"Only" is a self-evaluation of the artist's reality. I'm sure i'm touching on what many of you have said earlier, but i want to point out a couple more things.
The song begins with a confident statement, "I'm becoming less defined...kind of drifting into the abstract" That entire stanza reveals that the artist feels as if he once was focused, or had his mind set on "reality" and such, but that more and more he finds himself slipping away into the unknown, or the mysterious. The world that he has lives and that he was percieved to be true is slipping away from fact towards myth. He no longer grasps with such strength the reality the society has created for him. Relationships fade away into the meaningless, love drifts into the lies, and life, in general, can no longer be viewed as this clear, black-and-white reality.
In the second stanza, the artist then delvs into himself, saying that he no longer gives the same efforts to try and see the world as everyone else does. he refers to the world as "you world" which i think means society's world. And why, because it doesn't really matter. All the instituions he held to dear are slowly less important and more meaningless. Laws, religion, media, peers- they all don't matter any more, because, as far as the artist is concerned, they are not real, he only PERCIEVED them as real.
The third stanza brings in some tendancies of mentally "ill" patients. The artist says he was alone, and always was. All other people, again "you", as in society, are not real. People are just a manifestation of his imagination. Like in the movie "Vanilla Sky", he has imagined this entire world. Nothing is real, except himself. he created everything. He created the concept of earth, the universe, everything could just be one huge dream of a man in a coma finally realizing that he is jusy dreaming. Kinda of scary :(
The fourth stanza repeats "there is no you" which affirms that society is not real, and that the only real thing is the artist himself.
Now, the fifth stanza is where i think the artist describes HOW he got to thinking this way. He say a small dot, maybe he experienced something, say saw a car crash that altered his views of the world. He somewhow got to thinking that nothing is real and as such, everything is meaningless. Once he saw this dot, he couldn't quite picking on it, because it was like a scab. As a scab, it itched, it itched to be opened. And the artist ithced it until he could climb through it, metaphorically. The dot transformed into a scab and then a doorway. From one incident, or person, (i have no clue who/what) his whole perception of the world has been fundamentally altered. And now, the artist says "I can see things I know I really shouldn't see" as if he really shouldn't be thinking this way. Well let's face it, if he was dead serious about this, why even live? If life is just a dream that you are dreaming, why don't you just wake up? So the artist realizes that the world he has entered is not pretty, it's not pretty on the inside. He has this knowledge, and i'm pretty sure he regrets thinking this way. Maybe this is a declaration of instanity, or, just maybe, reality!
"Only" is a self-evaluation of the artist's reality. I'm sure i'm touching on what many of you have said earlier, but i want to point out a couple more things.
The song begins with a confident statement, "I'm becoming less defined...kind of drifting into the abstract" That entire stanza reveals that the artist feels as if he once was focused, or had his mind set on "reality" and such, but that more and more he finds himself slipping away into the unknown, or the mysterious. The world that he has lives and that he was percieved to be true is slipping away from fact towards myth. He no longer grasps with such strength the reality the society has created for him. Relationships fade away into the meaningless, love drifts into the lies, and life, in general, can no longer be viewed as this clear, black-and-white reality.
In the second stanza, the artist then delvs into himself, saying that he no longer gives the same efforts to try and see the world as everyone else does. he refers to the world as "you world" which i think means society's world. And why, because it doesn't really matter. All the instituions he held to dear are slowly less important and more meaningless. Laws, religion, media, peers- they all don't matter any more, because, as far as the artist is concerned, they are not real, he only PERCIEVED them as real.
The third stanza brings in some tendancies of mentally "ill" patients. The artist says he was alone, and always was. All other people, again "you", as in society, are not real. People are just a manifestation of his imagination. Like in the movie "Vanilla Sky", he has imagined this entire world. Nothing is real, except himself. he created everything. He created the concept of earth, the universe, everything could just be one huge dream of a man in a coma finally realizing that he is jusy dreaming. Kinda of scary :(
The fourth stanza repeats "there is no you" which affirms that society is not real, and that the only real thing is the artist himself.
Now, the fifth stanza is where i think the artist describes HOW he got to thinking this way. He say a small dot, maybe he experienced something, say saw a car crash that altered his views of the world. He somewhow got to thinking that nothing is real and as such, everything is meaningless. Once he saw this dot, he couldn't quite picking on it, because it was like a scab. As a scab, it itched, it itched to be opened. And the artist ithced it until he could climb through it, metaphorically. The dot transformed into a scab and then a doorway. From one incident, or person, (i have no clue who/what) his whole perception of the world has been fundamentally altered. And now, the artist says "I can see things I know I really shouldn't see" as if he really shouldn't be thinking this way. Well let's face it, if he was dead serious about this, why even live? If life is just a dream that you are dreaming, why don't you just wake up? So the artist realizes that the world he has entered is not pretty, it's not pretty on the inside. He has this knowledge, and i'm pretty sure he regrets thinking this way. Maybe this is a declaration of instanity, or, just maybe, reality!