Arms Trying Throw To World The Your Around

[MixingBliss]

Originally posted by The_Sweetest_Thing:
Yeah, I dreamed that I saw Dali
With a supermarket trolley
He was trying to throw his arms around a girl
He took an open top beetle
Through the eye of a needle
He was tryin' to throw his arms around the world

Especially this verse. Anyone out there who could possibly give me the low down? The 411? An explanation even?

Perhaps the reason this verse seems like such nonsense is because of what it is:
"I *dreamed* I saw Dali."
Very rarely are dreams very clear or linear. So this is just a surreal little scene from a dream that Bono probably fabricated for effect. A surreal dream? Huh--well that makes sense because Dali was considered a Surrealist. A Surrealist depicts ideas as they are in dreams. So to say, "I dreamed that I saw Dali" is a little bit of wordplay.
The supermaket trolley is just another silly symbol, but a significant one when you look at what U2 explored in terms of materialism and shopping (always seemed to me to first seeds of Popmart.)
The significance of the open-topped Beetle has already been alluded to. The modern interpretation of "a camel through the eye of a needle" involves a rich man trying to walk his camel through the low, narrow openings in the fortified walls of towns in Jerusalem in that day. To get your camel through the "eye of the needle," you had to unload your possessions and leave them behind. Bono has expressed his take on the line, too. He has said that to pass through the opening, a man would have to *kneel*, as in humility, getting close to the dirt and trash in the ground, an idea that defined U2 from Achtung Baby through Pop.
All in all, the line is loaded with all kinds of clever meanings, which is probably why the singer relishes it so.