ANOHNI / Paradise - EP / 2017
In My Dreams
haunted, resigned, quietly devastated
A short, incantatory piece built from a handful of repeated phrases, this song turns the dream-space into a site of emotional danger rather than refuge. ANOHNI inverts the usual comfort of dreaming, imagining a beloved who withholds love and actively wishes harm, and lets that single idea circle without resolution.
emotional vulnerability inverted comfort powerlessness repetition as psychological state distrust in intimacy
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed 'you' directly, describing a recurring dream in which that person is cruel or indifferent. The voice is not accusatory toward a real-world figure so much as reporting an internal, recurring vision; its reliability is emotional rather than factual.
What happens
There isn't a conventional story arc. Instead the song states and restates a single scenario -- a dream in which affection is absent and harm is possible -- with almost no variation, so that the 'narrative' is really the experience of being stuck inside a recurring thought.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on repetition and minimal variation rather than verse-chorus contrast. A small set of lines recur with slight reordering, and the piece gradually strips down toward its final fragments, mimicking the way a dream or an obsessive thought loses coherence and detail the longer it's held onto. There's no clear bridge or resolution; the ending simply trails off rather than concluding.
Section by section
Opening lines
“you don't love me”
The song opens by immediately naming absence rather than presence, establishing the dream as a place where the speaker rehearses the withdrawal of affection rather than finding comfort in it.
Escalation to harm
“you can hurt me”
The shift from emotional absence to the possibility of being hurt intensifies the stakes, suggesting the dream isn't just about loneliness but about imagined vulnerability to active cruelty.
Fragmented middle
As the lines break into shorter repeated cries, the structure mirrors a mind circling the same wound, unable to move past it or resolve it into a fuller thought.
Closing repetition
The song doesn't build to a climax or release; it simply fades on the same phrase it began with, leaving the listener inside the loop rather than offering an exit from it.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening phrase anchors every line to the dream-frame, reinforcing that everything described exists only in that imagined space, not in waking reality.
- minimalism/reduction
- The lyric sheds clauses as it progresses, moving from fuller statements to single words and fragments, which enacts a kind of emotional erosion or exhaustion within the song itself.
- paradox
- Framing dreams -- usually associated with escape or wish-fulfillment -- as a space of hurt and rejection creates a quiet irony that destabilizes the listener's expectation of what dreaming should offer.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats this as a meditation on how trauma or insecurity infiltrates even the unconscious mind -- the dream-space, which should offer refuge, becomes instead a rehearsal space for fear of abandonment or harm. A secondary reading might extend this beyond a single interpersonal relationship toward a broader sense of being unprotected or unloved by the world itself, given ANOHNI's frequent use of intimate address to speak to larger social or ecological anxieties elsewhere in the Paradise EP. Both readings are compatible since the lyric's vagueness about the addressee's identity invites both a personal and an allegorical hearing.
Context
This track appears on the Paradise EP, a leaner, more stripped-down companion to ANOHNI's 2016 album Hopelessness. Where that album used electronic production to address political and ecological despair explicitly, Paradise's songs, including this one, tend to compress emotion into sparser, more repetitive forms. I don't have confirmed biographical detail linking this specific song to a particular event in ANOHNI's life, so this reading rests on the text and the EP's general tone rather than documented authorial intent.
Listen for
- How the vocal delivery changes (or doesn't) as the lyric repeats, since any shift in tone becomes the main expressive variable
- The gradual shortening of phrases toward the song's end
- Any use of silence or space between repetitions, which may function like the gaps in uneasy sleep
- Whether the instrumentation swells or stays flat under the repeated lines, shaping how much the dream feels inescapable versus merely described
About ANOHNI
Anohni Hegarty, known mononymously as Anohni, is a British-born singer, songwriter, and visual artist based in New York City and Ireland.
b. 1971 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue