Pipe dream refers to visions experienced as a result of taking opiates (referring to the opium pipe). Opiates do not directly cause hallucinations of any kind, but large doses may cause the subject to become so relaxed that he or she experiences dreams while partially awake. They can be so vivid as to be confused with reality.
"Pipe dream" is also used as a term to describe a vain but fervent hope for an impossible or unlikely situation.
Pipe dream may also refer to:
Read more about Pipe Dream: Music, Other Media, Other
Famous quotes containing the words pipe and/or dream:
“I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author—detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower’s pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl’s lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.”
—Patricia K. Page (b. 1916)