The song is about a dream by the narrator, where he finds a whale on a beach and struggles to push it back to the water, but doesn't have enough strength for that. All the time, he hears the waves, the sun shouting: "Push the whale back in the sea", which pressures him. He hopes to get help from a Greenpeace ship he sees, but right before his eyes, it sinks. The next day he has sore muscles and gets under the shower but then his girlfriend urges him to "push the whale back in the sea" and on it goes.