“Follow your dreams”, “Dream Act Achieve”, “Stop dreaming, start flying” – these and similar slogans circulate widely on the social media accounts of Nepal’s numerous cabin crew training institutes. These institutes, part of a larger private skills training industry in urban Nepal, operate on the promise that the acquisition of “proper” soft skills along with multisensorial bodily and personal transformations, will significantly increase individual trainees’ success chances for recruitment into (inter)national airlines.

In the context of new gendered possibilities that have emerged in the last two decades, young Nepali women born in the 2000s dare to dream of forms of spatial mobility in ways that were largely unavailable to their mother’s and grandmother’s generation. Youth – and young women in particular as the figure of the flight attendant is largely gendered female in the Nepali context – enroll in these schools in hopeful anticipation of a future yet to come. A future – they are told – that is of their own making through positive attitudes, hard work, and perseverance and that will consist of a high degree of mobility. In this context, spatial mobility emerges as intimately tied to social mobility, but my ethnographic material also demonstrates an understanding of mobility in a more existential sense of everyday movement and moving forward in life (cf. Hage 2001, Jackson 2011).

“The dream” (Nep. sapanā) figures prominently in the narratives of trainees when they talk about the future they desire, even if this future remains vague. But what kind of labor does the transition from dreaming to flying entail? How is this experienced by differently positioned young Nepali women? Why do the young women consider it important to have and pursue a dream in the first place? And ultimately, how exactly do dreams animate action for my interlocuters?  Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research on young women’s quest for mobility and hopeful futures in the capital Kathmandu, this paper traces the intersections between gendered dreaming, imagining and laboring towards hopeful futures and experiences of im/mobility in urban Nepal. It draws on the recent anthropological literature on “hopeful labour” (Elliot 2016, Pettit 2021, Zharkevich 2021) and the power of dreaming and imagination to explore the “scale and texture of dreams” (Schielke 2020: 37) in my research participants’ everyday lives. In tracing how young women participate in novel dreaming, this contribution thereby thinks through the broader question of what kind of work it is that dreams do in particular people’s lives. Finally, young women’s attempts to navigate job trainings, the (inter)national labour market as well as family dynamics and expectations, while dreaming about, working towards and anticipating a hopeful, yet highly uncertain future, demonstrates fissures and limits of what the skills training industry promises.