One of my classes this term is an EFL reading class based on an English world history textbook. The problem for the students is that it's hard, from their vantage, for this stuff not to present as fiction, and history as fiction can make for very dull reading. There are occasional dramatic flourishes, sure. We were momentarily dipped into a Mario Puzo novel when the Abbasids claimed the helm of the Islamic empire and invited the former ruling families to a reconciliatory banquet, where the deposed were covered in blankets and slain with food still in their mouths. But mostly it's reading about how crusading Christian knights, knowing what God wanted, laid evaporative claims to the Holy Land while permanently capturing yoghurt and coffee.

Which makes for dull fiction unless that's your breakfast as you're reading, and then you have a reality-reality collision. You raise your cup and toast the misbegotten jihads of Christian armies long since dead and rotted.

I never liked history much as a student, so I came into the class appreciating that our material is not all that interesting on the page, particularly if you're so young that your memory goes back less than a decade and all trajectories seem linear because you're viewing such a small stitch of their domains, and you can't really feel time. Our only hope, I figured, was to look for connections between those ancient records and our modern, daily surroundings, allowing the vitality of the present to thereby bleed backwards into the pages. Now having read Ben's post, it seems what we're after is that sense of seeing Harrison Ford on TV as we sit in the real-world inspiration of his faux-future setting. Realities colliding.

My most forceful experience of this was at a flamenco performance in Sevilla, Spain. I'd arrived during la Feria de abril purely by accident, never having heard of the event and coming through Sevilla on a whim, with no preparations made, so that I spent the first couple hours in the city wondering why all the hotels were full and why women were standing at bus stops in costume, before a backpacker finally told me we were at the locus of the biggest festival on the Spanish calendar. The next night, I sat in a small room only a few strides from the stage and saw Spain's national champions dance flamenco. It was the first time I saw a flamenco performance.

The suffusion of unfamiliarity and serendipity charged a sense of the present, but the music sounded sometimes middle-eastern, and the dancer's hand movements recalled Egyptian dances that a friend had studied a few months before. These elements evoked a sense of deep history. Vibrating present and ancient reverberations collided. The room sat on the pinprick tip of a needle whose length reached into bottomless pasts.

I bought a CD of flamenco music that night and spent the next day with it in my ears, walking Sevilla as a time-traveller. Now, nearly four years later, our class is reading about the early Islamic expansion, in which the formerly divided Arab peoples, suddenly united in the 7th century CE under their own brand of monotheism, swept outward from Arabia in waves of conquest that washed Islamic culture up as far as the Pyrenees. I brought the Sevilla CD to class and played a track with a distinctly Spanish intro and a distinctly Arab outro, and asked the students why a modern recording of traditional Spanish music should bespeak such Arab influence. “The spread of Islam,” they said, but as we sat listening to the nearly literal echoes of 1,400 year-old history, I could see that realities had not collided for them.

i've done this a couple of times – in 2002 i did a road trip through LA, Vegas, San Francisco – my travelling library consisted of Armistead Maupin, Hunter S Thompson and John Steinbeck.

then in 2004 when travelling through Vietnam and Cambodia, it was a selection of writing about the war era – François Ponchaud's book 'Cambodia: Year Zero' and 'In Retrospect' by Robert McNamara amongst others.

Regrettably, I was a naive and inexperienced photographer at the time, (how I would love to repeat these journeys with the vision and ability that I have now) but reading these books while immersing myself in the culture of these countries enriched my experience no end.

It's good ol' referential ping-pong!

This post was mentioned on Twitter by whileseated2: Ben Roberts at the crossroads of reality, rain, Ridley Scott, and the metaphysical on @insightly http://bit.ly/6mk0nf...

When I was a teenage computer nerd, I used to spend hours playing around with a program called Bryce, which used fractal geometry to render surrealistic images of coastlines, mountains and forests. A week ago, I found myself on a fog-shrouded morning standing on the High Island Reservoir in Hong Kong’s New Territories. To my left the restless ocean with islands disappearing into the mist, to the right an enormous man-made lake bounded on all sides by dark, brooding ranges. At this point, I experienced a Bryce Moment for the first time in my life: a realisation that the environment I had stumbled across more than closely resembled a virtual scene my youthful self had created on his home computer two decades ago.

I don’t know if I managed to make any useful photographs, but the experience of that recognition made the rest of my day. Just prior to this, I had confided with some of my peers that such moments and memories were as important to me as the act of making photographs. That I cherished heading forth to explore a strange place for the first time almost as much as returning from it with successful photographs. To me, such episodes are a critical component for engaging with the world regardless of the ultimate end product: at the very least, akin to a wonderful night’s conversation with someone of the opposite sex whom you’ll never see again.

I took W.S. Merwin's “The Folding Cliffs” on a trip to Kauai awhile ago. Like Hannah, it became a guidebook in a way, or at the least it was the only thing I remember having with me. The book weaves the history of the island, in verse, and I distinctly remember reading it while overlooking an area where a battle took place and experiencing something quite moving. That merging of place/time/art.

Poetry's like that, I guess, but you could argue that civilwar re-enactments are on the same plate. (And maybe even a place like Lascaux?) Trying to eek as much air and living history out of a fixed landscape as possible. Now that I think of it, it doesn't have much to do with your post — mine was an artist's truth (Merwin's) colliding with the modern truth of a historical place, rather than fiction/reality.

Yours is closer to déjà vu!