Songfacts®:

• Much of The Violent Sleep of Reason album was inspired by current events, including turmoil in the Middle East. The band's drummer, Tomas Haake, wrote most of the lyrics for the album, including the track "Born in Dissonance," where he takes a look at how governments control the masses.
  
  "In a sense, it is about scare tactics," Haake said in his Songfacts interview. "Without sounding too paranoid, there is a lot of that going around the way I see it. Metaphorically, I wrote about the threat of something coming from space to destroy us, like an asteroid or something like that. And I wrote about it in way and used wordings that maybe you can't tell exactly what it's about."