Dreaming

IMO, Harry is exploring the dividing line between reality and our thoughts/dreams. She has little or no connection to actual people in the song but rather identifies almost totally with her dreams, even to the point of wondering whether pleasure is created by something real or if it is simply a mental state of being.

I think a subtext that is repeated here is that dreaming is free, i.e. it requires no emotional risk. Without that risk there is no chance of being hurt, so perhaps her attachment to her dreams is a function of a desire to avoid pain. In the end, she "sits by" and watches the world pass her by but is willing to "build a road in gold" in order to hold on to her dreams.

I have no way to confirm this other than asking by Debra, but by coincidence one day after watching the 1945 movie "Brief Encounter" I heard the song "Dreaming" and it all seemed to fit, making me believe that she might've been inspired by the movie to write this song.

Just about every line in the song describes the movie.

(I've never heard anything that would suggest that she has ever revealed this, so for now it's merely an assumption on my part)

The leading lady who's married, by chance meets a married man that she fancies in the restaurant of the British train station in Carnforth, and goes on to have a brief secret love affair with him.

They have tea together like good Brits (I'll have a cup of tea), and in the station there is a little musical group playing, he asked her if she'd like to stay and listen (to a measure), or see a movie. They ultimately go to a movie.

He offers to pay for her tea, but she refuses (She doesn't want to live on charity).

Reel to reel is living verite - movie reference of a style of documentary filmmaking that combines improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth of highlight subjects hidden behind crude reality.

People stop and stare at me, we just walk on by, We just keep on dreamin' - (There are gossipy nosey people that observe them together).

Beat feet, walking a two mile...Meet me, meet me at the turnstile (at the train station is where they'd continue to meet)

I never met him, I'll never forget him. (She never knew him previously, but now he's all she thinks about).

Dream dream even for a little while - (They typically have to cut short their dates because of their real lives, but she "fills up the idle hour" by soaking in all the love and romance she can 'til she has to go back home again).

I sit by and watch the river flow - (The two of them also had a favorite spot to hang out on a stone bridge over a waterway to be alone and to talk while watching the water flow).

I sit by and watch the traffic go. - (She sees trains coming and going while waiting for the one that he's on).

Imagine something of your very own, something you can have and hold - (She dreams that they could really be together).

Ultimately in the movie they have to stop seeing one another, and though she never reveals to her husband what has been going on, he somehow knows but loves her so much that he freely accepts her without making a deal of it. Very touching movie (I'm getting choked up thinking about it) and it wouldn't surprise me if Debra was so moved by it to write the song "Dreaming".

Yo Debra, if you happen to read this, hit me up. It was mere coincidence that made me connect the dots, but if I'm on to something I'd just love to hear from you what a genius you think that I am. LOL!

The entire song is approximately 170 words. In that space, Debbie Harry constructs a complete philosophical argument about the autonomy of imagination, the transactional nature of pleasure, the dissolution of the boundary between real and imagined experience, and the self-sufficiency of the inner life.

The Opening Scene

The song begins with what appears to be a concrete, grounded moment: a meeting in a restaurant. It’s specific. It’s real. Or at least it presents itself as real, which matters enormously, because the entire song will systematically dissolve the boundary between experience and imagination. By starting in a restaurant, Harry gives us solid ground to stand on — so she can pull it out from under us.

The speaker immediately identifies herself by what she is not. A debutante is a woman being formally presented to society for approval — evaluated, displayed, made available. She rejects that framework before the conversation even begins. There’s pride in the negation. She’s not performing for this person. She’s not auditioning.

The interlocutor then offers her a menu of pleasures — a movie or a measure. A film or a drink. Both are packaged experiences. Both cost money. Both are transactional. This is the script of a date: someone else offers to fund your pleasure, and you choose from their options. It’s generous on the surface, but it’s also a framework of dependency — your enjoyment is mediated through someone else’s offering.

Her response is the pivot of the entire song. She chooses a cup of tea: the most modest, least performative, least expensive option available. It’s almost a non-choice. And then she redirects entirely: she doesn’t want their movie or their drink. She wants to tell them about her dreaming. She takes the conversation away from what they’re offering and toward her interior world. It looks passive. It’s actually a power move.

The Thesis

“Dreaming is free.” This is the thesis statement of the song, and it operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it’s economic — everything else in the song costs something (dates, movies, drinks, charity), but dreaming costs nothing. But “free” also means liberated, unconstrained, belonging to no one. Inside the imagination, there are no menus to choose from, no scripts to follow, no one else’s framework to navigate. The dreaming is free not just because it’s costless but because it’s autonomous.

