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[Frightwolf]

Okay, everytime I get to this part of the song: "Living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you see," I lose all meaning and hope in my life because I have no idea what the hell Lennon is talking about after the line.

OK, I don't really lose hope in life, but after those lines which I understand perfectly, he talks about the difficulties of being someone else, guys on trees, and and sometimes people dream about thinking it's him.

Was there any meaning to this song?

[strawb3rryfi3ldsfor3ver]

Hmm. Dunno. All I really "get" is the No one, I think, is in my tree...I mean, it must be high or low... lyrics. Otherwise -- no idea what John meant. And the whole "theme" was just...sort of a "close your eyes and get away from the world"-thing, I guess. I dunno, but I still [obviously] <3 the song, as much as I don't understand it. ^^;;;;

[sregis]

Okay, everytime I get to this part of the song: "Living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you see," I lose all meaning and hope in my life because I have no idea what the hell Lennon is talking about after the line.
Was there any meaning to this song?

here's how lennon responds to this question in the famous playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: How about "Strawberry Fields Forever?"

LENNON: Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a nice semidetached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around -- not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden. They didn't have anything like that. Near that home was Strawberry Fields, a house near a boys' reformatory where I used to go to garden parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete. We would go there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at Strawberry Fields. So that's where I got the name. But I used it as an image. Strawberry Fields forever.

PLAYBOY: And the lyrics, for instance: "Living is easy---- "

LENNON: [Singing] "With eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see." It still goes, doesn't it? Aren't I saying exactly the same thing now? The awareness apparently trying to be expressed is -- let's say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. I was different all my life. The second verse goes, "No one I think is in my tree." Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius -- "I mean it must be high or low," the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn't see. As a child, I would say, "But this is going on!" and everybody would look at me as if I was crazy. I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way. It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary and the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde or a Dylan Thomas or a Vincent van Gogh -- all those books that my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what they were. I saw loneliness.

[Frightwolf]

Interesting... still don't quite know what he meant about the "sometimes think it's me" and "it's getting hard to be someone" lyrics (although I might be able to make a guess), but that article was really helpful