Creativity Quote by Bob Dylan

Dylan’s provocation isn’t really about hating trees; it’s about refusing the moral authority we keep assigning to “nature.” The line plays like a shaggy, half-comic rant, but it lands because it flips a lazy cultural shortcut: natural equals pure, true, trustworthy. By calling nature “very unnatural,” he treats the outdoors not as Eden but as a machine for rot, appetite, and repetition. Nature’s signature move is decay. If you’ve spent any time in Dylan’s catalog, decay isn’t romantic scenery; it’s the clock ticking under every love song and every protest verse.

The real power sits in the pivot to dreams. Dylan crowns the most private, least controllable part of consciousness as “truly natural,” precisely because it can’t be composted. Dreams don’t obey seasons, biology, or social rules. They’re anarchic, narrative, and strangely vivid - closer to songwriting than to landscapes. That’s the subtext: art as a rival ecosystem. Nature can erode bodies and cities, but it can’t weather an image once it’s lodged in the mind.

Contextually, this fits Dylan’s long-running allergy to being pinned down by any orthodoxies, including the back-to-the-land sincerity that shadowed parts of 60s and 70s counterculture. He’s also protecting the imagination from the pieties of authenticity. If “nature” is what everyone agrees is real, Dylan insists the more real thing is what can’t be verified - the inner cinema where meaning keeps escaping the law of entropy.