The Philosophical Turn

The second verse deepens the stakes immediately. She doesn’t want to live on charity — she doesn’t want her happiness or pleasure to depend on someone else’s generosity. This reframes the restaurant scene: the date itself was a form of charity, someone else funding her experience. She’s refusing that dependency.

Then the central philosophical question, delivered with deceptive casualness: is pleasure real, or is it fantasy? This isn’t rhetorical. It’s the question the entire song is built around. But the line cuts in two directions simultaneously. On one level, it asks whether imagined experience is as valid as lived experience. On another, it interrogates the pleasures being offered — the movie, the drink, the date itself — and asks whether accepting them constitutes genuine pleasure or simply compliance with a cultural script. Is the pleasure of the date real, or is it a performance both parties have agreed to call pleasure? The interlocutor’s generosity comes with an invisible tether: accept what I offer, enjoy it on my terms, and call that a good time. Harry is asking whether that transaction — which the entire world recognizes as pleasure — is actually freedom or just a comfortable form of captivity.

She doesn’t answer it, because the song is really asking something deeper: does it matter? The whole argument Harry builds is that the dreaming produces the same autonomy, the same refusal, the same freedom regardless of which side of the real/imagined line you’re standing on. The pleasure question is in the song, but her actual thesis is about the irrelevance of the distinction, not the unanswerability of it. The dreaming isn’t an escape from false pleasure into real pleasure. It’s a refusal to accept the terms of the question altogether. She doesn’t argue. She just orders tea and changes the subject.

“Reel to reel is living rarity” is the densest line in the song, packing at least three meanings into five words. “Reel to reel” evokes film — connecting back to the movie that was offered. It evokes tape recordings — the capturing and replaying of experience. And as a homophone, “real to real” suggests that genuine, unmediated experience connecting to genuine experience is rare. Most of life is secondhand, packaged, performed. Authentic encounter is the exception.

People stop and stare at her — she’s visible, conspicuous, perhaps odd. But there’s no self-consciousness in it, no flinching.

The Listener Enters

And then the crucial shift: “we just walk on by, we just keep on dreaming.” The pronoun changes from “I” to “we.” This is the moment the listener is invited in. By this point in the song, you’re committed — the melody has you, the rhythm has you, and Harry knows it. So “we” isn’t the speaker and some companion in the narrative. It’s the speaker and you. You’re now inside the dream with her. You’ve been recruited. The people who stop and stare are the ones outside the song. The ones who keep walking and dreaming are the ones who are listening. It’s a remarkably elegant move — the song conscripts its audience into its own thesis.

The Bridge: Motion, Threshold, and the Imagined Other

The bridge shifts into something more fragmented, almost incantatory. “Feet, feet, walking a two mile” — physical, rhythmic, childlike in its repetition. The dreaming isn’t stationary. It happens in motion, while walking. There’s something about the mundaneness of walking two miles that grounds the fantasy in everyday life. This isn’t transcendent ecstasy. It’s what happens on the way to the bus stop.

“Meet me at the turnstile” — a turnstile is a threshold you pay to pass through. Subway, amusement park, stadium. Again the tension between the free interior world and the transactional exterior one. And “meet me” — she’s now inviting someone in, but to where? Into the dream itself. Then the most devastating line in the song: “I never met him, I’ll never forget him.” Under a conventional reading, this is poignant — a missed connection, a stranger glimpsed and lost, an encounter that never quite happened but left a permanent mark.

But there is a deeper reading that snaps the entire song into sharper focus. What if the person she never met doesn’t exist at all? What if the “him” is entirely a construct of the dreaming? Under this interpretation, the line stops being tragic and becomes structurally inevitable — almost tautological. Of course she never met him. He’s imagined. Of course she’ll never forget him. He’s part of her. The paradox dissolves: the unforgettable stranger is the self’s own fabrication.

And this reading extends backward through the song. If “him” is imagined, what about the interlocutor in the restaurant? What if that encounter is also a product of the dreaming? If so, the song stops being about retreat from a failed real encounter into fantasy and becomes something more radical: a self-contained interior drama where both sides of the interaction are generated by the dreamer. She conjures the conventional social script — the date, the menu of pleasures — inside her own head so she can refuse it. She doesn’t just reject society’s options. She refuses even her own internalized version of them. The autonomy runs all the way down.

