'A mana

'A mana. Five is the hand, and a hand has five fingers: in the Smorfia things often work out like that, with a simplicity that only seems obvious afterward. The hand is the tool you do everything with — you work, wave, caress, count money — and in Naples it’s also the one that talks along with the voice, because without the hands half the conversation gets left behind. In dreams, five speaks of action and contact. Something you did yourself, with your own hands, or something you touched: a handshake, an object lifted off the ground, a person you brushed against. It’s the number of the concrete thing, the one that leaves your thoughts and enters the world. The images that lead here confirm it and complicate it a little. The hand, naturally. The broom, which doesn’t move without a hand. And directing, which is as much a gesture as doing, and sometimes the harder of the two. In tradition the hand is also destiny, the kind read in the palm: the same thing can mean “it’s up to you” or “it was written,” and the Smorfia leaves both readings open. If five has come up in your dream, here’s the useful reading: something is waiting for a gesture. It doesn’t promise it will go well and it doesn’t say which gesture to make — it says that in the dream your hands were involved, and that a thing touched is different from a thing only thought about.