Until her death aged 96 in September this year, Queen Elizabeth II was a constant figure in public life. Spanning seven decades, her reign corresponded with both a worldwide population boom and the information age, making her undoubtedly one of the most ‘seen’ figures in human history. From coins and stamps, to her annual Christmas speech, to being groped by inept cop Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun and defaced in Jamie Reid’s iconic artwork for the Sex Pistols, the public image of Elizabeth II was hard to avoid and has become firmly lodged in the global psyche.
While there is no substantive way to quantify the extent to which Her Majesty invaded our most intimate thoughts, it’s not a stretch to believe that the Queen must have been one of the most dreamt-about personalities of the last 100 years.
Indeed, a dream about Elizabeth II inspired one of the last songs country star Johnny Cash wrote before his death. In the album notes for , Cash wrote: “I was in Nottingham, England, and had bought a book called … I dreamed that I walked into Buckingham Palace, and there she sat…whirlwind.’” The biblical quality of this statement moved him to revisit the Book of Revelation, leading Cash to pen what he later termed his “apocalypse song”, “The Man Comes Around”. Cash kept the oneiric monarch’s prophetic-sounding phrase as part of its haunting chorus.
