Yeah the title pretty much says it all…
so any ideas?
What type of dream is a pipe dream?
I wold appreciate all thoughts.
The question really is: what kind of a pipe are they referring to?
And the answer is an opium pipe (or possibly a hashish pipe).
I hear “pipe dream” most often to describe unrealistically optimistic ideas. I’ve never heard it used in reference to an actual dream, only as a metaphor.
I would assume Exapno Mapcase is right about what it literally describes, the pipe being a common way to injest a number of mind-altering substances. It’s a polite way of saying, “you must be high.”
D
Heres’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says:
"pipe dream
n.
A fantastic notion or vain hope.
[From the fantasies induced by smoking a pipe of opium.]"
Ed
It was originally referring to an opium pipe, AFAIK, although, as Exapno says, I am sure a hash pipe might’ve been meant, too.
Opium smokers would watch their lives rot away in opium dens while caught in the high dream that everything was fine…
Where’s the controversy here? The first cite is as follows
“…instead of being consigned to the watebasket as the “pipedream” of an opium devotee.”
This is a story in a US newspaper from 1895.
Did not Exapno post it in plain English?
Yet it was already illegal in some places, even then. Surprisingly, the state of Nevada began cracking down on drugs as early as 1877. Not at all what you’d expect, that. Sorry, no cite, I’m remembering something I read years ago in a long-vanished book.
Nazi Germany’s V-3 weapon–planned, but never deployed–was a (or several) giant underground cannon(s) in northwestern France for the purpose of lobbing shells a London.
Two generations later Saddam Hussein enlisted the aid of ballistics expert Gerald Bull for developing a similar weapon to lob shells at Tehran or Tel Aviv. It also never made it past the test phase.
Both cases were examples of pipe dreams, both literally and figuratively.
Charles Earle Funk concurs on the opium-pipe origin, in his book “Horsefeathers & Other Curious Words.” He cites the apparent first appearance of it in print in Wallace Irwin’s “Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum”[1901]:
To just one girl I’ve tuned my sad bazoo,
Stringing my pipe-dream off as it occurred.
Sounds like something else going on here as well.
The origins of “Pipe Dreams” are rooted in the opium dens of the Far East when sailors went ashore looking for “trouble.”
The result of smoking opium being lost in a fog of one’s imagination and drug induced stupor.
Hence anyone with wild unrealistic dreams, proposals etc has them labelled labelled as “pipe dreams”
Pipe Dreams = Vast Plans based on half-vast ideas! 
No doubt that the origin lies in the psychoactive properties that opium has and the purportedly wild yet pleasant “dreams” that the user experiences.
I threw in the hashish connection because the image of the hookah pipe may have confounded the notion in peoples’ heads in more recent years.
Opium dens were once common enough in fiction, especially pulp and detective fiction, but their visible representation in movies was rarer, and almost eradicated after the Hays Code. The hookah pipe lasted longer, especially in an Arabian context, with sheiks and other exotics placidly puffing away.
The drug world of the past half-century also skews to a connection of pipes with hash rather than opium.
But the answer to the OP’s question is that a pipe dream is an pleasant but implausible idea, so impractical, wishful, or even crazy that only someone smoking opium, or some other drug, could have come up with it.
Don’t know, why don’t you fuck off to the pit?
The thing with a small horizontal surface and a long vertical one with handles at the top, that you tip backwards so the heavy stuff rests on the vertical part, and roll around on two wheels. What’s that thing called?
Doh! Hit reply by mistake. Ignore previous nonsensical post.
Not pitting anyone, least of all you.
Just irritated at the number of mindless posts that can follow a correct answer. Not that I’m not guilty of posting such on occasion.
I rather think that “fuck off” is a no-no in this column.
My apologies samclem. Me, gin and posting aren’t always a good combo.
But,all I could find on this said the term referred to opium not hashish as Exapno Mapcase said in his first post :
[quote]
… (or possibly a hashish pipe).
[quote]
(or possibly a hashish pipe)
[quote]
:o
donkeyoatey, gin or no gin, we do not tolerate this in GQ. Please do not repeat it.
Thank you.
-xash
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