'O maletiempo

'O maletiempo. Eighty-three is bad weather: the rain that ruins your plans, the wind that bangs the shutters, the sky that closes in all of a sudden. In the Smorfia it isn’t a catastrophe — it’s ordinary adversity, the kind that comes and goes, and against which the only thing to do is take shelter and wait. In dreams, eighty-three arrives when you’re going through a rough patch. A string of setbacks, a heavy atmosphere at home or at work, a tension you can feel in the air before anything even happens. It’s the number of unease, and in dreams it almost always takes the shape of the weather: you dream of rain when it’s raining inside. The images that lead here say something beautiful. Bad weather, of course. But also the air and the first light of dawn: once the storm has passed, the air turns clean and the day begins clearer, and folk tradition has always known it. Bad weather stirs things up, and sometimes it washes ashore something you would never have seen without a storm. If eighty-three came up in your dream, there was adversity in it. We don’t predict anything: we point out that in your dream the weather was bad, and that in the Smorfia this number never ends on its own.