Spanish Sahara

Those are some interesting insights to this song and I like your references used. When I hear this song I picture a man describing his experience of the battles fought in the Spanish Sahara time period. I personally like the opening lyric "So I walked through to the haze and a million dirty waves". I picture a man walking through the battle field after the dust has settled and how he's experiencing so many feelings such as doubt, fear, hopelessness, loneliness, uncertainty, and sadness. I think the dirty waves could be all the dead bodies that are laying in the land. I know that land is close to the coast but makes me wonder if you could actually see the waves from the battle fields. The line "the horror" I imagine death right in the mist of you and how it would raise so many questions about your identity, is God real, and if there is an after life how do you make it there. I think he want's to leave the horror and ignore the thought of God, nothingness or just death itself but the experience is so real he can't stop thinking about it.

I think you are right now about most of this. Just to add some thoughts that would add more support to your interpretation:

1. "god damn this boiling space" may refer to the increasing entropy of the universe, and the fact that at some point in the future energy will be dissipated and completely disordered. Boiling is a form of physical change in which molecules become more random and less structured, which is a form of entropy.

2. If HauntedHarmony is right below, perhaps the sight of a dead dog triggered these reflections on death, meaning, chaos, nothingness, etc. This also may help explain what is going on when he describes finding something in the sand and wiping it clean with dirty hands (all of this quite literal).

3. The Spanish Sahara may refer to the place where he saw the dog, or it could be a metaphor for the ambiguous status of life/universe. According to Wikipedia, "Its sovereignty remains under dispute... The United Nations considers the former Spanish Sahara a non-decolonized territory, with Spain as the formal administrative power." Similarly, at one time the universe was thought to be governed by God, but now it is not clear if anything is governing it.

4. Wanting to leave the horror in the Spanish Sahara may be a metaphor for wanting to believe that the universe does have an ultimate meaning/purpose insofar as it is governed by God. When the sovereignty of God in the universe is no longer under dispute, the horror of nothingness goes away.

I'm not sure if I buy the "I am" references as referring to God. I'm also not sure what any of the "fury" references might mean.

It just occurred to me that "fury" might be an allusion to the Shakespeare quote:

“Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

definitely all good points but i thought that the line 'its all just future rust and its future dust' meant that in the end all the horror isn't significant because in the future it will just be forgotten as much as rust and dust will be...

I also love the line "it's future rust and it's future dust" along with the line "now i see you lying there/like a lilo losing air"

Yeah, I hate people that take every song and say it's about drugs or fucking. Spanish Sahara is so tender, so deep, so cold. Like you wote: haunting. And seeing something like an animal, holding such a symbolism of innocence I could imagine being very upsetting and disturbing. Transfers through really well.

A lilo is a UK term for an air matress
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…