The Man Comes Around -or- Johnny Cash and Queen Elizabeth
Inspiration and Creativity in Dreams
Many musicians have had dreams that inspired them to create a new song. Many dreams and dream interpretations testify to this creative process, here are a few;
- Beethoven
- Paul McCartney's "Yesterday"
- Elvis
- Guiseppe Tartini's "Devil's Trill Sonata"
This dream interpretation is about the dream that Johnny Cash reported that he had. Here is the dream, which lyrically speaks for itself;
" 'The Man Comes Around' is a song that I wrote, it's my song of the apocalypse, and I got the idea from a dream that I had - I dreamed I saw Queen Elizabeth. I dreamed I went in to Buckingham Palace, and there she sat on the floor. And she looked up at me and said, "Johnny Cash, you're like a thorn tree in a whirlwind."
"And I woke up, of course, and I thought, what could a dream like this mean? Thorn tree in a whirlwind? Well, I forgot about it for two or three years, but it kept haunting me, this dream. I kept thinking about it, how vivid it was, and then I thought, Maybe it's biblical. So I found it. Something about whirlwinds and thorn trees in the Bible. So from that, my song started and... ‘The Man Comes Around'. (listen to the music video)."
On a final note, the line in Johnny Cash's song; "There'll be a golden ladder reaching down.", references a Biblical dream, namely that of "Jacob's Ladder".