The City of Gold and Silver
Sep. 11th, 2007 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthNormally, I don't post dream things. At all. However, I had a dream that I'm thinking about completely modifying into a novel, and so just now - before posting this - I thought I'd look in to it a little bit and make sure I didn't just dream some book I read last year. See, there is one distinct phrase in this dream...
"The City of Gold and Silver," very specifically, not "The City of Silver in Gold" - the second produces 30 times the number of hits in Google. In my dream, I was chatting with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swan_tower about a game we apparently played together. When we'd played, there had been a really awesome webpage on Wikipedia about the City of Gold and Silver (I just checked, there is in fact no Wiki page for this). That page was no longer there, and we'd both been sad about it, and in my dream I was very excited to tell her that I had been able to find that page in the Way Back Machine. It's not there, either, by the by. In my dream, though, we happily reminisce about old times while looking at this website - and believe me, no website ever looked like this except in a dream. Seriously, it was like taking a fucking tour. The City of Gold and Silver in the dream is just this one spectacular building which reaches towards the sky with tons of vaguely greek motifs in the architecture, except that it's even more fantastic. The people are...well, I guess it'd be easiest to say that they are like the Atlantian's in Escaflowne - beautiful, slim, with wings, but I don't think they were angels. The walls are opalescent. And all of this is the background of the webpage. In the foreground was a story, a story about politics and history and beauty and art and love and stuff. I think, in my dream, it was the story of the game that we played. Before I could reach the end of the story, though, I woke up. And damned if I remember ANY of the details now.
But during the dream, I also kind of knew it was a dream. I remember thinking things like "I need to look this up on Wiki when I wake up. I wonder if it's there?" Then I'd either think "of course it is" or "of course it isn't," depending on how awake or whatever I was at that moment. And I also had the distinct feeling I'd had the dream before.
So immediately, when I was up, I thought I wanted to write about it. That was a few days ago, though, and it had slipped my mind until I was reading through word count stuff on Ni90. Then I was like, RIGHT, I wanted to babble a little about this dream I had on LJ. So first, though, I thought "wouldn't it be funny if there's something on wiki?"
There wasn't, but I decided to google it. There aren't that many results for it, and most of them refer to places that specialize in gold and silver jewelry. However, on of the results was this, an online copy of the 1001 Tales. (Another, slightly different, translation) Please note at this point that I have never read the 1001 Arabian Nights, though I've always wanted to because I loved Aladdin so much as a child. Yes, I know it's a stupid reason. Anyway, in this tale, a city is described as being the "City of Gold and Silver."
xaniquen indicates that the phrase rings a faint bell, but he's not sure why. He's read 1001 Nights, though. I called my friend Kevin, and he's never heard of it (I'll explain why this is significant in a moment). deadmanwade, if you are reading this, does it ring a bell to you?
So if I tell you that the City in question is Irem - actually called Iram - does it ring a bell then?? I DREAMT ABOUT IREM. I can't fricken believe it!! Kev is gonna have a fit when I tell him!!
Anyway, for the rest of the world...
Irem, to me, is a city from Golden Age. As Kevin used it - and he derived much of his material from Lovecraft - Irem was the city of dreams, the capital of the Dreamlands, accessible to those with the power to go there. It's a city of pillars, with pyramids that indicate mystically which of the 9 great evils currently holds sway over the world. My character's big ability, when she was first started, was that she could go to the dreamlands, and, therefore, to Irem. I did a LOT of stuff in character there. This would seem to eliminate any chance my dream was random. HOWEVER. This link describes every reference to Irem that is in Lovecraft, and none of them mention it as the "City of Gold and Silver." And in my dream, it is not once referred to as Irem. Since Kevin probably didn't go beyond what Lovecraft said, and almost definitely not beyond what is in general Cthuliana - though it's possible - I don't think he referred to that city as such, though I intend to ask him at the soonest opportunity. No, while I was writing this I called Kevin, and he's never heard the phrase before! OMFG.
Outside of Golden Age, Iram is a city that actually existed. Ruins have been found on the Arabian peninsula of a city known to have been on a major trade route. I could write all about it, but all of it would be repeating this wikipedia article.
So yeah. I dreamt about Iram. I have to write this story! It's gonna take a lot of research to do it right, but it'll be awesome.
So I'm thoroughly wigging out, but I think it's totally stinkin' awesome. And I have a great novel idea. :)
So I spent the day wandering around old book stores in Jimbocho looking for more information. What I found is that there is very little, and most of it is to be found in Encyclopedia's about Islam. I resisted, with difficulty, the urge to buy these - I think I may have finally found my books to collect, my TRUE thing to collect, where I can delve into the realms of old books and the like, and, indeed, it looks pleasantly and surprisingly inexpensive to do so. But thats a separate issue.
Without really thinking about it, I checked one book and found an account in it. Then I did a double take. It was a book I've read. In Fall of 2003, my senior - but not last! - year of undergrad, I took a class with Professor Kaddish entitled "Medieval Historiography." If any of you have READ any Medieval Historiography, you can imagine what a nightmare this course was in some regards. Kaddish is an awesome professor - one my recommendations for Grad school - but this was a senior seminar. We read a book a week, books like Bede. It was arduous in the extreme, and I never finished any of the books for the class (this was at a point in my life when I was in as many as 8 games a week - two on Sunday).
