'O mariuolo

'O mariuolo. Seventy-nine is the thief, and in the Neapolitan Smorfia he’s a more nuanced figure than you might expect. There’s real theft, which is harm and gets called harm; and there’s the art of getting by, practiced by those who had no other way, which folk tradition has always looked on less severely. The number holds the two together and leaves it to the reader to separate them — which, after all, is what we do in life. In dreams, seventy-nine arrives when something is missing. An object that disappeared, of course: the classic dream is coming home and finding the drawers pulled open. But more often it’s something less concrete — time stolen by commitments you didn’t choose, an idea someone else took and passed off as their own, credit that went to the wrong person. It’s the number of loss at someone else’s hand, and it stings more for the way it happened than for what it was worth. There’s also the reversed reading, which does happen in dreams: the thief is you. Something taken without asking, attention taken away from someone, a shortcut. Dreams don’t go easy on anyone, not even on the dreamer. The image that leads here is the thief, and that’s all: some figures don’t need an entourage, you recognize them at once. If seventy-nine came up in your dream, something was taken in it. We name no names: we point out that in your dream something changed hands without your wanting it to, and that you noticed.