Hopes and Dreams Hopes and Dreams

By Toby Fox tobyfox Bandcamp tobyfox Twitter toby.fangamer.com Other fwugradiation Tumblr ← Don't Give Up Previous track by this artist → Burn in Despair! Next track by this artist.
Released 9/15/2015.
Duration: 3:01.

Listen on YouTube or Spotify.

Read artist commentary.
Read referencing sources.

Also released on UNDERTALE Soundtrack (CD), UNDERTALE Collector's Edition Soundtrack, UNDERTALE FAN SELECTION CD, UNDERTALE + deltarune FAN ENCORE CD, and UNDERTALE Complete OST.

Tracks that Hopes and Dreams references:

Tracks that reference Hopes and Dreams:

From Official Discography:

SAVE the World by Toby Fox
Final Power by Toby Fox

From Licensed:

From Fandom:

A Mother's Love by MasterSwordRemix and emBer
Twilight Reverie ~ Penumbra Phantasm by Torrent 64 and Tee-vee
It's the end. by ruby

Artist commentary for Hopes and Dreams:

Toby Fox: (collector's edition sheet music booklet)

I didn't actually make these piano arrangements or this booklet (that was Sebastian and Audrey) so I don't think this song is arranged the way I actually play it myself, but... There was a period where I played this song nearly every day on the piano, dreaming about the game I had not finished yet...

However, my wrists have some kind of problem now, so I can't play the piano for very long anymore. That's OK though. Anyway, once you learn this song, be sure to play it any way you like. Express yourself. But, you must make sure that your self-expression doesn't destroy your body.

PS - It's irrelevant to the piano version, but the way I arranged it in game is inspired by the band Anamanaguchi.

For release-specific commentary, see also: UNDERTALE FAN SELECTION CD.

Referencing sources for Hopes and Dreams:

Monckat and Witch's Cadence: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 7/12/2023

Monckat:
alright so my ears may be playing tricks on me but at 1:18 in Hopes and Dreams, quietly and mostly in the right channel... (YouTube link)
...is that penumbra phantasm?
specifically the penumbra variant of doctor
i can hear it in SAVE the World too at 1:35

Witch's Cadence: Yes that has been noticed by a good amount of people
Monckat: ah cool i would've assumed

Witch's Cadence:
It's most likely actually penumbra phantasm but no one has any idea why
Like this isn't like the thing with him "putting the baby is you in pokemon"
That one was silly this is like an exact direct quote
Not to mention it's like
he tried to hide it in there
but it is definitely unarguably penumbra phantasm

Monckat:
yeah it definitely feels intentional, i remember joking ages ago that penumbra phantasm would be the final boss music of deltarune but that seems less and less like a joke

ruby, Jebb, and Witch's Cadence: (HSMusic Discord, excerpts) 3/7/2024

ruby:
I've always been skeptical on the whole "Penumbra Phantasm is in Hopes and Dreams" thing, but the other day I accidentally isolated that piano part in SAVE the World and Last Goodbye (it's basically the same as in HaD), and now I'm starting to actually believe it was done intentionally lmao
feels more intentional than THE HOLY

[...]

ruby:

saveee_PROCESSED.wav

[...]

ruby:
(wip) i have resorted to spectral editing jesus

1_stereo_side_right_Other_EQd_Source_1.wav

Jebb: ruby over here trying to spirit box Penumbra Phantasm
Witch's Cadence: lol
ruby: LMFAO

Witch's Cadence: I thought the glockenspiel part was obvious
Witch's Cadence: lmao it's literally just penumbra phantasm
ruby: glockenspiel is playing undertale melody, the piano is potential pp
Witch's Cadence: Hold on
Witch's Cadence: Oh maybe it was a piano my mistake
Witch's Cadence: but yeah I can hear that it's clearly pp

ruby:
i'm trying to isolate it as best as i can, so i can transcribe it, so i can match it up with pp, so i can see how similar it actually is

whether it's a case of just sounding similar, but being completely different (like Gaster's Theme in Dating Start - which isn't there, the actual notes are nothing like Gaster), or genuinely similar

the piano plays something like this (this is from before i went spectral, so it's not accurate yet)

untitled.wav

untitled2.wav

since the piano is so hard to make out, I'm trying to get it more clear, cus this initial attempt is too tainted by my brain wanting it to be pp

Witch's Cadence:
pretty sure the top notes in that part of the piano is this

hoPPes_and_dreams.wav

first plays just piano
then actual hopes and dreams
then both layered

ruby:
see, I am not 100% convinced the top note goes B > A# > C# > A# > A#>B
cus it kinda sounds like instead of C#, it's just B again
in SAVE the World/Last Goodbye, that is
as that's the song(s) I'm using as reference

