CITY OF LUCK

Four ways New Yorkers have gambled.

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

A policeman inspects a roulette wheel after a 1943 raid on a Manhattan apartment.

A dream book is an anatomy of dreams, with numbers trailing after. For more than a century, dream books served as the bibles of New York gambling. Their mystic authors—often women, often claiming a Caribbean origin—would pair dreams with numbers, and those numbers would be used to play the locally run lotteries:

COFFIN—to dream of a coffin signifies that you will soon be married. . . . Play numbers 9-49-50; TOMBS—to dream of being among the tombs denotes a speedy marriage. Play numbers 7-8-31. TUMMY—to dream of one’s tummy as great and large predicts a fair and large estate. Play numbers 10-11-22.

A dream book uses the irrational to rationalize the irrational. Something uncontrollable, a dream, gets translated into something controllable, a set of numbers, which can then supply the winning digits. Gambling proceeds out of such cycles of hope and superstition.

There’s an unchanging principle to gambling: people like to lose money guessing at the outcomes of unpredictable events. We convince ourselves that the next thing about to happen—the outcome of a horse race, the turn of a card—can be known before it does, and that believing in our prescience will allow us to take money from those who believe in their own. Of course, gamblers think they don’t like to lose money; the gamblers’ conviction, naturally, is that they will not lose but win. Yet this happens so rarely that even the greatest overseer of gambling in New York history died because of his gambling debts.