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. 
V. Chari, D. Jakelic, A. Moura