I’ve been doing my annual-ish reread of William Gibson’s “Mona Lisa Overdrive”, a favorite of mine, and Gibson is (as I’ve said many times before) one of my favorite authors. One of the things I really like about his writing is the way he subtly brings in what I see are references from popular culture in his writing . It always leaves me thinking about whether or not it’s something I’m just connecting without the authors intention, or if he’s speaking in a code that only people with a certain bent will grasp, a kind of insiders club that you feel is an invitation to something bigger and more mysterious.

One such passage to which I’ve often twigged to over the years is late in the book where one of the principal characters, Mona, in tending to her idol, the SimStim star Angie, has this passage:

…filled with a weird mixture of fear and love and pity for the queen of all her dreams…

I’ve often wondered if that was a reference to the Led Zeppelin lyric in the song “Ramble On” that goes:

“I gotta find the queen of all my dreams”

or possibly it’s just an apophenic coincidence, an awareness of which I am particularly susceptible. I’ve further always wondered if Led Zeppelin took the phrase “the queen of all my dreams” from a Shakespeare creation, as I know that Led Zeppelin pulled in references from literature in to their songs, and to my tinny ear it sounds particularly evocative and something that could carry through the ages.

This year I finally made an attempt to do a little sleuthing and started to search the internet to see if I could gain some clarity to this dilemma that has haunted me in a minor way for almost forty years. I did an internet search for that phrase attributed to Shakespeare which turned up nothing. Further searching for points earlier than “Ramble On” did point to turn up that the Pink Floyd Song “Julia Dream” which was written a year earlier than the Zepplin song and had the lyric: 

“Julia Dream, dreamboat queen
Queen of all my dreams”

which doesn’t really answer the question but piqued my curiosity further and puts me one step backwards. Refining my query more just kept leading back to Led Zeppelin and lost the Pink Floyd connection, no matter how I changed the phrasing, and much more to my discontent AI got involved leading me circuitously through other poetry and lyrics interspersed in years between “Ramble On” and this decade. Falling down the “things I learned en route to learning other things” rabbit hole I did run across a reference to Shakespeare’s Queen Mab from “Romeo and Juliet” which was a fairy queen that helped give birth to human dreams, so it would seem that I might have finally closed the loop, but in all reality it is probably not a chain of clean attribution as much as a cultural reference to the essence of a dream entity. Whether or not there was a primal attribution no longer seemed to matter.

In all reality, if it had really been important to me I’d have probably looked it up years earlier, although it would have been more difficult before the internet, when the book was published in 1988, and only slightly less difficult before the advent of decent search engines. Although, we seem to have reached the other side of the searchability bell curve and searching has gotten more difficult since the advent of AI taking over internet searches and the subsequent poisoning of search results by all parties for and against AI, as well as the AI’s themselves. Many of the searches I made attributed the source of the queen of dreams to poetry and songs from this century ignoring my query’s parameters entirely. Maybe in the end I would have just been happier if I’d just stuck to the mystery of my initial wonder and not tried to nail down an answer leaving the magic with the Queen herself.

And maybe that says something in all on its own.