Windmills Of Your Mind Lyrics

Lyric discussion by PewterBox 

Cover art for Windmills Of Your Mind lyrics by Sting

To me, this song is like an ever accelerating spiraling descent into madness, brought on by the subject going over the same thing again and again in their head, perhaps a relationship breakup, as hinted in the final verse.

The first verse to me speaks of being out of control, lost, and feeling alone, the balloon flying away, the snowball down a mountain, Earth's 'apple' silent in space.

The second verse describes to me an increasing darkness of the soul and feeling trapped. Still the loneliness of the apple silent in space.

In the third verse, the subject is starting to confuse thoughts/dreams/reality and question their own memories. The images unwind and everything is falling apart.

The subject is so obsessed that they loose track of time and begin to find it hard to distinguish between real life and reality. They have fallen, out of control, into a loop of insanity.

My Interpretation

The mind is life and life is the mind, my friend.

How can insanity, then, be the most beautiful song ever composed? It's not a rhetorical question. Sometimes humanism and conversation can cure the obsession, but the song is more about the universe and its mirroring of the mind than it is about the diagnosability of the mind through another, more authoritarian, normative, clinical mind. Pain breeds such a loop of thought. Healing, pleasure and joy change the loop. If a life is lacking in those things, and is wallowing in sorrow, then the loop itself might, rather than insanity, be a form of self-comforting...pacifier, anyone? But you might not be...