Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) — Annie Lennox with orange hair in a black suit holding a baton in the Sweet Dreams music video

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

1983viral song / remix formatclassic

Published September 30, 2026

Eurythmics' 1983 synth-pop hit picked up a second life on YouTube as a remix engine, powering everything from a terrifying Marilyn Manson cover to bear dance edits and Kahoot mashups. The Annie Lennox refrain became a template for absurd audio swaps that shaped a distinct corner of 2010s YouTube meme culture.

song remix memes music memes mashup video memes youtube culture memes earworm memes

Overview

"Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" is the Eurythmics single that turned into an all-purpose YouTube audio bed for parody edits, cover chains and shock reworks1. The pulsing synth line and Annie Lennox refrain became easy to bolt onto animal videos, cartoon animations and gaming footage, which is how a 1983 pop track kept trending on the platform three decades later3.

The format tends to work one of two ways. Either the song stays intact while unlikely visuals get cut to the beat, as with the WormBur bear dance edit5, or the vocals get spliced into another sound source, as in the Kahoot lobby music mashup that circulated in 20174. Marilyn Manson's 1995 industrial cover added a horror register that got recycled endlessly in Halloween edits and creepy-fanvid compilations2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Vinyl single (1983) / YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
Eurythmics; meme remixers unknown
Date
1983

Eurythmics released "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" as a single on April 10th, 1983, the title track from the duo's second studio album3. The song hit number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 and its music video, featuring Annie Lennox in a suit with a cropped orange crop, was in heavy MTV rotation. The official video was uploaded to YouTube on October 25th, 2009 and passed 330 million views, giving remixers a stable, high-quality source clip to work from1.

The meme-era rework arrived with Marilyn Manson's cover on the 1995 EP "Smells Like Children," the track that broke Manson into mainstream rotation and whose child-abduction imagery got repeatedly cited as one of MTV's scariest videos2.

How It Spread

Cover uploads did a lot of the early lifting on YouTube. An a capella version by Holly Henry pulled more than 8.7 million views and a string arrangement by the Simply Three trio cleared 1.9 million, keeping the song in front of new listeners through the 2010s67.

The remix wave hit next. On December 16th, 2016, the channel WormBur posted "Bears Dance to Sweet Dreams – Remastered," cutting stock footage of bears to the beat; the clip crossed 3.7 million views and became one of the more circulated animal-edit templates for the song5. YouTuber zacj followed on November 22nd, 2017 with "sweet dreams but i put kahoot music over it," splicing the Eurythmics track into the Kahoot! quiz lobby loop; that upload passed 1.8 million views and set off a spring 2019 wave of copycat mashups4. Animation memes also latched onto the song, including an Eichman-credited animation posted March 18th, 2019 that drew more than 110,000 views8.

Timeline

1983-04-10

Eurythmics release "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" as a single, which hits number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

1995

Marilyn Manson covers the song on the EP "Smells Like Children," introducing an industrial-horror rework that later fuels creepy edits.

2009-10-25

The official Eurythmics music video is uploaded to YouTube, giving remixers a permanent high-quality source clip.

2016-12-16

WormBur posts "Bears Dance to Sweet Dreams – Remastered," which crosses 3.7 million views.

2017-11-22

YouTuber zacj uploads "sweet dreams but i put kahoot music over it," the Kahoot mashup that later inspires 2019 copycats.

2019-03-18

An Eichman-credited animation meme set to the track is posted and picks up over 110,000 views.

Frequently Asked Questions