Take a card from The Daydreamer’s Tarot and try to read the figure’s expression. You’ll probably catch yourself doing it even after you realize there’s no expression to read. A tilt of the head might look stubborn today. On a different day, the very same pose might look tired.
Twinkle and Lancelot borrow the cast of Alice in Wonderland for this Rider–Waite–Smith deck. The Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts come with plenty of baggage if you know the story. The Queen is the one I’d pause over. How much of the threat do you see in the picture, and how much did you bring with you because you remember what she’s like?
Read the same card twice
Draw a card and write one plain sentence about what’s happening. Then underline any word that describes a feeling. If you wrote “she’s embarrassed,” for instance, look again and ask what made you choose that word. Was it the posture? The distance between two figures? Or did the scene remind you of something that happened this week?
Leave the card out and come back to it later. Give the figure a different feeling and see if the scene still makes sense. It’s a small exercise, but it can loosen a reading that settled too quickly on one explanation.
What comes in the box
The deck has 80 cards and a printed guidebook. The artwork has a soft, grainy texture, and the pink gilding shows along the edges of the stack. The cards measure 70 × 120 mm and are printed on 330 gsm German black-core cardstock with a soft-touch finish. They come in a hinged clamshell box with gold foil details.