Witch's Cadence: this is hopes and dreams not save the world
ruby: that's why I clarified
Witch's Cadence: gotcha gotcha
ruby: cus different key

Witch's Cadence:
I'll have to check save the world myself but in hopes and dreams it definitely goes Bb > A > C > A > A>Bb
I'm not sure if I've ever heard anyone say that it's in StW actually
I always just thought it was in HnD

ruby:
neither had I, though I noticed yesterday that StW/LG (they are the same song, thats why I keep grouping them together) also had the piano part
presumably carried over from HaD, if that's the order the songs were made

[...]

ruby:
I'll just leave these here

1_stereo_side_right_Other_EQd_Original_Mix.wav

1_stereo_side_right_Other_EQd_Source_1.wav

1_stereo_side_right_Other_EQd_Source_2.wav

tried my best to get the piano in 1, so everything else is in 2

Jebb: What if it's just a coincidence 🙂

ruby:
I could argue that for the holy
but this is too similar to where Toby must have noticed it
same notes, played on the same instrument
pp is 170 bpm, had is like 170.674, stw/lg are 180

Jebb: Nah surely 🙂

Rosetta Leijonde: Which "same instrument" there's like 10 of them

ruby:
piano
both playing the

untitled2.wav

on a piano

untitled3.wav

if this was unintentional, that'd be a huge oversight
on toby's part
for how much he tossed around pp phrases throughout homestuck music, seems very, very unlikely

~~Deltarune final boss will be Penumbra Phantasm? nah, it was already finalized as Hopes and Dreams almost a decade ago~~ :howhigh:

Jebb:
God
Think we should add this to the reference list? (ruby: also yes)
Or is it
ALREADY THERE
? (ruby: also no)

ruby:
~~there are the pp-sounding flutes...~~

[...]

ruby:
(this is a joke)

hopes_and_dreams_is_a_penumbra_phantasm_remix.wav

Jebb, Makin, and ruby: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 6/4/2024

Jebb:
@ruby Some dude recreated Hopes and Dreams without the main melody, check out this part (YouTube link)

Makin: that's doctor

ruby: pp*
we went over this before

Jebb:
I think that Penumbra Phantasm might have a legally distinct doctor as its riff melody

ruby:
pp/sotww piano riff is definitely related to doctor yea
but, as we went over before, the piano here is very much the same as pp specifically

Interrobang, ruby, and Makin: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 7/2/2024

(Continued from a discussion re: Penumbra Phantasm being referenced in Octoroon Rangoon)

Interrobang:
Part of me wants to just defer to whatever toby put in the track description since hes the only one who really knows what is and isnt penumbra
But also they definitely werent always thorough on the hs bandcamp

ruby:
I feel like it's a case of Hopes and Dreams, where it's close enough to where he has had to have realized he put it in if he did do it accidentally

Makin: I'm still unconvinced about hopes and dreams lol

Interrobang: I dont really know what you mean
Interrobang: Whats the hopes and dreams thing

ruby:
a while ago we had a big discussion regarding a potential penumbra reference in Hopes and Dreams, SAVE the World, and Last Goodbye
there's a part with a piano in the background that's barely audible yet plays something basically identical to the pp piano riff
as ridiculous as it sounds

Interrobang:
The one thats the incredibly common pattern of four notes?

Makin:
it would be doctor, but toby fox analysts have convinced themselves there's a special doctor PP edition

Interrobang:
Yeah i cant say im convinced
I think the octoroon rangoon one is more likely though

Makin: same

Interrobang:
My suspicion is that toby fox stopped thinking about penumbra so much after a point

Makin:
yeah he instead started focusing on thinking about the baby is 2 so he could reuse it in a pokemon theme

ruby:
(keys adjusted)

doctor.wav

penumbra.wav

top note on Doctor goes B A# C# A# C# A# while Penumbra goes B A# C# A# A# B

sotww notably follows doctor here
hopes and dreams follows pp

Interrobang: I agree that there is a difference

Jebb:
Oh shit thanks actually
This helps with the Strifin Descendascend debacle of whether it refs doctor or Saviour
The chords in that song are more similar to penumbra and therefore saviour so yeah

ruby:
sotww is doctor with pp melody added, the main riff is doctor
I use "pp melody" loosely, I believe it's implied sotww came first

Interrobang:
If toby had never put “references penumbra phantasm” in however many hs songs hed have saved us many a headache

Red Rax, Rainy, Jebb, and ruby: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 10/4/2024

Red Rax:
My opinion is that all of these references that are kind of unclear like penumbra phantasm in hopes and dreams or core in oppa Toby style or gasters theme in whatever are just genuine coincidences

I feel like Toby Fox, who’s written so many melodies over his career, might just accidentally repeat himself at some point, subconsciously using something he already wrote

