Ergot in the Beremeal

—A compromised Lammas dream harvest—

What’s going down in this post: 

• Musings on Dream Harvests past and present
• A micro-podcast version of this post
• Harvests from the archives
• An invitation to this Sunday’s Outlier Hour

For the last few years, I have posted a poem at Lammas. I regularly write down the dreams I remember, and I compiled them as harvest poems from one Lammas to the next. 

Two years ago, I was full of hope about meaning I would find in these nocturnal transmissions. 

Lammas is a time of sacrifice. It’s the first harvest but also a moment for loaves and ideas to rise, to unlock the life-force stored in every seed and bring it home, inside us…The kingdom is asleep in so many ways. When it wakes, will it have used its dreaming well? 

Two years later, and I am convinced that as a culture we have fractured our dreams, shattered them into slivers of attention and distorted memory. What can we salvage?

You can listen to me read this post here. (The link will open in the same window as the post, so you can control click if you want it to open in a new tab.)

This Lammas, I have collected my dreams as I have done in the past,  but when I started to put them together, they took a different shape. The harvest had been compromised; metaphorically, there was ergot in the beremeal. 

(Beremeal is an ancient Neolithic grain still grown in Orkney. It has a sweet, blood-like tang to it. Ergot is a fungus that infects grains like barley and wheat and causes hallucinations when eaten. It is thought to be the culprit behind the Dancing Plague of 1518 and the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. In some mid 20th century theories, ergot poisoning caused the bizarre nature of many of the witchcraft confessions.)

This year, I began to write my dreams as prose poems or micro fiction. Too long for a post, I couldn’t edit them down. But worse than the verbosity of it all was the realisation that if I shared them in their raw state—which seemed the point of the exercise—it would be trauma dumping of the first order. 

This past year, my subconscious served up a steady dose of sleep paralysis, terror-ridden & hot-flash infused horrors, and then-I-woke-up panic attacks. 

My subconscious had finally cottoned-on that I was using its effluvium as creative fodder. It’s a drama queen, and it went for broke. I’m haunted by the state of things—professionally, politically, socially—and no matter how much I try to keep things rolling through the wheel of the year with my tidings, the tide is a mess of tortured detritus—a big old bag of Nope. 

I have taken to cleaning beaches of plastic. It’s mostly stuff from the fishing industry—bright threads from tangled nets, chunks of sea-bitten crates and day glow chips—hold fasts for now dead seaweed. I wish I could say that my harvest felt like this—a gathering of wasted remnants satisfying because they’ve been sorted out, contained. But it’s not like that at all. 

I don’t clean the beaches alone. I go with a group of others. We sometimes call out to each other but mostly, bent and heaving, we carry our loads in silence. Finished, we stand together, weighing what we’ve gathered. We look across the once-littered beach and see an expanse that is, for that moment, almost pristine. 

Here are a couple harvests from past years

Their accompanying sound file of me reading the poems did not make it through the migration from Substack onto Ghost. I’m using an awkward work around. Any feedback you have would be helpful. Do you like to hear posts read aloud? Is this a way you would prefer to ‘read’ my posts? Please comment with feedback! It would help so much.

It is something I’m working on for you, my wonderful paid subscribers. The sound files are now hosted externally.  They will open in the same browser window. You can control click to open in a new tab on your browser to read and listen at the same time. I’m still working on this. 

https://allysonshaw.ghost.io/nocturnal-harvests/.

Listen to the poem here. 

https://allysonshaw.ghost.io/annual-reaping-of-dreams/

Listen to this poem here.

Come to the Lammas Outlier Hour

Come to the Lammas Outlier Hour which I promise will be upbeat and ergot free! 

We'll celebrate the first in the trio of Neopagan harvest festivals. As always, this isn't a formal ritual but a gathering of minds and hearts, open to all paid subscribers.

Come as you are to this meeting of community, camaraderie and creative practice. Sometimes there are prompts for writing, drawing and discussion and often I bring a reading to share. No need to have your video on if you're not up for it--just show up– with a something to write/draw with, some paper to make marks on.

🗓️ We'll meet Sunday, the 3rd of August at 7pm-8pm BST.
🔗 The Zoom Link https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83050855354?pwd=A9v2kTNPJqKi0f8lwgVcU2MfdFqGCP.1
💌 RSVP to contact.allysonshaw@gmail.com to let me know you are coming.
🕰️ Find out what 7pm BST is in your time zone here.