Dream Work(s)

Speaking in dream: sweet flag, birthing, snow dreams, a tarot prompt, and a little Whitman and Oliver.

Hi all, and welcome to Crow & the Poet. Today’s post is about dreams: calamus (sweet flag) via dreamworld, dreams as metaphor for writing, dreams of snow, tarot dreaming, which is dreaming while awake. Scroll down and find installment #2 of my joint tarot-prompt project.

All night 
the dark buds of dreams 
open 
richly.
—Mary Oliver, "Dreams"

Plant Dreams

Ah dream. I wake up worried about something, but I don’t know what. You know the feeling? An itch inside your brain that you can’t scratch? I dreamed that someone gave me what looked like an iced latte but was actually a calamus root potion.

Sweet flag. You’ve probably seen it before. It grows in wet places, looks like an iris without the flowers.

In Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine it’s used to enhance concentration, memory, speech. It is rejuvenating to the brain. In large doses, the rhizome has hallucinatory effects (and toxicity). My herbal teacher says it improves one’s ability to meditate.

It’s Latin name is Acorus calamus, both epithets from Dioscorides (first century), who talks about two similar plants Acorum and Kalamos.

Here is his entry on Acorum (trans. Tess Anne Osbaldeston):

The native North American variety has been used in traditional medicine by many Indigenous peoples. Cherokee use: chewing the root for headache. Blackfoot: for poultices for sore throats, toothaches, cramps. Algonquin: for menopause and heart disease.

Whitman’s cluster of Calamus poems in his third edition of Leaves of Grass begins, “In paths untrodden, / In the growth by margins of pond-waters…” I read somewhere that Whitman may have used calamus to “enhance his brain” while writing his Calamus poems. But I can’t find it again . . . maybe that, too, was a dream.

Here’s a cool website with video recitations of the poems:

The Calamus Project

Page one of two of “Scented Herbage of my Breast” (second poem in the Calamus series) from the Walt Whitman Archive:

I guess it makes sense that I’m dreaming about plants. Is my dream telling me to drink some calamus? I have a bag of it. That I need a brain cleanse? That I need to focus? That I need to expand my thinking?

I made a dream-enhancing tea this week (lavender, chamomile, rose petals, mint, and elderberry grown here at home) and have been drinking it for two nights. The first night, I dreamed I was at a writing conference and went back to my hotel where I delivered two babies from a disembodied womb, but there were two more who didn’t make it. And the two who did make it didn’t have food until a doctor sent up some “bleached milk.” I was so grateful to be able to feed them that I ignored the “bleached” part.

Whoa. I interpret it as a metaphor for writing, particularly as I’m writing two books this year that need to be fed and feeling fearful that other projects will languish. But one has to prioritize. I don’t know about the milk part.

Last night, though, with the calamus dream, I had a headache. My middle-of-the-night brain made me wonder whether I was poisoning myself because of contaminated soil. So, I need to soil test the yard this season. We are at the bottom of a hill that begins on a trafficky street.

Snow Dreams

Death Dream

Blanket Dream

Lucid dream

Tarot Dreams

Tarot is dreaming while awake, using the archetypal symbols and logic of dream to plumb the psyche. Every week, we pick a card, sketch it, chat about it, and give you a writing prompt inspired by the card.

Four of Wands

LO: Take a beat, reader. You are allowed to hit the pause button to celebrate your achievements. Capitalism may tell us to go-go-go, produce-produce-produce at all costs, to never be satisfied, but it’s important to honor those successes and to recharge. Go, go, go is mind-sapping. I’ve seen it in action. You get on autopilot and even creative endeavors become shallow and rote.

The four of wands is about preserving the spirit of creativity in your life by allowing it some joyful breathing room for patting yourself on the back and some introspection. What patterns need shifting? What ruts have you gotten stuck in? Sometimes we can be blind to our own patterns. The other day, I realized my work schedule wasn’t working for me, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to change it. It took someone else’s suggestion for me to even realize the possibility of changing something I thought was just a given. Don’t be afraid to collaborate for change.

The big gray house in the background and the number four signify a return, through the welcoming arbor, to strong foundations of self and home. A safe place to be. You can always return to that spot when life gets too chaotic and you’ve lost the thread a little.

LL: When Lex drew this card in North Carolina it disappeared from my deck in Oregon. Or, maybe I absorbed it. The Four of Wands appears when your creative work begins to flourish and yield results that bloom like the bouquets held aloft by our friends who stand before the fortress, between the upright staves. This is an unfamiliar position for me to be in, and the signs that I need to step back and breathe are plenty. Sometimes when we finally crack a creative code it can quickly become a formula. Formulas are helpful but can also grow tired and stale. From the stability of the fortress we can keep tweaking the formula with new elements.

Hang out with a piece of art you’ve made that brings you satisfaction. A poem, a song, a painting, a collage. Think of the elements that you think make it a success on your terms. Now create a new work of art incorporating those successful elements but give them all a new twist. Add some acidity to the formula where there was sweetness or vice versa. Think about how little changes can lead to big new ideas.

---

• Check out Laurence’s Substack, Skullcrushing Hummingbird.

• Our first tarot prompt is here.

• Order Agatha, Head Case, or various artwork directly from me.

• I read poems at So-and-So books in Raleigh with Christopher Shipman two weeks ago. His new book, Mortar, is killer. We did a very cool thing where we read a few poems back and forth, so that our voices wove together throughout the reading. We’d never met before that night, and we didn’t plan it out. But it happened beautifully.

---