Fathoming Your Red Book by Luanne Castle

 

Image | Danilo Vinci

Fathoming Your Red Book

 

~after Carl Jung’s The Red Book

 

 

When you awake you reach for what you found. This time it was a basket brimming with walnut-sized rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Actually, you have found this treasure many times, and every morning you still expect to feel it tucked next to you under the covers. Your hand reaches out, pats the warm sheet, nothing. Other days you search for you-don’t-know-what. The sense of a dream surfaces vividly but when you try to translate into word-thought, it dissolves, and you wonder what your mind imagined it saw that second time. Without word-thought, there is no dream. A bit of binding tape: a tiny tote, a miniature book, putting fabric scraps into it, why? Your mind rejects. Was there a medical building? Doctors? You do remember the night you walked past an old-fashioned glass display window, saw the store stuffed like a canister of cotton balls with kittens, their faces pressed to the glass from top to bottom. You forget to wonder how they can breathe. Accept, accept, the dream’s mantra. And that night you flew on your bicycle so fast you almost hurtled ahead of the front tire, fleeing darkness that pressed at your back. No point of looking behind you. Accept, accept. 

 

© Luanne Castle

Luanne Castle’s stories and poems have been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026. Currently, she lives with four cats.

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