Anyway, the course was on Monday's, and I usually attempted to do the reading on Saturday nights. This involved locking myself inmistress_sin's bedroom in Hillside while all of my friends played Black Ops without me. Not, in my opinion, a good arrangement. The result was that I would struggle through the readings, skim them a little, and get increasingly depressed listening to how much fun my friends were having until I would give up, stop reading, go play, and read no more of the book before class. This trend got worse throughout the semester - in the end, I ended up taking an incomplete in the course and handing in the paper for it a month late. (with Kaddish's blessing)
The last book for the course was a change. Instead of standard European histories, is was the Muqaddimah, a history by an Arab named Ibn Khaldun. Kaddish had spent half the semester telling us how worlds different - and BETTER - this work was than the European works of the time, but when we got to it I was so burned out that I flailed through about 35 pages then gave up. The only thing I remember about it was a fascinating thing about how breathing works which attempted to explain why people suffocate - all wrong, of course. I don't even recall the details.
Today, in Jimbocho, the book I pulled off the shelf was this book, and there, on page 25, is an account of Iram, the City of Pillars. He even refers to it as the City of Gold and Silver exactly once. He describes the myth - the same as the Arabian Nights version, pretty much - and eventually concludes that the whole thing is clearly ridiculous nonsense and no such city ever existed.
What are the chances that I remembered this?
Well, Kevin, who took the same course a year before I did, didn't remember it either and is "positive" that he's never heard the phrase before. It's a two page account in a book I read while exhausted almost 4 years ago. I find the chances that I was remembering this in some vague fashion to be almost nonexistant.
Anyway, I didn't buy the Muqqadimah, because the edition at these rare book stores was an old, fancy one and cost 40,000 yen. And I already OWN a copy, it's boxed up in my storage unit. However, I did buy a copy of the Arabian Nights, a copy of the Koran (which only mentions Iram once, and only briefy, but was fairly cheap and should make for interesting reading either way), and two collections of Lovecraft short stories. I thought, given the difficulties of finding English books, that I had decent luck finding ones that were relevant.
That said, I thought I'd clarify, after a day of reflection, a little bit about the above. I'm not trying to suggest I had any sort of prophetic dream. Instead, I think I had a dream that was a truly fascinating coincidence, and has gotten me very interested in something which was, in truth, pretty interesting anyway.
"The City of Gold and Silver," very specifically, not "The City of Silver in Gold" - the second produces 30 times the number of hits in Google. In my dream, I was chatting with
swan_tower about a game we apparently played together. When we'd played, there had been a really awesome webpage on Wikipedia about the City of Gold and Silver (I just checked, there is in fact no Wiki page for this). That page was no longer there, and we'd both been sad about it, and in my dream I was very excited to tell her that I had been able to find that page in the Way Back Machine. It's not there, either, by the by. In my dream, though, we happily reminisce about old times while looking at this website - and believe me, no website ever looked like this except in a dream. Seriously, it was like taking a fucking tour. The City of Gold and Silver in the dream is just this one spectacular building which reaches towards the sky with tons of vaguely greek motifs in the architecture, except that it's even more fantastic. The people are...well, I guess it'd be easiest to say that they are like the Atlantian's in Escaflowne - beautiful, slim, with wings, but I don't think they were angels. The walls are opalescent. And all of this is the background of the webpage. In the foreground was a story, a story about politics and history and beauty and art and love and stuff. I think, in my dream, it was the story of the game that we played. Before I could reach the end of the story, though, I woke up. And damned if I remember ANY of the details now. But during the dream, I also kind of knew it was a dream. I remember thinking things like "I need to look this up on Wiki when I wake up. I wonder if it's there?" Then I'd either think "of course it is" or "of course it isn't," depending on how awake or whatever I was at that moment. And I also had the distinct feeling I'd had the dream before.
So immediately, when I was up, I thought I wanted to write about it. That was a few days ago, though, and it had slipped my mind until I was reading through word count stuff on Ni90. Then I was like, RIGHT, I wanted to babble a little about this dream I had on LJ. So first, though, I thought "wouldn't it be funny if there's something on wiki?"
There wasn't, but I decided to google it. There aren't that many results for it, and most of them refer to places that specialize in gold and silver jewelry. However, on of the results was this, an online copy of the 1001 Tales. (Another, slightly different, translation) Please note at this point that I have never read the 1001 Arabian Nights, though I've always wanted to because I loved Aladdin so much as a child. Yes, I know it's a stupid reason. Anyway, in this tale, a city is described as being the "City of Gold and Silver."
xaniquen indicates that the phrase rings a faint bell, but he's not sure why. He's read 1001 Nights, though. I called my friend Kevin, and he's never heard of it (I'll explain why this is significant in a moment). deadmanwade, if you are reading this, does it ring a bell to you? So if I tell you that the City in question is Irem - actually called Iram - does it ring a bell then?? I DREAMT ABOUT IREM. I can't fricken believe it!! Kev is gonna have a fit when I tell him!!
