I don’t mean there is code in your sleeping dreams that will unlock the secret to the success of this show. Although I did once dream a lizard told me the losing lottery numbers and what do you know, the same thing happened in life. Without the lizard bit. I just lost.

American Idol is popular because it is about dreams. Even more so it seems to embody the American dream. It is about my dreams and your dreams and their dreams. It is about wanting something so bad you’ll humiliate yourself on television for it. It is about the journey to achieving a dream; the rags to riches tale. We get to go with the contestants on their dream journey. In all its stagey, outlandish and glamorous ways American Idol is the American dream.

Let’s rewind a bit to the first segment of the series. We can call it the schadenfreude era. The first episodes are about the beginnings to a dream. When everyone laughs at you behind you back (or your front) and people think you are arrogant for daring to imagine you can achieve something.

During the first couple of weeks the viewers and the judges get to exorcise their inner demons at the expense of a fat chick from Illinois who sounds like a drunken strangled cat. We get to laugh at the mad, the ugly and the fat and we enjoy Simon Cowell. [Did you know that if you enter Simon Cowell and run a spell check it tells you to change it to cowbell.] We enjoy his negative comments even if we are morally outraged; we tutt and throw things at the TV. We enjoy his silly hair and trousers and the irony of this man proclaiming his thoughts on style. And inwardly, despite his appearance, we know he is right. He says what we can’t say and he can say it because we believe him to be powerful. He embodies the stereotype of a powerful fat cat with a touch of the quintessential English villain.

Then we move from the schadenfreude era to the part where some people switch off. The grand performance where not a soul dares to look unhappy for a split second. Heaven forbid a camera caught a glimpse of a contestant not waving. This is the beginning of their dream; they need you to like them even if it means the beginnings of a brain haemorrhage.

So to summarise American idol is our dreams made glamorous and public. Our rejections. Our set backs and successes. Lisa tucker is gone and wasn’t she a good loser. I guess in some sense we aspire to be able to take our own more private knock backs in a similar fashion. We want to be able to say “Well, whatever happens I’ve had an amazing experience,� instead of the usual tantrums we throw. We also like to put bets on who will be a bad loser. My bet is on Katherine McPhee (diddly diddly dee) and I figure there will be tears, a single finger salute and possibly even a “How dare you! I should have been a star!