Queen guitarist Brian May wrote this after he had a dream about the Great Flood. Many religions and cultures have stories of floods, including the Great Flood of The Bible that led to Noah's Ark.
Brian May had the dream that inspired this song years before he wrote it. He wasn't trying to push any religious agenda with the lyric, but he did want to convey a message. "In the dream, people were walking on the streets trying to touch each other's hands, desperate to try and make some sign that they were caring about other people," he told Melody Maker in 1975. "I felt that the trouble must be - and this is one of my obsessions anyway - that people don't make enough contact with each other. A feeling that runs through a lot of the songs I write is that if there is a direction to mankind, it ought to be a coming together and at the moment, it doesn't seem to be happening very well."
A working title was "People Of The Earth," which is a phrase that came to Brian May in his dream and made it into the lyric.
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