Pipe dream

Reader question:

Please explain “pipe dream” in the following: My friend Johnny has this pipe dream about becoming a famous movie star. But it won’t ever happen.

My comments:

Thing about pipe dreams is that they, as explained in the above example, “won’t ever happen”.

I used to privately conjecture that “pipe dream” was a British idiom and having to do with music. In fact I thought pipe dreams are fantastic musings of listeners while being mesmerized by, say, the Scottish bagpipe.

That is not the case. “Pipe dream” is an American idiom, and the pipe refers to the smoking pipe of opium.

It turns out that “pipe dream” actually has to do with drugs, and that is just as well – it explains the “fantastic” part just as fine. Nobody smokes the opium in the olden style any more but the effect of opium on people is well documented. It gives them what is called “a high”. In this state, one feels elated and flamboyant, and possibly – again, I conjecture – all in a drowsy, dreamy, hallucinating way. In this condition, one might dream one of those “pipe dreams”, a fantasy that makes one feel that they can be eternally happy, can beat Mike Tyson in a fist fight, can scale the Himalayas and can conquer the world as a whole.

In short, a pipe dream is a fantastic notion or vain hope. It is what the Chinese call a “day dream” – dreaming in broad daylight – and it won’t come true, or at least it won’t readily come true.

Anyways, “pipe dream” is American. A Phrase.org article dates it to 1890s (The Chicago Daily Tribune): “It [aerial navigation] has been regarded as a pipe-dream for a good many years.”

Here are more recent media examples:

1. A National Audit Office (NAO) report out today said that many prisoners were failing to get the rehabilitation they needed.

UCU said it was essential that prisoners were given greater access to education, which studies show is a key driver behind stopping repeat offending. However, Manchester College, the largest provider of prison education, is doing the complete opposite and axing 250 jobs. The college runs courses in 96 institutions, but the union says it is sacking staff to increase profit margins and showing a blatant disregard for prisoners’ needs and what is best for our society.

The NAO report found that many prisoners were spending all day in their cells, rather than being engaged in training and rehabilitation. Four-fifths (80%) of prisoners have writing skills at the level of, or below, an 11-year-old child. Studies have shown that prisoners who do not take part in education or training are three times more likely to be reconvicted than those who do.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: “Today’s NAO report highlights the vital service prison education could provide for prisoners and our society. However, rehabilitating prisoners will remain a pipe dream if we continue to put profits first.”

- Prisoner rehabilitation a ‘pipe dream’, says UCU, as main prison education provider axes hundreds of jobs, March 10, 2010, UCU.org.uk.

2. In thinking about the way information is supplied to us, we have, it seems to me, four possible approaches: (1) the state I live in decides what I can and cannot see, and that’s OK; (2) the big companies I rely on (Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, China Mobile) select what I see, and that’s OK; (3) I want to be free to see anything I like. Uncensored news from everywhere, all of world literature, manifestos of every party and movement, jihadist propaganda, bomb-making instructions, intimate details of other people’s private lives, child pornography – all should be freely available. Then it’s up to me to decide what I’ll look at (the radical libertarian option); (4) everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available. The job of states, companies and netizens is then to enforce those international norms.

At the moment, we have a combination of (1) and (2). Developments in technology will give us more of (3), whether we like it or not. (4) currently looks like a pipe dream. Nonetheless, it is to (4) that we should aspire. It’s in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That’s a likely outcome, but not the best.

- Beyond Google’s clash with China, we must find rules for a global village, March 24, 2010, Guardian.co.uk.