Alice must have had the need to venture to the subsurface layers of herself. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and having nothing to do” (1) Alice finds a way to get to the underground layers of herself, beyond the tip of the iceberg or down the rabbit hole, we could say, through dreaming. The fact that Alice was dreaming however, does not mean that Wonderland is not a real place. It is just that in Alice’s specific mortal condition at the point in time when her first journey to Wonderland occurred, perhaps dreaming was the only way for Alice to fulfill her wishes and/or needs to explore. Alice is on her way to self actualization and Wonderland symbolizes something much greater than just a dream. A dream is rarely just a dream you know. Wonderland symbolizes the opportunity for Alice to question what she is told is reality and to experiment with all sorts of “impossibilities” and nonsense so that she can better understand her own potential and the potential of the world around her.
Alice’s dream fits into something that the psychology world calls wish fulfilment. It goes farther than where Freud (the coiner of the phrase...what a surprise) took it though. According to Freud, dreaming of your wishes coming true is a way to overcome that wish in your awakened life and perhaps move past it. But maybe it is really a way to get clues, training and practice as to how to really fulfill your wishes. Making your dreams come true is something we hear all the time. In our society though there are lots of things that just “are the way they are”. So if we live by the rules that makes things “the way they are”, they will stay this way. But if we explore beyond we may start to see how many options there truly are. It may be a fantasy but not all fantasies remain fiction forever. Alice was not content with her life the way it was and she was not going to take a boring mundane lot in life sitting down. So she created Wonderland.
Right from the very beginning she was grappling with possible vs. impossible. Can Rabbits talk!? The laws of logic are broken right from the start. “For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” (9) Alice finds herself in a land where the only stability is that nothing is ever stable. The only form or government we meet, the Queen is out of her mind because she cannot possibly have any control over a land that is just stubbornly wild (wild meaning; some natural order that appears to be chaos because we do not know how the order works) The Queen cannot possibly rule through law because that would require too much sense of which wonderland has almost none.
In Wonderland, it is some natural order of chaos that rules. Though we (back in “the real world”) try to classify, group, label and predetermine all sorts of situations in every-day life, chaos seems to be what rules the here as well when you really get down to it. Wonderland is just more blatantly so because it is a rebellion (on the part of Alice, fullfilling her wishes through a dream, rebelling against oppressive ideas) against all the feeble attempts our society makes to know all and control all. Well, what we do all know is that you must always expect the unexpected, now isn’t that right? In Wonderland, even when the Queen tries to punish for disobedience sake, magic often gets characters like the chescher cat out of “legal troubles”, AKA decapitation (The only punishment the Queen seems to know of). Perhaps this OCD of the Queen’s is rooted in the fact that everyone seems to be out of their mind anyway. Rather ironic; one of Lewis Caroll’s little clever bits. The Queen cannot control Wonderland though because it is organically an anarchist state seeing as the only stability is instability. Alice’s whole intention in creating Wonderland was to rebel against society. So why would the Queen have any real power or respect? Strong will and clear intentions can make anything happen no matter how many people say it is wrong or impossible. This is what Alice learns through her dream rebellion. This is what Alice fulfilled for herself, taught to herself. Alice is not very much intimidated by the Queen. But she does realize that perhaps the Queen has some sort of decapitation OCD so Alice does not stay around the Queens castle for long. Alice always does what she needs to do for self preservation. Just more proof that Alice really has her wits about her and is only getting stronger as she learns more and more.
Dreams may come in the form of symbols and or metaphors for the dreamer to understand. “Why We Dream: ...To satisfy our own wishes. In 1900, in his landmark book The interpretation od Dreams, Freud offered what he thought was “the most valuable of all discoveries it has been my good fortune to make”: Dreams provide a psychic safety valve that discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. According to Freud, a dream’s manifest (apparent) content is a censored, symbolic version of its latent content, which consists of unconscious drives and wishes that would be threatening if expressed directly” (104 txtbook) Aha! Rebellions often are threatening aren’t they? The way Freud put it is all good and well but we could also say that the dream world is a place where oppressive norms do not exist and so this is why people are able to fulfill things in their dreams that they are restricted from in awake life. A lot of Freud theories like this one are based on the context of an oppressive society. All the things that Alice learns are very threatening to what her concept of reality was before she ever ventured to Wonderland. Alice fulfilled a wish to rebel through dreaming just like many of us do. But dreams mean a lot because we are able to see real things that have walls put up around them in awake life. So the lessons our dreams teach us can be very useful when we are awake and this is why dreams should never be poo pooed.
Though dreams are often very murky when it comes to sense, this does not mean that the symbols in dreams are masks attempting to hide things. Dreams just function on a whole different plane that, us awake people may describe it as a little tricky and clever. Lewis Caroll conveys this through all the riddles and poetry we find through out the text. Some of the riddles like; “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” (97) even have no answers. So why Alice wonders, would anyone waste time to even ask? Maybe that was Alice’s way of realizing that sometimes, you just cannot know the answer. Maybe it was a manifestation of her frustrations with all the things society has no clue about that we are always trying to draw conclusions on like that boring book her sister was reading that Alice could not interest herself in. Because often times, connections that are tried in the attempts at creating “facts” really are as rediculouse as comparing a raven and a writing desk (and sometimes they are even straight up cover-up lies). But then again, If one tried, one could come up with something to compare a raven and a writing desk that does make some sort of sense. That’s the thing about sense! It can be made of almost anything if you really try or even sometimes with little to no effort at all. This is why sense doesn’t always mean much. Weather or not something makes sense has nothing to do with weather or not it is true. Alice realizes this through her dream. This is what Wonderland is all about. Wonderland does not give too much importance to sense like we do in “the real world”. Hopefully Alice will take this realization with her to “the real world” because that is a truth actually worth learning and never forgetting. So many projections and preconceived notions could be avoided if people would sometimes think beyond sense rather than within it all the time.
Where do you land once you’ve gone beyond sense? You wont know until you put your best foot forth and find out! This is what Alice does through out the story. She is very curious and very determined to see as much of all this nonsense as she can. She takes pleasure in this bold exploration and begins to learn lessons that help her along the way. Alice often has to take risks in order to move forward and though sometimes she is fearful, she never stops. It seems that Alice is a very mentally healthy young girl well on her way to self actualization. “Maslow proposed that we are motivated by a hierchy of needs. If our physiological needs are met, we become concerned with personal safety; if we acheive a sense of security, we then seek love, to be loved, and to love ourselves; with our love needs satisfied, we seek self esteem, we ultimately seek self actualization (the process of fulfilling our potential) and self transcendance (meaning, purpose and communion beyond the self). Alice is definitely not there yet but she is certainly on her way. Her dreams are not trivial. They are a part of her growing up process.
