Branched Crystals and Category O

In this paper we describe a theory of (branched) crystals which is adapted to the study of representations in the BGG category $\cal O$ and which generalizes the theory of normal crystals of Kashiwara. In the case of $sl_2$ we show that one can associate (uniquely up to isomorphism) to every module in $\cal O$ a branched crystal . We show that the indecomposable modules in \cal O$correspond to "indecomposable" branched crystals. We also define the tensor product of these crystals and show that for$sl_2$ the indecomposable components of the tensor product of branched crystals are the same as the crystals associated to the indecomposable summands of the tensor product of the corresponding modules.