Just look at the song he did for Pokémon sword and shield! It sounds VERY similar to a The Baby Is You song, but Toby said that he came up with the melody on the way back from a meeting with the Pokémon people, and I’m very much inclined to believe that he did and just accidentally reused a melody he’d forgotten he’d already written

Rainy:
Yeah I agree
Dudes only human and he's bound to reuse melodies unintentionally
Like look at that hopes and dreams-esque melody in snow pollen

Jebb:
Yeah
Once again i began to reconsider a lot of things after i found out that my brain accidentally redid a bassline 1 to 1 note to note in one of the songs i submitted to lofam
I need to edit together a small video so that i can reference this easier
But yeah
The brain is super good at accidentally regurgitating melodies you like
Penumbra phantasm in hopes and dreams may be an accident, so may baby is you in pokemon, so can many other things
We can't know for sure

ruby:
pp in had feels so purposefully hidden though

Jebb:
Yeah i mean it WOULD make complete sense
Hopes and dreams was like Toby's magnum opus for Undertale

ruby:
mhm, if there's any track with enough time and care put in to where it'd avoid accidental references, it'd be hopes and dreams
but then again, we don't know

Rainy, ruby, Makin, and Jebb: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 12/11/2024

Rainy:
It might be me being a hater who hates fun (I am but that's not the point) I feel like half the discussion around PP at this point feels like it's chasing it's own tail a bit

ruby:
we know nothing except some vague tumblr posts and some uncanny musical resamblences

Rainy:
Yeah hence why we're talking about the same stuff every month when the topic comes up lmao

Makin:
I agree, don't be disappointed if it turns out it's just a song he couldn't figure out how to make work and gave up on

Rainy:
I'm still of the opinion that if PP shows up at all, it will be an entirely different song with the same name

Jebb:
[A] lot of it is baseless speculation
Ya gotta admit though the Hopes and Dreams and The Holy examples do sound preeetty similar
Though that could always be an accident

ruby:
it could be an accident, but seems very unlikely with how important both songs seem to be to him

Kenón, Witch's Cadence, Meulanie, ruby, and Makin: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 3/24/2025

Kenón:
I'm so glad someone mentioned Penumbra in OTS because I thought I hallucinated it and was too scared to bring it up-

You don't wanna be the "Penumbra is in everything" gal but sometimes It Is In Fact In The Things

Witch's Cadence:
I mean it's a decently common enough motif throughout homestuck
So it's not crazy to think it might be in a homestuck track
It's when people think they hear it outside of homestuck that you really gotta double check

Meulanie:
maybe penumbra was the roaring knights we made along the waking world

Kenón:
I think it's fair to hear Penumbra in Hopes and Dreams and THE HOLY, I think they were both intentional, but I also don't think Penumbra is going to be a Deltarune motif or the song itself will show up in the game

I think THE HOLY was derived directly from Penumbra, but is intentionally different enough to stand as its own separate motif, like Penumbra itself does for Doctor

It WILL show up as a motif throughout the game, but Penumbra itself won't.

Meulanie:
where did the "penumbra in deltarune" thing come from to begin with

ruby: cryptic tobyposting

Makin:
when he was teasing penumbra on tumblr he used wording that sounds a lot like deltarune lore
and deltarune was always in the planning stages so it makes sense he decided to use it there

ruby: and then the holy happened to be kinda similar

Kenón:
His cryptic Deltarune Twitter messages were basically recordings of his cryptic Penumbra Q&A and Twitter messages

I'd say more than KINDA similar
It's not the same but Toby absolutely knew what he was doing with that
It was intentionally close

Makin:
I'm anti-PP-is-in-everything and I still think it's pretty likely it will be used in deltarune yeah, this isn't some insane fan cope

ruby:
oh i totally agree, it is too close for it to be coincidence

pp must mean a lot to toby, so there's no way he accidentaly made it so similar and shipped it without noticing

also PP in HaD

SergeantSnivy: (YouTube comment on "the PENUMBRA PHANTASM insanity spiral") 5/6/2025

52:46 I really think you're underselling this. This excerpt in Hopes and Dreams is 100% quoting Penumbra specifically, not just Doctor. In particular, it's quoting the melody in the Penumbra piano demo at 12:55. This melody in the demo sounds a lot like the first measure of Doctor, but it's distinct in two important ways:

The final two notes are different

The contour of the harmony exactly mirrors the contour of the melody, with only the intervals between notes slightly tweaked. The scale degrees of the melody are 3 2 4 2 2 3 while the harmony's are 5 4 7 4 4 5.

In the piano excerpt of Hopes and Dreams, the scale degrees in the melody and harmony are an exact match to this part of Penumbra (in a different key) rather than any part of Doctor.

