A dream sequence is a technical term used mostly in film and television to set apart a brief interlude from the main story. (Wikipedia) The deeper lying theme that Carroll wanted to incorporate into his story of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in my opinion, was not his psychological or sexual desire for Alice Liddell. What he did mean to express by writing these stories was his innermost desire to escape from reality in which a relationship between he and Liddell was not allowed to a fantasy land where everything is backwards and nonsensical, and he did exactly that in the guise of children’s literature.He uses notions of dreams and their significance to real life to symbolize his own dream sequence in his real life: as an interlude from his normal life as many worthy professions to his newly discovered hobby as a photographer of little girls. Carroll first incorporated the notion of dreams and the riddle of life in Alice in Wonderland, where Alice meets the Cheshire Cat for the first time.
Upon receiving Alice’s comments about the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat gives her a rather puzzling response, “we’re all mad here.I’m mad. You’re mad. ” (66) The annotation for this quote was interesting to look at, because it explains exactly the dream sequence that Carroll wanted his readers to understand as a part of his life.
The annotation basically states that insane things can happen in dreams, and they are perceived as quite real, and therefore, dreams are just as real as the actual reality that one accepts as the standard reality. Then, what is a dream and what differentiates a dream from reality?This is what Carroll wished to convey to his readers about himself; the Wonderland that Alice stumbles into is as real to the author as it is to Alice, and it may as well be the author’s sanctuary from the harsh reality that denies him his love. As if confusing his readers once with the dream versus reality mumbo-jumbo, as it is seen that way in context of Alice’s adventures in the Wonderland, Carroll further supports his theory of double universe within a single life span in Through the Looking Glass.When Alice and her two short-lived companions, the Tweedle brothers, approach a sleeping Red King, the Tweedle brothers announce that the King is dreaming.
They inform Alice that the Red King is dreaming about her, and Alice claims that she is not a fragment of his imagination, for she is a real human being. Carroll is really great at these existential issues, whether we really exist in one universe or not. The annotation for the quote “Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream! ” suggests that Carroll had been influenced by Bishop Berkeley, and that other writers have used this kind of circular paradoxical theme in other works as well.The annotation in the book mentions a James Branch Cabell, who created a paradox consisting only of dreams in one of his works. Jorge Luis Borges, the author of Ficciones, used this method that basically questions our entire existence on this planet.
His short story entitled The Circular Ruins in Ficciones is about a wizard who creates a boy in his dream, who, with the help of the God of Fire, will not burn in fire because he is not real. The wizard ends up finding out that he is, too, unreal, for his skin does not burn when he walks into the fire.Borges referred to Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in his own story, elaborately creating his own meaning to the mirror image of existence in two universes. Carroll thus displays himself as two different beings through this theme: a serious mathematician-existentialist-writer, and the uncanny photographer who enjoys taking nude pictures of little girls, which are undoubtedly one exactly same person in the world of two universes; since the two realities can have differences and yet both very real, Carroll’s strange personality is not actually strange at all.
Borges’ The Circular Ruins did not contain the same meaning as Carroll’s existentialist ideas; Borges’ idea of dreams was strictly one-way, in which when one person wakes up, the person who is being dreamed will vanish. The Circular Ruins questioned about our existence as real or just a fragment of someone else’s imagination, which is supposedly as real as the actual reality of whoever is imagining us. Carroll’s notion of dreams, then, questions a more complex essence of existence: of two possibly imagined universes imagining each other.Carroll expresses himself and his queer personality (or is it queer? ) through a seemingly harmless book of nonsensical fantasies, and also questions his readers, and possibly himself, the meaning of life and the universe. What I always thought of as the fun story with insane poems, in addition to the wonderfully brilliant image of Wonderland portrayed by Disney, turns out to be quite an amazing text for future existentialists and philosophers.
