I’ve had some pretty vivid dreams in lockdown, including one that was like a Resident Evil chase scene set in a bizarre sterile abattoir world peopled by raw flesh golems, but I had one recently that is a first. I was sorting through some books and DVDs, in my dream, and the covers were of real books and DVDs, that I recognised upon seeing each one. What was odd was the titles were wrong, every work was called something else. What really freaked me out was this:
Have you ever tried to read text in a dream? And it’s all jumbled, when you focus on it? Sometimes it’s words in random order, sometimes it’s just letters in random conglomerations, but it never makes sense, and the text even shifts and flows as your eyes cross the page; if you even try to read back a non-sentence, you can’t, because it’s changed?
The blurbs on the back of the works was in perfectly legible English and discussed the plot of the work in a neat little summary. It was a story that had no relation to the cover, but they made sense, coherent sentences, the lot. I only looked at two and it freaked me out so much I woke up. Take that, brain.
Anyway. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
Not perfect by any means; a lot of little peripheral things wrong throughout, although the book is right in pointing out the brilliance of a man who really did create an empire without daddy laying the foundations for him. While still a byword for barbarity and destruction (Mongol, Mughal, mogul, etc), rather less attention is paid to the free trade, cultural exchange, unification around a common alphabet and language, adherence to a overarching system of laws, abandonment of torture, and numerous other achievements that bootstrapped many countries, some intentionally some not, into a surprisingly broad, sudden advancement.
