About

Walking on a Dream refers to a series of TikTok videos that use Empire of the Sun's 2008 song "Walking on a Dream"^[2] literally by using the freeze frame filter to walk on the top of a dream they had written out. The videos became popular on TikTok in April 2020 and went trending on the platform the next month.

Origin

On April 29th, 2020, TikToker @ketamimesandwich uploaded the first Walking on a Dream TikToks by walking on a paper with "girls being funny" written on it (shown below). The video gained over 42,900 likes in a month.

Spread

On May 18th, 2020, TikToker @_robby513 used the song in a video of himself walking on "having good mental health" (shown below, left). The video accumulated over 487,000 likes in 11 days (shown below, left). On May 22nd, TikToker and YouTuber MrBeast uploaded a variation that garnered over 1.3 million likes in a week (shown below, center). On May 29th, Jason Derulo uploaded a video of himself walking on a paper that says, "performing in 2020" (shown below, right). The video received over 263,900 likes in a day. StayHipp^[1] published an article on the trend.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References