'A puteca

'A puteca, the shop. Eighty-six is daily work: the metal shutter rolling up in the morning, the counter, customers you know by name. In the Smorfia it isn’t a big business or trade on a grand scale — it’s a craft practiced in a small place, by hand, every day at the same hours. In dreams, eighty-six arrives when doing is involved. Work that gives you an identity, a skill built up over time, the satisfaction of a day when you made something concrete. And it also comes when that work wears you out, because the shop never really closes: you take it home with you. The images that lead here are those of the trade: the stools and the pieces of cloth. And then being skilled, meaning knowing how to work well even without getting rich: a precious quality, but one for everyday use. The Smorfia tells wealth apart from skill, and here it sides with skill. If eighty-six showed up in your dream, your trade was in it, whatever it may be. We won’t tell you whether to change it: we point out that in your dream there was someone who knows how to do something, and that’s always a kind of wealth.