Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Samuel Prestridge of Georgia (USA), with “Coyote,” an atmospheric piece detailing an encounter with a coyote in a dream. “The night before my 68th, I dreamed/ I was walking in a moon-scarred landscape./ I saw a coyote./ He wasn’t threatening. Just staring…” People, places, and things in our dreams often don’t behave the way they would in everyday life because our mind is using them as symbols of other things. The mystery is in finding what our subconscious means and how that meaning might change over time and under the influence of memory. This coyote follows the dreamer, despite the latter’s efforts to ignore the puzzling animal. and befriends him in a stunning show of affection. Is the coyote a symbol of a shadow self, accepted and befriended by the psyche after wariness and trepidation? Or is it some fear: mortality, loneliness, or animal nature, that is being tamed and revealed as friendly? The answer could be any or all of these things or something else. Now that he has shared the experience, it may have a different meaning for us than it did when he dreamed it.
This is an economical poem that creates a quiet stillness around the action. Time slows down and there is nothing to distract us from the relationship playing out. Samuel doesn’t over-interpret the scene, doesn’t tell us what it means, but focuses on the sensory experience and the feeling of quietness that eventually overcomes his discomfort and fear. The ambiguity of the story makes us cling to the love revealed inside the dream. Like a mother singing a lullaby, the dream and the retelling of the dream are both soothing.
Read “Coyote” in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Samuel Prestridge is a post-aspirational man whose first book, A Dog’s Job of Work, was published in March 2025 by Sligo Creek Publishing. He has published variously, and his children concede that, in general, he is an adequate father.