For a similar reason, I'd also say that the excerpt of Oppa Toby Style at 13:28 is definitely pulling from Penumbra. The melody is a bit jumbled up, but the correspondence between degrees in the melody and harmony is exactly the same as it is in Penumbra - 3 in the melody pairs with 5 in the harmony, 2 in the melody pairs with 4 in the harmony, etc.

Super well-done video overall, I just really wanted to point this out

ruby and Jackie: (HSMusic Discord) 5/20/2025

ruby:
oh right the video said it was doctor in pp
as I've gone over before, it is definitely pp and not doctor yeah
but the part of pp itself is undeniably based on doctor
saying hopes and dreams references doctor is like saying another medium references doctor
completely skipping over the middle step that is patient

Jackie: there's a chain there yeah but it's a chain. the attachment isn't link A to link C

ruby:
but leaving out the middle link is leaving out incredibly important nuance
because the part has been changed fundamentally
so its appearance in C doesn't represent how it was in A
yet it perfectly represents its appearance in B

Lan, Makin, Witch's Cadence, and ruby: (HSMusic Discord, excerpt) 5/21/2025

Lan:
The conversation with PP in Hopes and Dreams is, well, something I've attempted to log in a huge as fuck "Referencing Sources" section for H&D on the music wiki... I need to get OK's from everyone before actually committing this, but I've gathered and re-read I think every single discussion about PP in H&D. (I've read a chunk of related stuff about PP in Deltarune more broadly, also.)

My takeaways on the convo presently are:

Mostly everybody agrees that Penumbra Phantasm is in Hopes and Dreams. (There's some argument that it's just Doctor, mainly from Makin in june/july 2024, but it's kinda fringe. Interrobang has also expressed skepticism that it's any particular motif at all.)

There's a substantial argument that although the reference is there, it might-well not be there on purpose — that Toby has reused melodies on accident because he is human and people do that. Comments on this angle from Red Rax and Rainy and Jebb, october 2024.

Deltarune fans are proooooooobably coming more and more to take it as Universal Fact that Penumbra Phantasm is in Hopes and Dreams. I haven't taken a real vibe check but I suspect that 99.8% of those fans will/do feel it's intentional.

Makin:
I retract my argument that it's doctor, and support the PP interpretation, though it's still possible toby reused it by accident

Lan:
It's kinda more sporadic so I don't think @vriska (8Ω 0.5W) actually shows up in the quoted records here at all, but she also expressed taking it as given / certain that PP exactly matches H&D, just to bring up another voice there, ex. #music-discussion - also shared their gut feeling re: how refs should be organized for the music wiki #music-discussion (<- I haven't gone through discussion from this link closely, but that comes next...)

Intentionality in referencing is a big subject of interest for the music wiki as a whole, in my opinion. My personal gut is that 1) I do think Toby is intentionally using PP at bare minimum in H&D and co. from Undertale, and that he is probably still thinking about it in Deltarune nowadays; and that 2) intentionality matters enough that I would say H&D does reference Penumbra Phantasm, but Battle! (Battle Tower) does not reference A Baby Legend.

or A History of Babies or whatever.

Witch's Cadence: yeah I agree with this

Makin: I don't think anyone has made a single good argument about battle tower

Lan: I'm entertaining the notion that they are dot for dot the same melody (i.e. analogous to PP in H&D), but yeah it's rhetorical haha I don't actually know (or care) anything about that one.

Witch's Cadence: I think if anything people have made fantastic arguments against it lol

ruby:
battle tower is not an exact match
hopes and dreams is an exact match

Lan: As usual I am not a musician, I do not know music, and I don't really engage in Music Talk for my own sake, tho it interests me... but uh huh, ^nodding.

ruby:
battle tower is loosely the same melodic idea
just toby-isms
but the piano in hopes and dreams specifically plays the same thing as pp

Makin: I don't even think battle tower is even a mild match, it's like calling two arpeggios the same melody

Lan: From that angle, we can include PP in H&D on the grounds only that it's an exact match - without concerning intentionality

ruby:
we can't leave out intentionality here
I always say this when we talk about it but
both songs must mean a lot to toby
there is no way it was done accidentaly

Lan: I 100% agree w/ this fwiw

Makin: I vote to leave out intentionality, if someone screws up and accidentally plays C instead of B, it's not a reference

ruby: [re: battle tower]
it starts with the same rhythm, at the very least, but the notes don't match either way

Lan: The thing with intentionality for me is -

ruby:
we can't put words into toby's mouth
and we shouldn't

Lan: I think it's critical to understanding music in context. I think it's something we should think about when considering what the Point of any music even is. But I also think it's super nebulous and speculative, very often, when we don't get a confident and unambiguous word one way or the other from the composer. That makes me hesitant to use it as a deciding factor - on whether to include or exclude a reference. (...But I wonder if it's necessary, sometimes, too.)