Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome writer and poet Craig Czury of Pennsylvania with “Dreamsong with Monster,” an intriguing and whimsical analysis of a nightmare which rides the edge between flash and prose poetry.
“From what I get in Gestalt e v e r y t h i n g in the dream is me…this half-lit room…the room is me, the half light…the girls from high school dancing around, suddenly scared by a monstrous sound from another room…”
Carl Jung also believed that everything and everyone in a dream revealed an aspect of the dreamer, something needing attention and understanding. It seems strange at first to recognize the mind’s preoccupation with the self–although our waking hours already bring in much evidence of that. This interpretation proves both useful and entertaining. The monsters in our dreams are aspects we keep locked up. When we don’t acknowledge them, they grow until they pop up in a nightmare or, much worse, they invade our daytime reality without our understanding. A dream monster is perhaps a warning that part of us is not integrating with the whole, but is isolated and in danger or dangerous. The monster isn’t the whole story–the other characters have a relationship with the monster that enables or restrains it, that reacts.
Craig plays with spacing–contracting and expanding ellipses throughout–which gives an off-balance surrealist feeling to the piece. The imagery is recognizably that of the high school horror flick, but, like most dreams, the archetypes serve to illustrate something particular about the dreamer’s life, the fear of something beastly escaping from inside the dreamer’s psyche. It’s a vulnerable piece cloaked in whimsy. Similar to many movies, the monster is scarier when it isn’t visible.
Read “Dreamsong with Monster” in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Craig Czury is from the coal mining region of Northeast Pennsylvania and spent his younger years hitchhiking North America, working as a carny from the Jersey Shore to the Nebraska Panhandle. A pot wrassler and pearl diver in restaurant kitchens as well as a cod slinger on the Oregon coast, he bucked hay bales on the Montana Hi-Line, carried hod for bricklayers in the Badlands. Growing up in immigrant labor communities, English wasn’t his first language. Broken English was, in all of its visceral tones and undertones, like poetry.
Laureate of the 2011 Ditët e Naimit International Albanian Poetry Festival in North Macedonia, Craig toured Albania and the Balkans in 2019, and was honored with the Alexander the Great Gold Medal for Letters & Arts through UNESCO/Piraeus on Salamina Island in Greece. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar to Chile, his latest book is And If You Saw Me. Craig lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania where he continues his weekly online Life-Writing from Cyberia workshops and community writing projects.