5th track of Under The Iron Sea. It was released as a single on January 22, 2007, and peaked at No. 23 in the UK Singles Chart, becoming the band’s first single to miss the top 20.

Tim has said it’s about soldiers.

“A Bad Dream is the most emotional song on the record. It was based on a poem by W.B.Yeats, called “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, and I think it also came from visiting lots of battlefields and graveyards and so in France, which sounds very morbid, but that’s the kind of thing I like to do on holiday! I’ve just always been really affected by… I guess still being a relatively young man, I still have a lot of empathy of people of my age and even younger, who are going off to war; and I guess the idea of going off to war has been in the air for the last couple of years, with Afghanistan and Iraq particular. Those seem like very distant things, but I think in Europe in particular the Second World War is still something that still looms quite largely in a lot of people’s minds, and it certainly should do. I’d also been reading a book called "The New Confessions” by William Boyd, in where the protagonist of the book goes up in a hot air balloon to film the front line, and he gets shot down and captured. It just made me think a lot of people when they go off as young men, and when they come back – even if it’s a couple of years later it’s like they’ve become old, and all the things they left behind have changed. And it’s something that you can never ever go back to being young again. And I guess it’s just a very sad song. We wanted to get a balance between a kinda dream sequence – it starts very quietly, and I love the idea of being in a plane, like a Spitfire or something, being so high up in the sky that you can’t hear the guns below you and so on. And it’s almost got a serene silence which is what this Yeats poem seemed to really express. The song starts very quietly, but it gets huge and angry as it goes on – the big distorted washy piano sound in the middle is a pretty vast sound and it’s I guess an attempt to express all that anger bursting out."