The first thing you see is the dark shadows of disfigured people and you plunge deeper into sleep. The faded silhouettes become familiar warped faces. The things you see are unclear and glassy. You're dreaming. You hear someone start to speak in a soft subtle tone, driving you into a heavier daze. This voice is Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, inviting you into her fantasy in "Dreams" to understand her message; she is stuck in her dreams.

As we dive into O'Riordan's visions, we hear her sing "My life is changing everyday,/ In every possible way./ And oh, my dreams, it's never quite as it seems". Her distant love is not in her world when she's awake, that way we know we're stepping into her reverie. She repeats those lyrics later on followed by, "'Cause you're a dream to me,/ Dream to me". In reality the love is a one-way-street, so she can only imagine him in her dreams. She knows her aspirations will never be true, so she ignores the reality. As everything is shifting in her "dream world", so are her harmonies. To elicit the inconsistencies of dreams, Dolores sings with sporadic harmonies, changing anywhere from a 4th interval to a 7th interval.

She puts us in her dreams using cloudy effects and layering clips to prove her message. The first thing we see as the song begins is Dolores' face fading into the back round. Her face is blurry and she appears to be lying down. Her eyes are closed. Her facial features become visible as the waves of water layer over her face. This interpretation of a dream, and the lyrics, provoke the fact that she's stuck in a trance. The translucent flashes of different images such as guitars, frogs, a girl dancing, and glass shattering emphasize the fact that dreams never focus on one thing. The discontinuity of visuals also shows the dream state that O'Riordan traps herself in. 

Keeping the dream like effect, her band members are half lit by a glimmering fluorescent blue light. Throughout the video, we're unable to see the full, exact faces of the members and everything is layered. This effect helps The Cranberries lead the viewer into O'Riordan's imagination. As we listen to Dolores sing in the foreground, the appearance of her band members sleeping serenely approaches the foreground. These pellucid layers of faces and images are what may look like the perception of a dream. This dream is the only connection to her love.

With the help of trance-like visuals and lyrics, it's clear that she's unable to make her dreams come true and she can only reach her love through imagination.