Dreams and Body Parts

We do not fear the ominous in dreams because our epinephrine during REM sleep plummets. I learned this from a podcaster—a perfect specimen of a man—who sits before a dark screen, fixes eyes on camera, and expounds on nutrition and hydration and alcohol consumption and exercise.

In a dream once, I pulled a molar from my mouth into the pillow of my palm. I told my lover, through veils of dream pleasure that slid over my hips and thighs, that I’d take the tooth to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia to be displayed on red velvet among the other body parts. 

When morning came, though, and my rational mind came online, I knew that my tooth at the Mütter would not make a splash. Their gallery houses twins conjoined at the head, a skull thickened by Paget’s disease, a saponified corpse. The replica of a woman’s head with a horn growing from the forehead down over the nose. (One is confronted by one’s bias that horns should grow up.)

My tooth at the Mütter—standard in length, in ridges, in yellowing hue, with that filling that shows it could not make it through life on its own—would be like an ordinary person lost in the crowds of time. A woman with mud-stained skirts, standing among hundreds, under the balcony of the rulers. History does not care about figures like that. We like extremes. Everything else gets summarized. 

Does the Mütter, I wonder, have closets of boxes filled with forgotten body parts? Perhaps an intern steps in, weighed with a task, and pulls on the string to the overhead bulb. Perhaps he rummages for that femur or sternum someone described, checking the shape on his phone for reference. And all the tiny body parts—the ones the size of shark’s teeth—crumble down to the bottom of the box.

In dreams, we are not confronted by our own insignificance. At least not in mine. That is a feature of waking life. 

But I must remember the morning in Philadelphia that led me to Mütter. Nothing like insignificance mattered. It was a cold day, early spring. I was at a conference downtown. Planning to skip a few sessions, I set my phone’s GPS to the Mütter and left the hotel on foot.

The city stretched its sunny blocks before me and offered me the crossings of its wide boulevards. Stone and glass buildings rose to the sky, and stories above, window cleaners hung. My eyes, my beating heart, my lungs, could not get enough. I tucked away the GPS. Before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a school bus let out, and children in red and green and blue jackets ran up the stairs like a cloud of spreading birds that converged again at the entrance. Down an alley, an eastern redbud spilled its blossoms over an iron fence.

An hour into the walk, by chance, I stumbled upon the Mütter. I almost passed it before noticing the plaque. College of Physicians of Philadelphia. What flooded me was delight. Delight that I had not spent the walk checking the map, puzzling over the spinning figure on screen, matching names to street signs. I had instead noticed the rise and fall of traffic, the hiss of a bus, the shift between the sun-washed avenues and the shaded, cold side streets. 

I purchased my ticket and entered the main gallery. Orchestral music played on a loop. I strolled the long wall of skulls, read the dates and causes of death on their parietal bones. I stepped around the art students sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Giant white pads lay over their knees. I peeked over the shoulder of one who was sketching an enormous, looped colon. He erased his latest curve with a thick pink eraser—the kind I hadn’t used since middle school in math class—and he brushed the debris off the page with a hand and attempted to make a more careful mark this time.