How to Deal with Tooth Nightmares (Real and Imagined)

Live in a third world country for a few years with poor diet and dental care and probably obtain two cavities (I haven't confirmed yet). Then start learning to SCUBA dive and have pieces of your back molars pop off because of the water pressure. True story. Real phenomenon. I've never had bad teeth, until now, but I've had a lot of dreams in my life about something happening to my teeth, like all of them falling out or being broken.

My parents said that I ground my teeth as a child and it woke them up at night. I'm not sure if the grinding caused the dreams or vice versa, but they were probably connected somehow. I've heard that tooth dreams are a result of stress, which makes a lot of sense since people grit their teeth
when they're under pressure, no pun intended. However, for kicks and giggles I decided to research other possibe interpretations of this kind of dream.

1) Fear of death or growing old
2) Powerlessness
3) Fear of change
4) Fear or failure or embarrassment
5) Poor health (physcial, mental, spiritual, emotional)
6) Financial instability
7) Abandonment
/(Source)

I think a lot of these concerns apply to me, but they are general enough to apply to quite a lot of people. They are very real human fears. You could add a lot of additional things to this list and it could all be considered stress, a mental/emotional condition that may affect us physically in the way that we hold our jaw, which completes the cycle by again affecting our mind and emotions as we sleep, especially if we don't deal with that stress in a healthy way.

Now that it has actually happened - pieces of my teeth have actually come off, the fear isn't as great as I thought it would be. I was so worried that one day I would have cavities or other tooth problems and that it would ruin my teeth and affect me for the rest of my life. Now I realize that regular people just go to the dentist and get it taken care of. Unless you stick your wide open mouth in everyone's face, no one is really going to know or care that you have a few tooth problems.

As long as I am not in pain and my smile looks okay, I'll be happy. And even if someday something happened to my front teeth (Lord forbid!), I'll probably cry but then end up with some nice looking implants that no one will realize are fake. Unlikely, but at least now I know that I'll survive.