I Can't See Your Face In My Mind Lyrics

Lyric discussion by sawfish666 

Cover art for I Can't See Your Face In My Mind lyrics by Doors, The

The line, as they show it here:

"Carnival dogs consume the lines."

make no sense in any interpretation I can come up with, even nonsensical, and so I begin to wonder if the lyric is actually something else.

I mean, what are we to make of it? There are dogs at a carnival and they eat the people standing in line for the farris wheel and the roller coaster? The Doors lyrics are seldom that, well, sloppy... This would be as self-referential as James Joyce. They rend to reference classical tropes and use images that often relate to that. The way it is, no one could possibly interpret the song, and they did not seem to try for this level of obscurity.

They are not typically like John Lennon, who, if the apocryphal story is true, upon finishing "I am the Walrus", said:

"There. Let the fuckers figure this one out..."

@sawfish666 - I believe this lyric describes being under the influence of psychedelic drugs e,g, LSD. In this state one can generate an image in ones mind while other mental images involuntarily emerge and encroach upon the original image and morph or obliterate it. In this case Jim's tripping like crazy, thinking of the girl he's breaking up with and having the image of her face he's holding in his mind start to dissolve around the edges due to the secondary images encroaching on it. The encroaching images first look like carnival dogs (little dogs with pointy hats?) but...