Synchronicity II

It's pretty obvious. He's about to murder the family. He is the monster. The monster is the hatred that's been festering in him, he's personified it. What he's "staring at" in the distance is the monster. i.e. He's envisioning it. Notice every time the monster is mentioned it's accompanied by the man staring, or watching, etc? Until the end, when he and the monster are both reaching to open the door... they have found synchronicity.

Adding to last comment- found 1 line wrong here- should be- "Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance" - the word alone adds emphasis to his ambivolence of feeling towards anyone.

"He knows that something somewhere has to break He sees the family home now looming in his headlights The pain upstairs makes his eyeballs ache

Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the shore Of a dark Scottish lake

Many miles away"

So to clarify my post- the monster is entering the cottage to kill all inside, at the same time the father is entering the house to kill his family. Hence, the synchronicity. After hearing the song umteen times, reading the lyrics, and realizing this, it sent chills down my spine. Sting is a hell of a lyracist, with one hell of an imagination.

It's about the emasculation and demoralization of the middle class male with the images of the monster rising from the lake serving as a symbol for the need to awaken and relate to man's primal side. The man is besieged at home with problems, seems to be in an unhappy marriage, has a thankless job and a polluted environment. Secretly he wishes to act on his lusty impulses for the secretaries at his office but "all he ever thinks to do is watch." It is indicated that there is an outward signal of the primal force rising inside him: "He walks unhindered through the picket lines today / He doesn't think to wonder why"

It just seems to me that it is about modern middle class man's rising frustration both at his station in life and to the moral and natural decay that seems to be taking place around him, this frustration is linked symbolically as the catalyst for the monster rising from the lake.

i think that the song is telling two stories about the lochness monster and a frustrated dad. they are feeling and doing the same thing, they are in sychronicity. the dad realizes his life is full of boredom and frustration and hes trapped as a middle class worker. while the monster is full of boredom and frustration, trapped in a loch and always hiding. In this point in the fathers life he finally snaps out side of his house where he can see his family who he's gotten sick of and his monster hes been storing inside of him finally comes out, and goes in and murders them all. The Loch ness monster, in an act of frustration, creeps up to a lake side cottage to kill everyone inhabiting it. basically the same story with both the man and the monster.

this song is about the lives we live today, we have to put up with boredom of family life, the boredom of work, and then at the end of the day the boredom of traffic, "packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes contestants in a suicidal race" when your stuck in traffic next, think of these lyrics and u will see what a waste of life . this song is nearly 20 years old and still it rings true for millions of people throughout the world.

To Stingfan: I was in college in 1983. The environment was definitely a hot topic. The big concerns were acid rain and nuclear fallout. It was only a few years after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident. The prospect of nuclear war was also looming. One of the most-watched TV movies that year, The Day After, was about a nuclear holocaust.

As many have said before, the essence of Synchronicity is that the events that have no causal relationship, and are not taking place in the same place, but nonetheless, are somehow connected. That's why the Police repeat (over and over) the lines "many miles away".

Like many Police songs of this era (check out When the World is Turning...") this is definitely a social commentary on post-modernism. For a good example of fictional post-modernism and to see what it's all about, check out "White Noise" by Don DeLilo (not sure about spelling) but it's an amazing book. I'm not sure about the Loch Ness Monster references though. Perhaps it is comparing the stark, bleak, reality of the American post-modern age, with the fantasy and mystery of ages past? Who knows. grouping may have a good point too.

Some famous writer once described Britons as living lives of quiet desperation. Pink Floyd referenced the line at the beginning of "Dark Side of the Moon." Seems to me this song is referring to it as well, drawing a picture of a desperate middle-class man socially buffeted from all sides until "something has to break," at which point the inner monster is released and, the song seems to imply, something horrible happens.

This song is MOST DEFINITELY about the father slowly slipping into insanity, driven by his poor home life and the hopelessness of his work situation. Sounds like he gets it honestly from his mother.

The 'monster' or 'creature' was never said to be the Lock Ness Monster. There are lots of stories about lake monsters in Scotland, and Nessie is only one of them

I see a vile creature stirring and rising from the depths of a dark slimy lake coinciding with the father's fall. Or, you could say that as the creature rises, so does the evil within the father.

One line that put it into focus for me was:

"He walks unhindered through the picket lines today He doesn't think to wonder why"

I picture him walking him walking through a throng of protesters with suck a look on his face and an air of fear about him that they move aside as he gets closer. But he's already so far gone that it doesn't even occur to him.

And at the end as the shadow falls across the door both of the house and the cottage, the creature has risen and is loose both in life and metaphorically, and I doubt if either is going to simply whine about having a bad day...

I think this song is just about the desperation of modern life, and the way this man's sanity is hanging by a thread. Apparently it's starting to show externally as well, as no one hassles him when he goes through the picket line that day.

I think the monster and the Scottish lake are metaphors for his psychological state. Something primal is coming up from the depths. The 'shadow on the door' is a pretty suspenseful bit of imagery to end with, and I think it implies that something has broken, or at least changed in this man's mind.