Songfacts®:

• Blaze Bayley, who was Iron Maiden's frontman for the Virtual XI album, describes "Futureal" as "That feeling of paranoia."
  
  Bayley has an interest in paranormal activity and cosmology, which was on his mind when he wrote the lyric. He says that there is a lot more out there than what the traditional media will have us believe. "So much of the news media decides what they think is newsworthy, but that's not everything that's going on in the world - that's what they think you should know," he said in our 2014 interview. "And worse than that, sometimes that's all they want you to know, is my belief."
• Global warming was a hot topic in the media when this song was written, and the debate on that issue was an influence on the lyric. The band was struck by how the scientific evidence that proved global warming could be muddled in the media to the point where people didn't know if it was real or not.
• The title is a combination of the words "Future" and "Real." It asks the question, "Is the future real?"
• Blaze Bayley wrote this song with Iron Maiden founder Steve Harris. Bayley, who was with the group from 1994-1999, credits Harris with improving his songwriting by teaching him how to develop his best ideas and leave the others by the wayside.