"Wildest Dreams" has an atmospheric, balladic production incorporating programmed drums, Mellotron–generated and live strings, and synthesizers; the rhythm interpolates Swift's heartbeat.

Set in Africa in the 1950s, it depicts Swift as a classical Hollywood actress who falls in love with her co-star but ends the fling upon completion of their film project.

[21] Although the synths and drums were a stark contrast to Swift's earlier music, the musicologist James E. Perone said that the composition retained some elements from her previous country songs: the "heavy use" of the pentatonic scale in the melody and the move between major and minor chords in the chorus.

[15][22] Despite the inevitable ending, the narrator acknowledges the strong romantic and sexual connection with this man and strives to build fond memories with him.

"[24][25] She expresses her desire to live on in the lover's memory as a woman with red lips, "standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset".

"[29][30] Critics have described the sound as sultry, sensual, and dramatic, comparing the production and the theme of failed romance to the music of the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey.

[14][27][31][32][33] The Guardian's Alexis Petridis felt that the song abandoned Swift's previous "persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend" and instead portrayed the man as her victim.

[28] Robert Leedham of Drowned in Sound wrote that the lyrics portrayed her arrogance and confidence to "[move] onto better things", contrasting with the victim mentality on her past songs.

[43] On Billboard's Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart, supported by the R3hab remix, "Wildest Dreams" was Swift's first number one and made her the first female artist to have five top-10 songs in a calendar year.

[44] "Wildest Dreams" was certified four-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and had sold two million digital copies in the United States by November 2017.

[45] "Wildest Dreams" reached the top 10 on the singles charts of Canada (4),[46] South Africa (5),[47] Venezuela (6),[48] Iceland (8),[49] New Zealand (8),[50] Slovakia (8),[51] and Scotland (9).

[24] Writing for Hot Press, Paul Nolan picked it as the album's best track for its combination of chillwave and "sweeping, singalong choruses".

[68] Aswad said that it was "hard to tell if the song is homage or parody",[17] and Wickman and Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times opined that Swift's songwriting lost its distinctive quality.

[12][28] Shane Kimberline from MusicOMH and Lindsay Zoladz from Vulture deemed "Wildest Dreams" one of the album's weakest tracks and took issue with the Del Rey resemblance in Swift's vocals and lyrics.

[14][69] Slant Magazine's Annie Galvin said Swift's vocals complemented the narrative lyrics but described the song as a "misguided imitation" of Del Rey with a predictable storyline.

[70] NME's Hannah Mylrae called it a "beauty",[18] and Nate Jones from Vulture considered it one of Swift's 10 best songs and specifically lauded the "invigorating double-time bridge".

[72] Petridis ranked it 18th out of 44 singles Swift had released by April 2019, and he said that the song employed a Del Rey-inspired songwriting trope with a "smart, pleasing twist".

Inspired by The Secret Conversations (2013), a memoir of the actress Ava Gardner,[76][77] Swift conceived the premise for the video as an illicit love affair between two actors in an isolated place within Africa, because they could only interact with each other without other means of communication.

[79] The video's narrative focuses on an affair between a classical Hollywood actress (Swift) and her male co-star (Scott Eastwood) who shoot a film in 1950s Africa.

[79] The pair gets involved romantically off-screen, as the video features shots of wildlife such as giraffes, zebras, and lions in a broad savanna.

[92][93][94] The African studies professor Matthew Carotenuto wrote that the storyline depicted "pith-helmet-and-khaki-clad men as civilizing heroes and the women who joined them roughing it in tents wearing lingerie".

Carotenuto opined that Swift was part of a "Lion King generation", which led her to think of Africa as "nothing more than a rich tapestry of flora and fauna, with actual Africans fading onto the periphery", an idea that had been propagated by Hollywood films and popular American culture.

For Kornhaber, "Wildest Dreams" was in line with Swift's artistic vision of "a powerful but vague nostalgia, defined less by time period than by particular strains of influence that just happen to be affiliated with a certain skin color".

[101] The Ringer's Nora Princiotti in March 2023 deemed it Swift's best live performance, praising it as an "epic five-and-a-half-minute medley [that] is fundamentally simple".

On September 30, 2015, she performed a stripped-down rendition on an electric guitar as part of the "Taylor Swift Experience" exhibition at the Grammy Museum at L.A.

[102] At a private concert for 100 fans in Hamilton Island, Australia, as part of Nova's "Red Room" series, Swift "Wildest Dreams" on an acoustic guitar.

[103] Swift included the "Wildest Dreams"/"Enchanted" mashup in the set lists of two concerts: at the United States Grand Prix in Austin on October 22, 2016,[104] and at the Super Saturday Night, a pre-Super Bowl event, on February 4, 2017.

[106] At the Philadelphia concert of the Reputation Stadium Tour on July 14, she sang "Wildest Dreams" a cappella after a stage device malfunctioned.

[109] Adams said that Swift's 1989 helped him cope with emotional hardships and that he wanted to sing the songs from his perspective "like it was Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska".

[115] In The Guardian, Michael Cragg said that there were no substantial additions in Adams's cover, which he described as a "fairly rudimentary strumalong",[118] and Rachel Aroesti found it "comical" that it failed to match the original.