Reaching for Bangs That Are Not There
In the dream you lift a hand to brush your bangs aside, and your fingers catch on nothing, gliding over bare scalp. The hand you rush to the back and the top of your head meets no hair either. A going bald dream carries the bewilderment of suddenly touching the gap between the self you know in your mind and a look that finished changing unseen.
Have you ever caught up late with a change already complete? The depth of your own voice on a recording, or the startled face of someone you have not seen in years, are everyday moments when others tell you first of a shift you could not date. When you raise a hand to your head in a going bald dream, the scene sometimes shows the reverse order, with your own fingers finding the change before anyone speaks.
Where the Air Meets Bare Scalp
- Going bald on the crown - Only the top of your head shows a round patch of scalp, out of your sight as long as you face forward. It is tied to the unease that others knew of a change starting where you cannot see before you did.
- Going bald at the back of the head - The hair is gone only where your fingers reach behind your head, and touch is the one way you have of checking. It takes the shape of gauging a place your eyes cannot reach by the memory in your fingers alone.
- The whole head going smooth - From your forehead to behind your ears there is no hair, and wherever you trace, nothing catches. A head with no strand left to arrange holds the bewilderment of being pulled at once out of the morning work of deciding how to look.
- Going bald as a woman - You are a woman in the dream, your hair has vanished, and the clip in your hand has nowhere to go. As the morning routine of tying, pinning, and curling is taken away at once, the scene asks how far a look kept through fixed steps still holds.
- A family member going bald - A father or brother you meet on a visit home appears with his hair gone, and he does not mind at all. Only you being flustered shows a moment when your readiness to take in a loved one's change has not yet caught up.
- Noticing in a mirror - A shop mirror you pass shows a head without hair, and you do not recognize it as yours right away. That brief distance, as if watching a stranger pass, marks a mind not yet ready to claim the bare head as its own.
- Hiding it under a hat - You pull a hat down low so no one sees your bare head and walk holding the brim against the wind. In a plot where hiding leaves room for nothing else, the time to accept the change is stretched out by the work of concealing it.
- Shaving your own head - You run clippers through what hair is left and finish with a razor. Letting go by your own hand of what was already leaving, before it is taken, reveals an effort to win back the final say over the change.
- Learning it from someone else - Only when an acquaintance mentions your head do you learn that your hair is gone. That another person named the change first mirrors the unease of leaving the checking of your own look to other people's words.
- Hair growing back on a bald head - Short, fine down sprouts here and there on the bare scalp, rough under your fingers. In dreams where the new hair differs in color or stiffness, the change is taken in again as something newly growing, more than as a return to the old head.
When Did the Hair Disappear?
In a going bald dream, the hair is already gone when the dream begins. The worry of catching falling clumps in your hand belongs to dreams about hair falling out, and choices such as cutting, growing, or coloring are sorted out in hair dreams. What a going bald dream holds is a head beyond any grooming, lying past the anxious stretch of steady loss.
A scene where you learn the state of your head only from a mirror holds, as mirror dreams do, the pause before you accept the reflection as yourself. In a going bald dream, even with no mirror at hand, the fingers on your forehead and the air passing over your head report the change.
The Seat Offered With a Single Word
In the period of a going bald dream, the change itself is already over, while the readiness to accept it as your own appearance lags behind. A person in their mid-forties stands in a crowded morning train car when a young passenger seated in front springs up and offers the seat with a quick "here you go." It does not occur to this person at first that the words were meant for them.
Refusing feels odd, so they say thank you and sit, and the other passengers' faces, level a moment ago, are suddenly above them. The young passenger slips through the gangway as if nothing had happened and stands just inside the next car's door.
The Self You Want to Be and the Self You Ought to Be
In his 1987 paper "Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect," the psychologist Edward Tory Higgins linked the gaps between the picture people hold of who they actually are and the self they hope to be or feel they ought to be to distinct kinds of unpleasant feeling. The core of self-discrepancy theory is that a gap from the hoped-for self leads toward dejection, such as disappointment and dissatisfaction, while a gap from the self one ought to be leads toward agitation, such as fear and uneasiness. If self-discrepancy theory, proposed to tell apart the ways a mood sinks, is made into a map of the going bald dream while remaining a framework measured through answers to questionnaires about oneself, the feelings aimed at the dream's bare head split into two directions.
A dream where your spirits sink before a head whose hair will not return leans toward the gap from the self you hoped to be, while one where you rush to hide before anyone sees leans toward the duty of how you ought to appear. Even so, in what June Tangney and colleagues tested in their 1998 paper "Are shame and guilt related to distinct self-discrepancies? A test of Higgins's (1987) hypotheses," no one-to-one link between the kind of gap and the kind of feeling was found. The two directions in the dream, too, never form a sharp border and remain a rough guide to which way the feelings lean.
Hair That Keeps Growing at the Back and Sides
Male-pattern hair loss begins above the temples and at the top of the head, and even as it advances, a rim of hair remains around the sides and back. This rim has been called the Hippocratic wreath, and the loss rarely goes as far as clearing the whole head. Female-pattern hair loss thins hair across the whole scalp while keeping the front hairline, and it too rarely takes every hair.
The head in a going bald dream, smooth all the way to the back, is an outline drawn by the mind beyond where the body usually arrives. When a woman dreams of going bald herself, it is the dream that chooses a head the body rarely produces. That head, poorly suited to predicting the future of your hair, keeps company with a mind trying, just once, to picture a shape that cannot be hidden.
The Skin That Hair Used to Cover
The scalp is the skin where hair grows on the head, and since hair covers it, it takes no direct sunlight or cold air. In a going bald dream, that skin, stripped of its cover, passes on the temperature of the surrounding air at once. Some dreams leave, on waking, a hazy memory of how you looked yet a clear one of the chill on your head.
What that chill conveys is a bodily process that has begun accepting the change on the skin before you acknowledge it as a matter of appearance. A seed fluff carried on the wind lands on top of the smooth head in the dream, rests above the ear for a moment with no hair to cling to, and drops to the shoulder.