For years I have listened to The Police. I mean the 1980s band, although I also listen to law enforcement officials when they speak to me. Today I was listening to the album Synchronicity. While listening to the song Synchronicity I, I decided to check out the lyrics on one of the many lyric archives on the Internet. I wasn’t quite sure about the lyrics at the end.
What I found, however, was that I had misheard another section of lyrics for years. I heard the lyrics as:
If we share this nightmare
Then we can dream
Spiritual spooning
This made perfect sense to me.  They had been talking about sharing a dream. Dreaming is something you do in bed. So is spooning. So, sharing a dream could be considered spiritual spooning. I thought it was a great image.
However, it turns out that the actual lyrics are:
If we share this nightmare
Then we can dream
Spiritus mundi
Spiritus mundi means “spirit of the world.” Personally, I think this makes less sense than my lyrics. I could write The Police and tell them they should change it, but the only time they have performed together in the last two decades was at the Grammy Awards earlier this month.
I have submitted the lyrics to kissthisguy.com. For those of you that don’t know the site, it is a repository of misheard lyrics. Some of them are quite funny, especially the way people hear the lyrics to Toto’s song Africa.
The Police have some remarkable lyrics, but it takes a while to make sense of them. When I teach Biblical Interpretation, I have an exercise where the students have to apply interpretation techniques to the song Synchronicity II. Paying attention to the structure and movement in the song is particularly important.