A Witch's Dream Ladder

A Witch's Dream Ladder

• Wednesday, April 9, 2025

With the new moon, I build this ladder.

With the the rise of her light, climb up!

Oh future, climb up and greet my dreams!

The little sorceries are always the best.  While it feels like the world around me is on fire, I'm finding solace in the small ways we work magic into our lives for the sheer comfort, for the memory and the warmth that comes with it.  As Floralia, the Hare Feast and May Day rise, so do all the best tides for love projects and fortunes.  I look forward to some rest, to walking the land again after so much time cooped up, watching the world around me twist in a hideous mass of nonsense.

My periwinkles are blooming; I'm always so happy when they do-- gentle reminders of endurance and love.  I gather mine nine days after the new moon, to use on the full moon for love-pillow stuffing. The petals of the flowers are to be dried for strewing powder for Midsummer.  I just want to get lost in the tendrils and never come out.

"Make a little ladder of sticks and place it under your head at night 

and you'll dream of your future husband."

From Current Superstitions: Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk

edited by Fanny Dickerson Bergen

To usher in the Pink moon's rising light and her verdant, prophetic, and erotic work... and to officially usher out this awful winter... I begin with sharing a sweet little charm with you.  I've found this one in Current Superstitions (19th century) and have been using it for about eight years now.  Not for dreaming of my future husband, but for all kinds of seductive divinations and dream fortunes.  I don't find many other cross references for it, but given the breadth of love fortunes and divinations especially in the annals of North American Folklore, I'm not at all surprised by such a random one-off.

There's no specifics on which wood to use-- it only says sticks and I think the raw accessibility of that makes for good magic.  I selected dried bramble vine-- bramble is a bringer of love and a guardian of dreams.  I keep the thorns for future dream work; they have a way of deterring nightmares.  I bake the wood first before washing in rose and rosemary water and drying again.

Once completely dry, I anointed the thorny woods in Oneroi oil (a blend of opium, Neptune, musk and amber) and selected reed wool for binding.  Slide that baby under my pillow and we'll see what dreams come climbing up at night...