Songfacts®:

• Written by George Lynch and Jeff Pilson of Dokken, this is the theme song to the 1987 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the first in the franchise starring Patricia Arquette. The band was asked to write the song, which had to be titled "Dream Warriors," the name for the kids in the film who fight back against their nocturnal tormentor, Freddy Krueger. Fortunately, that's a song-friendly title (unlike "Ghostbusters"), and they were able to write a big chorus around it. The verse lyrics are more generic, dealing with sleep and torment. Outside the context of the film, it could be a song about a guy trying to get over a breakup.
• The music video inhabits the same world as the film, with the band showing up in Patricia Arquette's dream to help her vanquish Freddy Krueger. The film hewed to the same demographic as MTV (teenagers), so they put the video in rotation, giving Dokken more airplay on the network.
• This was released as a single to promote the film, but was not included on the soundtrack, which was just the film score ("Dream Warriors" was the only original song written for the movie). It was included on Dokken's fourth album, Back For The Attack, which was their peak. As Dokken got more successful, they also got at each other's throats, culminating in the 1988 Monsters Of Rock tour that hammered the last nail in their coffin. They didn't release another album until 1995, after a long split.
• According to lead singer Don Dokken, when the band got the assignment, he wrote his "Dream Warriors" and his bandmates wrote theirs.
  
  "Mine was more uptempo, more of a rock song," he said in a Songfacts interview. "They had given me a rough cut of the movie so I could know what the movie was about. So, I wrote the lyrics:
  
  I lie awake and dread the lonely nights
  I'm not alone
  I wonder if these heavy eyes
  Can face the unknown
  
  So, I wrote a version, they wrote a version. It's kind of funny. They said, 'We actually like your version better Don, but we're going to use our part.' [Laughs] It was just ego – there was a lot of ego in my band in the '80s."
• In an effort to land hits, Dokken put some gloss on songs like this one that they knew were going to be released as single and get videos. It paid off in popularity, but cost them some metal cred. "That kind of signified our sound as a very commercial rock band," Don Dokken told Songfacts. "I have people say, 'I don't like your commercial stuff,' and I have other people say, 'I don't like the heavy stuff.' You can't make everybody happy, man."
• An earlier Dokken song, "Into The Fire," also appears in the movie.