You can't get more riddley and ambiguous than Bob Dylan. I get irritated when people try to pin down references and so forth - and of course I'm not talking just about Dylanology here - on a one-to-one basis, as if that explained what a song or a poem was "really" about. That just isn't how it works.

Mishearings and forgotten lines and changing meanings can be the source of the most powerful images. That happens collectively and individually - I mean I've found singing somas I've written that I'll misremember something, and the misrembering improves it. Any suggestion that the closer you can get to "the original" the better is way off. Often it's more that the original is a rough draft off what can turn out to be something far better in time.