooth by tooth was already circulating fifteen centuries earlier in Greek and Aramaic — these dictionaries did not invent the ledger.
This page reports what two classical texts say. 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.