Anyway, for the rest of the world...
Irem, to me, is a city from Golden Age. As Kevin used it - and he derived much of his material from Lovecraft - Irem was the city of dreams, the capital of the Dreamlands, accessible to those with the power to go there. It's a city of pillars, with pyramids that indicate mystically which of the 9 great evils currently holds sway over the world. My character's big ability, when she was first started, was that she could go to the dreamlands, and, therefore, to Irem. I did a LOT of stuff in character there. This would seem to eliminate any chance my dream was random. HOWEVER. This link describes every reference to Irem that is in Lovecraft, and none of them mention it as the "City of Gold and Silver." And in my dream, it is not once referred to as Irem. Since Kevin probably didn't go beyond what Lovecraft said, and almost definitely not beyond what is in general Cthuliana - though it's possible - I don't think he referred to that city as such, though I intend to ask him at the soonest opportunity. No, while I was writing this I called Kevin, and he's never heard the phrase before! OMFG.
Outside of Golden Age, Iram is a city that actually existed. Ruins have been found on the Arabian peninsula of a city known to have been on a major trade route. I could write all about it, but all of it would be repeating this wikipedia article.
So yeah. I dreamt about Iram. I have to write this story! It's gonna take a lot of research to do it right, but it'll be awesome.
So I'm thoroughly wigging out, but I think it's totally stinkin' awesome. And I have a great novel idea. :)
So I spent the day wandering around old book stores in Jimbocho looking for more information. What I found is that there is very little, and most of it is to be found in Encyclopedia's about Islam. I resisted, with difficulty, the urge to buy these - I think I may have finally found my books to collect, my TRUE thing to collect, where I can delve into the realms of old books and the like, and, indeed, it looks pleasantly and surprisingly inexpensive to do so. But thats a separate issue.
Without really thinking about it, I checked one book and found an account in it. Then I did a double take. It was a book I've read. In Fall of 2003, my senior - but not last! - year of undergrad, I took a class with Professor Kaddish entitled "Medieval Historiography." If any of you have READ any Medieval Historiography, you can imagine what a nightmare this course was in some regards. Kaddish is an awesome professor - one my recommendations for Grad school - but this was a senior seminar. We read a book a week, books like Bede. It was arduous in the extreme, and I never finished any of the books for the class (this was at a point in my life when I was in as many as 8 games a week - two on Sunday).
Anyway, the course was on Monday's, and I usually attempted to do the reading on Saturday nights. This involved locking myself in
mistress_sin's bedroom in Hillside while all of my friends played Black Ops without me. Not, in my opinion, a good arrangement. The result was that I would struggle through the readings, skim them a little, and get increasingly depressed listening to how much fun my friends were having until I would give up, stop reading, go play, and read no more of the book before class. This trend got worse throughout the semester - in the end, I ended up taking an incomplete in the course and handing in the paper for it a month late. (with Kaddish's blessing)The last book for the course was a change. Instead of standard European histories, is was the Muqaddimah, a history by an Arab named Ibn Khaldun. Kaddish had spent half the semester telling us how worlds different - and BETTER - this work was than the European works of the time, but when we got to it I was so burned out that I flailed through about 35 pages then gave up. The only thing I remember about it was a fascinating thing about how breathing works which attempted to explain why people suffocate - all wrong, of course. I don't even recall the details.
Today, in Jimbocho, the book I pulled off the shelf was this book, and there, on page 25, is an account of Iram, the City of Pillars. He even refers to it as the City of Gold and Silver exactly once. He describes the myth - the same as the Arabian Nights version, pretty much - and eventually concludes that the whole thing is clearly ridiculous nonsense and no such city ever existed.
What are the chances that I remembered this?
Well, Kevin, who took the same course a year before I did, didn't remember it either and is "positive" that he's never heard the phrase before. It's a two page account in a book I read while exhausted almost 4 years ago. I find the chances that I was remembering this in some vague fashion to be almost nonexistant.
Anyway, I didn't buy the Muqqadimah, because the edition at these rare book stores was an old, fancy one and cost 40,000 yen. And I already OWN a copy, it's boxed up in my storage unit. However, I did buy a copy of the Arabian Nights, a copy of the Koran (which only mentions Iram once, and only briefy, but was fairly cheap and should make for interesting reading either way), and two collections of Lovecraft short stories. I thought, given the difficulties of finding English books, that I had decent luck finding ones that were relevant.
That said, I thought I'd clarify, after a day of reflection, a little bit about the above. I'm not trying to suggest I had any sort of prophetic dream. Instead, I think I had a dream that was a truly fascinating coincidence, and has gotten me very interested in something which was, in truth, pretty interesting anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-11 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-11 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-11 03:21 am (UTC)My parents had a shelf full of the Tales, and Supplemental Tales, by Burton. Currently in a box in Chicago. Nice to know there's an e-book route.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-11 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-11 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-13 04:10 am (UTC)I have the immense 3-volume Burton translation if you ever want to read part of the "Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night" (as that rather famous translation would have it).
I can point you to the dirty bits- I used to seek them out when I was a child.
Well, and they encompass about a third of the text...
-K