Doggface208's Dreams TikTok

Origin: a broken-down truck in Idaho Falls

Nathan Apodaca, an Idaho Falls warehouse worker who posts as @420doggface208, had a potato-warehouse shift to get to and a truck that would not start. So he grabbed his longboard and a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and rolled down the highway shoulder, filming himself on the way.

He posted the result on September 25, 2020. It is 22 seconds long. He drinks straight from the bottle, mouths along to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” and looks entirely, uncomplicatedly content. There is no punchline, no edit, no caption gag.

Why it worked

Late September 2020 was a grim stretch of a grim year, and the clip landed as a small argument for staying upright. Everything in it is going wrong — the truck is dead, he is late, he is skating on a road shoulder — and none of it appears to touch him.

The song does a lot of the lifting. “Dreams” was written by Stevie Nicks and released in 1977 on Rumours; it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 18, 1977 and remains Fleetwood Mac’s only US chart-topper. Its unhurried groove and Nicks’s calm delivery match Apodaca’s coasting exactly, which is why the video reads as choreographed when nothing about it was.

Apodaca himself repeatedly framed it as an accident. He was not making content; he was getting to work.

The chain reaction

The clip passed tens of millions of views within days and set off a run of consequences unusual even by viral standards:

• Ocean Spray responded on October 6, 2020 by presenting Apodaca with a new pickup truck in cranberry red, loaded with juice — one of the rare brand reactions the internet approved of, largely because it was slow, physical and useful rather than a tweet.
• Fleetwood Mac joined in. Mick Fleetwood made his TikTok debut recreating the video, Lindsey Buckingham posted a version, and Stevie Nicks filmed herself on a skateboard in ice skates.
• “Dreams” re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 21 on October 17, 2020, then climbed to number 12 the following week — the band’s highest placement on that chart since 1988, 43 years after the song’s release. It also topped Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart.
• The video was recreated by athletes, politicians’ offices, police departments and roughly every brand with a social account, which is generally the point at which a meme is over.

Apodaca — who had been living in an RV — used the attention to buy a house later that year.

Legacy

The “Dreams” TikTok became the standard reference for a specific 2020s phenomenon: catalogue music revived by a short-form video. It is the case study cited whenever a decades-old track re-enters the charts, and it changed how labels treat their back catalogues, with entire teams now dedicated to seeding old songs into TikTok’s sound library.

It also stands as one of the platform’s few genuinely uncynical hits — a video that succeeded because a man was having an ordinary good time, and that neither he nor anyone else could have engineered.