Dreaming about the loss of ability to speak through disease of or damage to the mouth has a symbolism of a threat to our independence.

…I have always tried to remember the dreams I have had in the delirium of fever and illness, and in many of these dreams there has figured the same woman — clad in black, with long, flowing, black hair, and wild animal eyes — eyes that might have be-longed to a woman of the stone age. Thrice, before the deaths of those I have loved, I have dreamed that this same woman has glided up to my bedside and bitten and pinched me. And on each occasion I have awakened with the sting of her sharp, cruel teeth, and her hard, bony fingers burning into my flesh. Can she, I ask myself, be the banshee? But to revert to my deliriums, the deliriums of my youth, in chicken-pox, and measles, and of my later days, in rheumatic fever, dysentery, and severe colds. Apart from this woman in black, who…