pipe dream

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

pipe dream

—n
	a fanciful or impossible plan or hope

[alluding to dreams produced by smoking an opium pipe]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
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American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

pipe dream

A fantastic notion or vain hope, as in I'd love to have one home in the mountains and another at the seashore, but that's just a pipe dream. Alluding to the fantasies induced by smoking an opium pipe, this term has been used more loosely since the late 1800s.

Example sentences

We may dismiss it as sci-fi fantasy or a spooky pipe dream, but wearables are

here.

In this kind of reality, downsizing while maintaining quality is largely a pipe

dream.

Addressed to the wrong name, before telling her her ambitions were a pipe dream.

The doubters conclude from this that solar energy is a pipe dream, hardly worth

the effort.

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Matching Quote

"Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia."

-Walter Pater