'A figliata

'A figliata is a brood of children: not one child, but all the children together, the whole nestful. Nine carries an old and very Neapolitan idea — that real wealth is the people around you, and that a full house is a fortunate house even when it’s a poor one. Nine is also the number of months of waiting, and that coincidence hasn’t escaped anyone. In dreams, nine shows up when something multiplies. Not just children: an idea that gives rise to other ideas, a job that brings more work, one acquaintance that opens up ten more. It’s the number of things that don’t stay put where you left them, and that often surprise whoever set them going. Among the images that lead here, two make a curious pair. The brood of children, which is the thing itself. And the novena, which in tradition sits closer to birth than you’d think: it’s the nine days in December when everyone waits for that birth together. In the Smorfia, figures hold hands the way life really goes in the neighborhood, not the way categories say. If nine has come up in your dream, the Smorfia is talking about something that goes on beyond you. It promises nothing about what’s to come — we don’t predict anything here — but it shows that in the dream there was something about to give birth to something else, and that maybe you haven’t finished seeing its effects.