This is the oscillation at the heart of the song. It never resolves. You can read it as real encounter dissolving into dream, or as dream that was never anything else. Both readings are fully supported by the text, and the song is richer for never choosing between them.

The Invitation to Imagine

“Dream, dream, even for a little while” — the word “even” is doing all the work. She’s not asking for much. Even a small amount of dreaming is enough. There’s humility in it, but also defiance — even a little dreaming is an act of resistance against a world that wants to sell you its pleasures. “Dream, dream, filling up an idle hour” — brutally honest. The dreaming isn’t grand or transcendent. It’s what you do when you have nothing else. An idle hour. Dead time. But she’s not ashamed of that. She’s elevating it. The idle hour becomes the site of the only freedom that matters. “Fade away, radiate” — contradictory and perfect. Fading is disappearing, diminishing. Radiating is glowing, expanding, emitting light. The dream does both simultaneously. It dissolves because it has no external anchor. It shines because it originates in the self. As a two-word summary of what imagination does, it’s hard to improve on.

The Final Verse: Stillness, Possession, and the Golden Tautology

The song then shifts into something quieter and more contemplative. She sits and watches the river flow. She sits and watches the traffic go. After all the walking, the feet, the turnstile, she’s still now. Observing. The external world moves — river, traffic — and she watches it pass without participating. She’s not in the flow. She’s beside it.

Then the direct address: “Imagine something of your very own. Something you can have and hold.” This is the most explicit invitation in the song. She’s speaking to the listener now — to the “we” she recruited earlier — and telling them to do what she’s been doing all along. Make something inside yourself. Something that belongs to you. Something no one offered you from a menu.

“I’d build a road in gold just to have some dreaming.” This line is extraordinary, and it contains another tautology. A road in gold is the most extravagant, impossible, wasteful construction imaginable — and she’d build it not to arrive somewhere, not to possess something at the end of the road, but just to have some dreaming. She’d dream the most magnificent dream she could imagine, and the purpose of that dream would be to keep dreaming. The means and the end are the same thing. The road doesn’t go anywhere. The gold isn’t currency. The construction isn’t for use. It’s dreaming in service of dreaming. It’s imagination justifying itself by its own existence.

This is the final and most complete expression of the song’s thesis. Dreaming doesn’t need to produce anything. It doesn’t need to lead to action, or resolution, or a real relationship, or a destination at the end of a golden road. It is its own reward, its own economy, its own closed loop. “I’d dream just to keep on dreaming” — the tautology isn’t a failure of logic. It’s the whole point.

The Return

“Dreaming is free.” The thesis restated, now carrying the full weight of everything that came before it. On first hearing, it sounded like a throwaway pop hook. By the end of the song, it’s a philosophical position — a quiet, defiant claim that the interior life is the one thing that can’t be commodified, can’t be given to you as charity, can’t be taken away, and doesn’t need to justify itself by reference to anything outside itself.

Conclusion: Economy as Art

The genesis of the song confirms its method. Chris Stein came up with the phrase “dreaming is free.” Harry heard it and built the rest. The song practices what it preaches. It gives you something for free. What you do with it is yours.

[Edit: correction]

this song means when you first meet your first love nothing else matters even though you live miles apart because you know you can still see him in your dreams.

i can't imagine debby aging..i saw her old face earlier and can't identify her..her young face stands out as the symbol for girl rock long before the courtney love's or the brody armstrong's or dalle's..debby and patti smith really brought girls into the core of rock music..so shut up ashley simpson..nah..just joking..i don't like hating..sorry..

sticks and stones covered this song. it's probably one of my top 10 favorite covers.

This song is actually areference to the first time Debbie Harry met Blondie guitarist ad long time partner Chris Stein....when I met you in a restaurant ...etc

This song is actually areference to the first time Debbie Harry met Blondie guitarist ad long time partner Chris Stein....when I met you in a restaurant ...etc

would somebody be so kind to explain what exactly a "measure" is? in this context?

btw, the Billy Corgan version is actually sung with Deborah Harry herself...

I think she just goes about her life but has no real life outside her job (for whatever reason) and watches people and dreams about what her life could be if she cold just meet that special someone. She is very nice and kind but because she does not stand out in the crowd, she is over looked but still holds out hope for her prince charming (he see's the real her and isn't hung up on the cosmetics and flash of life).