ROLLING STONE

Mariah Carey has an intense relationship with her handbag. Nothing unnatural or bizarre, you understand, just something slightly more emotionally freighted than the average state of affairs that exists between a woman and the receptacle containing her cell phone, sunglasses, compact and lipstick. Tommy Mottola, the president and chief operating officer of Sony Music Entertainment, whom she married in 1993 and separated from last spring, used to make a joke about the bag, about how she reminded him of his grandmother, always with the bag. But to Mariah, the bag (Prada, what else?) is an extension of herself, a sort of mobile home for the soul. She and her mother (her parents divorced when she was about 3) moved around a lot when Mariah was a child, and being a superstar, as Mariah has been virtually since she signed with Sony subsidiary Columbia Records at 18, is an on-the-move type of a profession.

Anyway, she likes to sleep with it next to the bed, so that if anything happens in the middle of the night, she has it right there and can just run out. So that's probably where it was when she had this dream: In Mariah's dream, she has lost her bag, not to mention her two assistants, Katie and Stephanie, who are supposed to keep track of it. She is in a trailer, surrounded by freaky, drug-addicted people who are all physically impaired in some way, and she knows that if she doesn't find her bag, one of them is going to try to steal her stuff. She runs from the trailer toward a big building, pursued by one of the freaks, who, when she glances back at him, is no longer impaired and is laughing at her, as if in mockery of her gullibility. Continuing on, she bumps into two girls who tormented her when she was little. They are grown up now but have the same weird attitude they had when they used to throw rocks at her window and taunt her while her mom was at work.

"Haven't seen you in a long time," say the girls. "Yes," says Mariah, "you used to terrorize me when I was in the third grade and you guys were older. You should have known better." Moving on, she sees a little girl who tells her that she has no friends where she lives now because she doesn't go to school - they won't let her go because she's a TV star. "Who won't let you go?" asks Mariah. "-----," says the little girl, naming a man who in real life tried to turn a sleazy buck off having known Mariah before she got famous. The little girl is not anyone Mariah actually knows, but she feels like she recognizes her as soon as she sees her. She can still see her in her mind.

Until recently, Mariah's official public image has been as pristine and regulated as her dream is chaotic and untrammeled. She is a franchise artist, the best-selling female recording artist of the decade, the vocal pyrotechnician whose sweetly soaring power ballads and bouncy dance singles have helped sell more than 80 million records worldwide since her 1990 debut, Mariah Carey, which itself sold 12 million copies and produced an unmatched four consecutive No. 1 singles.

Melodies come to her so easily that she could write a song right now while she's sitting with you. She has never had to worry about her professional popularity; she is the people's pop princess. But she does worry a little; she is the worrying kind. "I'm the type of person who doesn't count their chickens until they're hatched," she says, and this is true. She is not even the type of person who counts her chickens after they're hatched. "In the past, much more so than now," she says, "I was very cautious and easily swayed by people telling me, if you do this, you're limiting yourself, you're limiting your salability, you're limiting your chances of success."

A Daydream Long Ago

Additional reflections from the people's pop princess

On childhood crushes:

I had Matt Dillon all over my wall when I was little. When I was in 7th and 8th grade, I used to be in love with Matt Dillon. People used to bring me Teen Beat magazines, only for pictures of Matt Dillon, and my whole wall was plastered with him and the Outsiders when that movie was big. I love old movie star prints and things like that now.

On sex:

I always had these older boyfriends when I was little, from like 13 on. But I didn't really do anything with them. I ended up just having these relationships -- not that I did nothing -- but I wasn't actually doing deep experiments. I was very virginal and people wouldn't have thought so because I was walking around with tight-ass jeans on! I walked around looking like that, but I was more of a teasing type of girl.

On her best traits:

I think that I'm a caring person. Often times I put other people's feelings before my own or my own well-being because I have a capacity for high levels of dysfunction. And because for a long time, I allowed myself to be in emotionally unhealthy situations. I've always been the person that I am now, but there are things that are glaringly obvious, if you're a smart person and you see them, because I think I'm growing into feeling more confident. I was a very, very insecure person, and I put up a lot of fronts growing up in high school and whatever.

On her mom:

I bought my mother a house and I decorated it -- I didn't tell her I was buying it. I told her we're going to go looking for houses. Meanwhile, over the past two months, I had been buying the house I always wanted as a child, decorating it, getting her stuff from storage -- she kind of had an inkling what was going on. I brought her there and I decorated it, put food in the refrigerator, clothes in the closet, a toothbrush. It was like she'd lived there for 10 years. I got a picture of her mother and her family and put them all on this one wall -- everything to a T. I had coffee brewing on the stove. And she thought we were going house hunting!

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