Following His Dreams

My sophomore English teacher was enamored with Simon & Garfunkel's 1965 hit, The Sound of Silence, and spent weeks on it in class. We pored over the lyrics, packed with religious and hallucinatory imagery, trying to make sense of them. The opening lines are straightforward, the later verses less so.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence"

58 years later Paul Simon is still writing songs about life, death, God, and meaning. The source of his inspiration is perhaps unsurprising.

CBS Sunday Morning Interviewer: His latest solo album, Seven Psalms, was recorded in his cabin studio. The title came to him in a dream.

Paul Simon: The dream said that you are working on a piece called "Seven Psalms."

Interviewer: He got up and wrote it down on a legal pad.

Interviewer: When something as vivid as that happens, what do you make of it?

Paul Simon: Since it came to me in a dream with someone or something's telling me to do this, I said it's not my idea anyway so I'll just wait to this clarification on what I'm supposed to do.

Interviewer: Did you get clarification?

Paul Simon: Yeah, it did come as guitar pieces.

Interviewer: The words would come later, again in dreams.

Paul Simon: I would start to wake up two or three times a week between 3:30 and 5 in the morning, and words would come. I would write them down and start putting them together.

Paul Simon goes on to say that his best work, The Sound of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water, came from dreams.

In another time he might have been called a prophet with a pipeline to the divine, except that no prophet had his gift for music.