Casimir Lund

Casimir grew up between Poland and Denmark, in houses where a dream about a wedding meant a funeral and nobody questioned it. He studied comparative folklore and now writes about how cultures read the same dream differently — the snake in Cairo, the snake in São Paulo, the snake in your childhood bedroom. His entries carry the history most dream dictionaries skip. He has spent the better part of fifteen years collecting dream beliefs the way his grandmother collected recipes: from the source, with the story attached. He can tell you which readings arrived with trade routes, which ones survived translation and which were invented by a nineteenth-century publisher with pages to fill — and he finds the invented ones just as telling, because a culture only keeps the superstitions it needs. In his entries, the folklore is never decoration. He treats each tradition as a record of what people feared and hoped in a particular place, which is why the same snake can be an enemy, an ancestor, or money on the way, depending on who is asleep. He is careful to label every reading with where it comes from, and he never ranks one tradition above another. What he loves most are the collisions: a reader raised between two cultures, carrying both meanings into the same night. Those letters, he says, are the whole job.

Writes about: dream folklore, cultural symbolism, mythology.

Elsewhere: casimirlund.substack.com