Alphabet of Dreams

One day, while read­ing Abbas Milani’s beau­ti­ful book, Tales of Two Cities, I came upon a pas­sage that told of an old Per­sian tra­di­tion, the idea that some peo­ple have the spe­cial abil­i­ty to have dreams for oth­ers. Some­thing about this idea caught me. For a cou­ple of years I toyed with it, imag­in­ing a char­ac­ter who might have this abil­i­ty and try­ing to find the right time and place for him. But I could not.

Then, on anoth­er day much lat­er, while I was dri­ving past a church renowned for its love­ly Christ­mas pageant, a vision of the Three Wise Men flashed into my mind. I’d always loved the Wise Men! But now, I won­dered: Who were they? Where did they come from? What did they hope to find? I decid­ed to write about them as soon as I fin­ished the book about the dream­er, (if I ever man­aged to fig­ure that one out). And then I thought. They’re part of the same book.

In 2002 my sis­ter Lau­ra and I went to Iran, on the trail of those ancient seek­ers. (She pro­vid­ed the courage; I, the itin­er­ary.) With the help of our expert Iran­ian guide and dri­ver, we tra­versed the Iran­ian plateau, explored ancient ruins, gazed down into a qanat, pic­nicked in the moun­tains with a Kur­dish fam­i­ly we’d just met, wan­dered around a car­a­vanserai, float­ed down an under­ground riv­er, and vis­it­ed mosques and muse­ums. We con­firmed some things I knew, debunked some things I thought I knew, and made dis­cov­er­ies I could nev­er have imag­ined. Lat­er, I received much help and sup­port from Iran­ian friends, most notably Abbas Milani of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and Hos­sein Ebrahi­mi (Elvand) of the House of Trans­la­tion in Tehran. Both men gen­er­ous­ly drew upon their own and oth­ers’ knowl­edge to con­firm some of my guess­es and cor­rect my mistakes.

One of the hard­est things about writ­ing this book was to inte­grate the themes of the two sto­ries: the sto­ry of the boy who dreams for oth­ers (and his sis­ter Mitra, who turned out to be the main char­ac­ter), and the sto­ry of the Magi. For a while, I despaired of ever pulling it off. But in the end, an answer came. At least, an answer that sat­is­fies me.