The Teardrop Explodes / Kilimanjaro (Remastered) / 1980
When I Dream
euphoric but slightly unhinged, giddy and anxious at once
A brisk, bright pop-psych song about romantic fixation, where longing tips into something more obsessive and unstable. The lyric keeps circling back to the same handful of verbs — thinking, dreaming, screaming — until devotion starts to sound like compulsion.
obsessive longing distance and return emotional instability infatuation as possession repetition as psychological state
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent lover directly, oscillating between tenderness and mania; the voice is emotionally reliable but psychologically unstable, more interested in the intensity of feeling than in the other person as a distinct character.
What happens
The song opens with a fairly ordinary declaration of mutual longing, then escalates: sleep-talk becomes dreaming, dreaming becomes screaming. A middle verse supplies a backstory of separation and sadness, with the narrator now travelling back toward the object of affection. By the final section the relationship is recast as something being done to the narrator — feelings and heart being toyed with — even as the same dream/scream refrain returns, suggesting the fixation hasn't resolved, only repeated.
How it's built
Built on short, plainly rhymed verses that funnel into a nonsense-syllable hook, the song relies on near-identical verse shapes (a pair of declarative lines, then an escalation) rather than a conventional chorus with new information. The 'here you come again / there you go again' couplet functions as a late pivot, reframing the earlier declarations of devotion as a cycle rather than a straight line, before the song ends on an unresolved trailing phrase rather than a firm close.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator states mutual interest almost too plainly, then immediately complicates it by admitting the thoughts have invaded sleep — a small but telling shift from conscious affection to something involuntary.
First refrain
“I go ba ba ba ba oh oh”
The collapse into vocables right after the escalation from dreaming to screaming suggests the feeling has outrun vocabulary; the childlike syllables also puncture the intensity with a note of comic or manic release.
Second verse
A short flashback to sadness and physical distance recontextualizes the opening lines: the fixation isn't casual infatuation but the aftermath of separation, with the narrator now literally moving back toward the person.
'Counting for two' verse
“now I'm counting I'm counting for two”
This line is ambiguous — it could imply pregnancy, or simply a mind now permanently occupied by two people's worth of thought. The ambiguity is left unresolved, which keeps the song's emotional stakes deliberately vague.
Closing couplet and outro
“playing with my feelings”
The late shift to being acted upon — feelings and heart 'played with' — reframes the narrator from active pursuer to passive victim of the same dynamic, and the return of the refrain afterward implies the cycle simply continues rather than concludes.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I've been' and 'and when I' openings across verses give the lyric a chant-like, incantatory quality that mirrors the narrator's fixation.
- escalating parallelism
- Thinking, talking, dreaming, and screaming are stacked in ascending intensity using identical grammatical structure, dramatizing an emotion spiraling out of proportion to its trigger.
- non-lexical vocables
- The wordless 'ba ba' and 'oh oh' syllables stand in where language fails, letting the melody carry an intensity the lyric itself can't quite articulate.
- circular structure
- The song ends by returning to its own refrain rather than resolving, formally enacting the obsessive loop the lyric describes.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of infatuation curdling into obsession: the vocabulary of ordinary romantic devotion (thinking, missing, returning) is pushed past its normal register into screaming and compulsive counting, and the final verses suggest the narrator has lost agency in the relationship even as they remain fixated on it. An alternative reading takes it more straightforwardly as an upbeat, playful love song where the vocal exuberance and nonsense syllables are simply pop conventions, and the 'playing with my heart' line is a stock complaint about a fickle partner rather than evidence of psychological distress. The song's context — an art-pop/post-punk band making an early single — makes some deliberate ambiguity plausible, since Cope's lyrics elsewhere lean toward the theatrical and disorienting rather than confessional.
Context
This appears on the Teardrop Explodes' 1980 debut album Kilimanjaro, from the Liverpool post-punk scene that also produced Echo & the Bunnymen; the band, led by Julian Cope, mixed garage/psych energy with pop songcraft. I don't have reliable specific biographical or recording detail about this particular track, so this context is general rather than song-specific.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery shifts in intensity across the escalating think/talk/dream/scream sequence
- the tension between the bouncy, major-key pop arrangement and the increasingly frantic lyric content
- the wordless 'ba ba' hook and whether it reads as celebratory or slightly manic in the mix
- the pivot at 'here you come again / there you go again' and how it recasts the earlier verses
- the unresolved final line, which trails off rather than closing the song definitively
About The Teardrop Explodes
The Teardrop Explodes were an English post-punk/neo-psychedelic band formed in Liverpool in 1978. Best known for their Top Ten UK single "Reward", the group originated as a key band in the emerging Liverpool post-punk scene of the late 1970s.
1978 - 1982 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue