Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, California, with three evocative dream poems. The first, “Nightmare Trilogy,” explores the way our minds create stories around our fears. This trilogy features a robot/zombie plot (fear of brainwashing and lost autonomy), a car flying off a cliff (fear of losing control) , and a brilliant mind inside a sleeping carrot (fear of not being understood). You may have had similar dreams–our minds speak in tropes and archetypes–and yet the variations in dreams bear the signature of the individual mind. Lucille refrains from interpreting these delightful, colorful episodes, giving the reader clues and the agency to draw their own conclusions. I especially love the last one with its fanciful whimsy: “I wondered what good/ it did to be brilliant if you/ were a sleeping carrot/ without a means to speak.”
“Still Life with Liver and Peonies” is full of wonder as the mind picks at the edges of creativity: “In the dream, I specialized in acrylic paintings/ of human organs. I simply/ dipped my brush into paint and stroked/ it onto the canvas under skylights/ in my spacious studio. Effortlessly,/ the organs would emerge.” Things often appear magical in dreams–perhaps it’s a kind of short hand or maybe our minds want to live in the miraculous–that peaceful place outside of time that lies just beyond. Lucille does such a wonderful job of distilling the experience so that we feel we are experiencing the dream alongside her. Her gentle alliteration and word music draw us in, strong as any magic.
The prose poem “Dreaming On Time, Twenty Years Later” inhabits the shifting dreamscape of love. From factory to restaurant, garden to bus to train, the beloved pursues and is pursued. “He said he wanted to see me, but I slept too long, and now it’s very late. I tell my mother, three years dead, he’s taking me out to dinner. I know he sees me.” I love the way mother still presides from within the dreamer and the way the beloved remains vague and hazy. The dead are seldom dead in dreams, as we slip out from under time’s thumb.
Read Lucille’s mesmerizing poems in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Lucille Lang Day believes that dreams tell us things we need to know about ourselves. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place. The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems, 1975 – 2025 will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. She has also edited three poetry anthologies and published two children’s books and a memoir. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 newspapers, magazines, and anthologies; her honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart nominations. She runs a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books.