He asked after my mother and I have never met him

✦ TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS

The stranger who knows you

You have never seen this person before, and you are pleased to see them. One of the gentler ones.

I HAD THIS ONE TOO

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TODAY’S SYMBOL

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MONDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER

Dear friend,

A man in an apron asked after my mother’s knee on Saturday night, and I have never seen him before in my life.

I answered him as though we had known each other for years, and it was only at the sink the next morning that I thought to wonder who he was.

This is one of the ones nobody writes in about, because it does not frighten anybody, though it is stranger than most of what does.

Somebody you have never met turns up knowing your business, and you are glad to see them, so the question worth asking is how you knew him back.

How you know them

You do not recognise people in dreams by their faces, you recognise them by the feeling they give you. When researchers asked people how they had known who was who, affection and warmth came back as often as any face did, and sometimes against the evidence of the face itself.

💭 I just knew who it was	👤 A face I have never seen
🎭 Somebody wearing another person’s feeling	👪 One person in a crowd knew me
Tap the one that fits

Wholly new people are rarer than you would think, since in one count of hundreds of dreams only about a sixth of the characters were nobody at all, with the rest either named or known by what they were doing.

So my man in the apron is probably a shop, a waiter and somebody’s uncle, put together and given a job, and the job was to ask after my mother.

Which is the part worth keeping, because whoever he was made of, the dream needed somebody to ask, and it could not find anybody I already knew to do it.

“	You do not recognise people in dreams by their faces, you recognise them by the feeling they give you.

What they are for

A stranger can say the thing a familiar person cannot, since your mother asking about your week comes with the whole history of her asking, while a man in an apron simply asks.

People have read these figures as messengers for a very long time, which I would not push as evidence, though the readings and the letters agree that the stranger is nearly always kind.

What they carry, in your letters, is usually a piece of ordinary interest in you, so they ask about a knee or a job or a child and then go back to what they were doing.

✦ BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED

Tap one to answer it

1

What did they know about me?

2

Who did they feel like?

3

What did I tell them?

4

Why could they ask when nobody else could?

5

Who asks after me in waking life?

6

Who have I not asked after?

The fifth one is the one that got me, since I had to think about it for longer than I would like to admit in writing.

Being known

Nobody wakes up upset from this one, and I think that is because being known by somebody with no history with you is a thing most of us stopped expecting a while ago.

It tends to come in weeks where you have been keeping up a great deal of correspondence and saying very little in any of it, which I notice with no comment at all on my own line of work.

Whether the man in the apron was anything more than my own mind doing the asking, I cannot tell you, though somebody in there wanted to know about the knee.

✦ CARRY THESE WITH YOU TODAY

Somebody wants to know how I am

I can answer properly today

Kindness can come from anywhere

I can ask after somebody first

I am easier to know than I think

Tap the one you need

✦ WRITE BACK

Your stranger either felt like somebody you know or like nobody at all, and I would like to know which.

TELL ME WHICH ONE

I rang my mother about the knee, which is fine, and she wanted to know why I was asking on a Monday.

Sleep well,

Dream Signs

P.S. When I told her about the man in the apron she said her father had worn one all his life and that I had seen the photograph. Tell me who yours was. Then she asked what I was having for lunch.

✦ TONIGHT’S PRACTICE

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Write what they knew

Tomorrow, put down what the stranger knew about you before you put down what they looked like. The knowing is the part that survives the walk to the kettle.

TELL ME WHAT THEY KNEW

✦ MANIFESTATION TIP

💬

Say it to somebody new

Tell the thing you want to one person who has no history with you, because the ones who have known you longest will hear the old version of it first.

WHAT CAME BACK

Something happened after a dream? Tell me

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