Seaweed Reverie

Spring Equinox 2025. Imbas Dispatch #19

Dreams come from… ‘Nature itself, it’s a natural phenomenon. We take dreams like being like a tree or a wild pig or something. We cannot say what makes a wild pig. If we believe in God, then we’ll say God makes the wild pigs but it is that unknown power or mysterious force which makes all existence.’

Marie Louise von Franz, Way of the Dream

A Chairde, Friends,

I open with this quote from Carl G. Jung’s peer, Marie Louise von Franz in the Way of the Dream documentary where by this stage in her life (c.1983), she had interpreted +65,000 dreams. She answered this in response to the question, ‘What’s the power, who makes up the dreams?’ She goes on to say that like nature, dreams have super intelligence in them, which moves far beyond the human ego.

As many of you know, dreams are a core part of my work as a dreamer myself (we all dream), and in ways, it’s not possible to work mythologically without dreams because myths and dreams emerge from the same place, from the personal and collective unconscious in dialogue with the Anima Mundi, the ‘World’s Soul’—what our ancestors understood as the Celtic Otherworld.

As part of my ongoing training in dreamwork with the Anima Mundi School, I started a course on ‘Alchemy and the Poetics of Matter’, where we are practising spagyrics, a form of plant alchemy, which means to ‘draw or pull apart’ and then ‘reassemble’. This is what alchemy does psychologically, it separates out the shadowy and unintegrated aspects of ourselves so that we can become conscious of them, and reintegrate them in healthy and meaningful ways.

The Celtic Calendar itself is a model for this. As we are passing through the Spring Equinox here in Ireland, the apex of Imbolc, we are in the energy of discernment, of separating out, of growing in conscious awareness of new possibilities for our lives, and tending to their buds. Leaving the final remnants of Samhain behind. When we attune to the energy of the Celtic Calendar and the more than human world, our dreams attune with us, or rather when we attune to our dreams, nature attunes to us. We make a gesture to nature, acknowledging that we are not separate.

For spagyrics, I chose to work with seaweed, mainly with bladderwrack. A story etched in my memory from my grandmother, is her telling me about the power of seaweed and how my grandfather (who I never met) ate boiled seaweed as a source of supernutrition when he was terminally ill in his late 30s. As I harvested the bladderwrack, I didn’t realise that traditionally in Ireland, the spring tide of Imbolc was believed to be the best source of seaweed for the whole year so it was auspicious timing.

When I began to work with the seaweed and bring it through the alchemical process, I had the intuition to begin playing the feadóg stáin, the tinwhistle to it to deepen my connection. After over twenty years of a hiatus, and encouraged by the beautiful harpist (and multi-instrumentalist),

Aoife Lowden

and my now music teacher, Ciara O’Donnell (you can listen to Ciara’s sublime ceol here), I had started playing the whistle again but this time learning it in a more traditional way by ear. It was through sound that I knew I could connect with the seaweed. The song I played was Amhrán na Leabhar (‘Song of the Books’).

The first time I played for the seaweed, an immediate synchronicity flowed in the form of a dream. That night I dreamt that I was on the coast with Aoife and we were showing two people who’d never seen Ireland before, what the land looked like. Nature was lavish in her beauty. We were surrounded my moss-green forest, a kinship of mountains catching the shadows of the sun, golden sand dunes, and fat waves rolling to shore.

As we rounded the dunes towards the sea, we encountered two huge primordial white swans with a flurry cygnets. Swans can represent the mercurial nature of alchemy when opposing forces start to come together and new consciousness emerges. Moving beyond the swans to the sea, the land began to play Amhrán na Leabhar, like the air itself was playing the whistle and indeed, this song is a slow ‘air’. As we stood on the shore, the seaweed rose up and began to shimmy and dance. Holy tears spilled from the eyes of our two guests who were seeing Ireland for the ‘first time’.

What this dream showed me was firstly, how I (the two people being parts of myself) was beginning to see the land I know so well in a new way by fostering a deep relationship with this seaweed. It also illustrated how we can be in deep kinship and communication with the more than human through our night dreams.

This weekend in the equinox energy, I begin the process of distillation, of separating out, with my seaweed friend. And so I brought the bladderwrack fermenting in its jar to the beach this morning and played the whistle for it, which was witnessed by the dunes, the sea, its seaweed kin and the rising sun. I have not played the tinwhistle in public since I was in my late teens so I was flooded by nerves but once I anchored into the more than human, and devoted Amhrán na Leabhar to nature, the song flowed, and my heart grew in that moment.

In a way, this Imbas Dispatch is a simple reverie to following the energy and the intelligence of nature through our dreamscapes and our connection to the more than human. I have no idea where this will lead, if anywhere. A few months back, I didn’t think I’d be banging out a tune to a jar of fermenting seaweed on my local beach, but there you go. The unknown is at play and this Spring Equinox, I am devoting myself to staying in this energy of the unknown.

Eimear - if you are reading this, thank you for capturing this moment, a stór

Journal Prompt

What new awareness do you sense is emerging for you and your life that you are ready to devote yourself to this Spring Equinox even if you still feel like you are in the unknown (here’s your sister!)?

Celtic Soul Garden

If you are curious about working with your night dreams and the symbolism of alchemy to bring your creative projects to life, this will feature as part of my Celtic Soul Garden curriculum. The course runs from 28th April-6th June 2025 and will provide you with an innovative framework rooted in ancestral wisdom to bring your creations to life with soul, awe, and alignment.

Wishing you brighest of equinox blessings!

Croí isteach,

Jen x

Sources:

Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends & Folklore by Niall Mac Coitir