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See the animal in his cage that you built,
Are you sure what side you're on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye,
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all, right where it belongs
What if everything around you,
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
What if all the worlds inside of your head,
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your Gods, all the living and the dead
And you're really all alone?
You could live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the woods
While you're hiding in the trees
What if everything around you,
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
Are you sure what side you're on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye,
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all, right where it belongs
What if everything around you,
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
What if all the worlds inside of your head,
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your Gods, all the living and the dead
And you're really all alone?
You could live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the woods
While you're hiding in the trees
What if everything around you,
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
Lyrics submitted by ab0ve
Track duration: 05:05
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The animal in the cage you have built is the person you chose to craft for yourself. A cage is safety. That is most likely not the first way you think of the word cage, you probably think imprisonment. Take the next words of the song, addressing the life you have built for yourself and the hollowness you feel inside. This is him explaining the animal in his cage to you.
You trade in the possibilities of literally EVERYTHING you can do in life, in existence, for a boring, fucking monotone life, because of... Safety. Security.
The hollowness a caged animal feels, is, fucked up as it is, right where it belongs. How could it feel anything but hollowness, it's been distanced from all but itself. The tragedy with us is we put ourselves in the cage, not only willingly, but happily, desperately. Too willing to trade everything for the safety of a useless, empty existence.
You can't see the forest for the trees while all you're aware of is the tree you've locked yourself in.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, is it all you want to be? Are you content to stop growing and learning and developing? Are you okay with being a two dimensional image? Not a competent sentient being, just a useless image of one.
The spiritual parts of the song dealing with existence strikingly remind me of 'The Mysterious Stranger' by Mark Twain. His assertion in this short story is that really, the ultimate end to all that exists is your consciousness. Its not really just yours, as in, everybody you know is in your head, but rather, everyone that you know is also a piece of what you are a piece of. They are all you and you are all of them. Together you make up the universe, one total consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively through many different lenses. All of reality is just an elaborate dream, nothing exists save you, and empty space. The universe, and all else that might exist beside it, is your beautiful dream, and you can change it at anytime. All you have to do is wake up.
what if every life on this earth, or any life anywhere, is just an elaborate dream?
What if you are only one being, experiencing each life, each time under the illusion
that it is all separate; that you are independent of others. Maybe you will awake from the dream and remember all of the dreams that you've had (all your lives) and everything will make sense.
This philosophy is a good motivation to see others more empathetically and insightfully. After all, they are just another dream that you will have to experience.
I came to this song, as quite a few people I believe, through a video someone made several years ago about quitting the MMORPG World of Warcraft. The video was called "Goodbye Blue Sky - Running on Empty" and can still be found on Youtube. Taken in that context the words have powerful almost literal connotations. People allow themselves to fall completely into the fantasy world of virtual words as an escape from the pain of their every day lives and the disappointment of unfulfilled potential - as Jane McGonigal states in her book on this subject "when we're playing video games, we're not suffering."
When I first heard this song I thought it was literally talking about my life, how I had built myself into a cage to keep the real world and all it's pain and disappointment out. How living a life in the virtual world is comfortable and easy but ultimately hollow as it isolates you further and further from reality and the healing presence of other people.
The reason I think it strongly resonated with so many MMORPG players, particularly WoW players due to this video, was because of the lines about living in a fantasy world, an illusion created by yourself, living in your own head and despite it all being truly alone. That is the definition of life in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft.
For myself, the lines about looking at your reflection and asking yourself is this who you wanted to be? Is this person, trapped in a pretend world, isolated, alone and unsatisfied - is this who you saw yourself becoming? It can't help but strike a chord, no one who plays WoW to escape the painfulness of their lives set out to be in that place; none of them. A lot of people who play those games are the social outcasts; the types of people society likes to airbrush out and pretend aren't there.
Looking through the cracks as Reznor puts it, is frightening because you have to see past the safe reality to break out of it, see the real world for all it's pain and ugliness and still step forward away from the safety net of the virtual world and make a place for yourself.
I realise this is a very specific interpretation of the song which will not apply to most who hear it, but those of you who did hear this in connection to WoW or those who heard it after being involved very deeply in an MMORPG - I'm sure hearing this song was as painful for you as it was for me.
For me the song is about Mr Reznor's idea's on his fame (see the animal in his cage), and how empty and hollow he feels because of it. But how he at the same time enjoys it, and even chases it. (Hence why these feelings are right were they belong). When the crowd noise comes in, the song plays as a live performance, and the cheering and adulation of the crowd that he enjoys, is also just a dream. None of us fans really know him at all, and he's worried he's doesn't know himself anymore.
For me one of the best songs of the 00's and it wasn't even a single.
~Shiqin
The song also seems to take on the idea of Descarte's Cogito Ergo Sum, "I think therefore I am" philosophy in a way. The phrase is usually taken to mean that because I have thoughts, I must exist, but the song makes the claim that your thoughts could cause the existence of everything, rather than the other way around. In a sense, the world really could revolve around you. Though we usually say that someone "acts like the world revolves around them" to show we feel that person is narcistic, I don't think that Reznor is doing that. He is trying to show that we truly are alone inside the prisons of ourselves. He is right in a way. No one can never really know you as well as you know yourself. No one can know every thought you have, every emotion, every feeling. We are trapped, and alone in our bodies, and our minds, and in a sense do create the world around us. This would explain the line "feel the hollowness inside your heart".
The song is depressing because of these ideas; and Reznor's ability to express the ideas in the song, I believe, show what he was going through at the time he wrote this album, which was a bout of alcoholism (or so I've heard). He was experiencing a mental illness of sorts, and was trying to explain what it feels like. I've seen some that have commented on this stating it's about dissociative disorders, or schizophrenia, but that wouldn't fit with the theme of the album which is about pain and suffering caused by alcoholism (with teeth, all the love in the world [I believe him asking the bottle why he loves it so much] The Hand that Feeds, &c.), since those going through those diseases rarely understand that they are suffering from a disease. The loneliness, and confusion of this song comes from depression, and alcoholism, two things many of us can relate with, which is why it is such a fantastic song, and people are still posting on it 7 years after its release. If it were a song playing literary games, and trying to make us feel like a person suffering from one of the rarer psychological disorders that people have brought up, it wouldn't have the weight that it does to those of us who have listened enough to comment, just not enough of us feel that way.
In brief, this song is Trent Reznor's thesis on the album With Teeth. His answer to what alcohol has done to him by digging its teeth into his soul. It shows how alone it has made him feel, so alone, that he can actually believe that the world is his own creation, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, not love, hate, war, disease, beauty, friendship is real.
The following verses get even more detailed about living this lie ("What if everything around you,
Isn't quite as it seems?", "What if all the world you think you know, Is an elaborate dream?") and about how the one could realize one day that he/she is doing wrong ("And if you look at your reflection, Is that all you want to be?")