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THURSDAY, 15 OCTOBER
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| Dear friend, |
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I keep counting the short hairs on my pillow. It happens at five in the morning, half awake, for no reason I can name, so I just lie there with my fingers on the cotton until the feeling passes.
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(I count them. No idea what the number is for.)
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The haircut dream is the one that got me thinking about this, because it does something no other symbol of change does: it points forward. Hair falls and hair grows back, so the cut is never just an ending. I am not sure what to make of that, except that every culture with a haircut ritual seems to have noticed.
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The Threshold, Not the Loss
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People have said for a very long time that a haircut in a dream is not about what fell to the floor. It is about what is already on its way in, and the feeling underneath tells you which one.
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Hair grows at about a centimetre a month. What you cut starts coming back before you leave the chair. In the Slavic tradition the first haircut, the postriziny, was the ceremony that moved a boy from his mother's care into the company of men, and the whole day was about his new standing, not the hair on the floor.
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The same thing appears in Buddhist ordination, where shaving the head is the first act of monastic life and the hair on the ground shows they have given up ordinary life. This is what people have said for a very long time: the haircut points to the life that follows, and whether that makes it true is your call.
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What you cut starts coming back before you leave the chair.
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