illusion

Barmecide feast An illusion of plenty; any illusion. In The Arabian Nights, Barmecide, a wealthy Persian noble, invited the beggar Schacabac to dine with him at a banquet table laden with dishes, all empty of food. The host feigned indulgence in the illusionary banquet, and when the beggar followed suit with gusto, Barmecide repented of his joke and served the pauper a sumptuous repast. This latter aspect of the story does not figure into the meaning of the phrase; Barmecide feast retains only that aspect of the story dealing with the nonexistent fare.

cast beyond the moon To indulge in fanciful, outlandish thoughts about the future; to imagine the impossible. One definition of cast is “to calculate or conjecture, to anticipate, to forecast” (OED). The moon was considered a mysterious force of inexplicable power. Beyond the moon reinforces the idea of a realm where nothing is impossible. The phrase appeared as early as the mid-16th century.

castles in Spain Fanciful notion; pipe dream—the opposite of all that is practical, reasonable, and grounded in common sense. The phrase appeared in English in The Romance of the Rose (approx. 1400).

Château en Espagne, the French equivalent, dates from the 13th century. The OED attributes the reference to Spain to the fact that it represents a “foreign country where one had no standing-ground.” Spain was superseded by the now current air or sky.

castles in the air Visionary projects; daydreams or fantasies; impractical, romantic, or whimsical schemes; half-baked ideas without solid foundation. This phrase, common since 1575, is equivalent to castles in the sky.

Fata Morgana See ENTICEMENT.

fool’s paradise A self-deceptive state of contentment or bliss; a mental condition in which one’s happiness is generated by delusions and false hopes. The expression is derived from the Latin limbus fatuorum, a quasi-limbo where the mentally feeble went after death. The phrase has evolved to mean the fantasy world inhabited by certain daft individuals.

pie in the sky An illusion of future benefits and blessings which will never be realized; an unattainable state of happiness or utopia. This expression, probably alluding to the concept of pie as something sweet and desirable, and sky as in the air, beyond one’s reach, was popularized in a World War I song often attributed to Joe Hill (1927):

pipe dream An unrealistic and often fantastic plan, goal, or idea. One source suggests that this expression alludes to the dreams and schemes which may inspire an opium addict after he has smoked a pipeful of the drug.

tilt at windmills To combat imaginary evils, to fight opponents or injustices that are merely the figments of an over-active imagination. The allusion is to Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha, in which the hero Don Quixote imagines the windmills he has come upon to be giants and proceeds to do battle, with the result that both the knight and his horse are injured and his lance destroyed. At this Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza says that anyone who mistakes windmills for giants must have windmills in his head, i.e., suffer delusions, be crazy. The equivalent French phrase is se battre contre les moulins à vent. A variant of the expression appeared in Frederic W. Farrar’s book on Christ: