The Dream
Dreaming the Dream – Playtime for the Mind
“What is the use of a book without pictures?”
Alice’s
opening remark in the first paragraph of the book.
Alice’s
dream fantasy ultimately revolves around the idea of just being silly. Alice
discovers she can break rules, make words have two meanings, learn to think
backwards, ignore bossy authority, become big, little and many sizes in between.
Her dream stretches her in both mind and body.
Yet the story of Alice in her Wonderland presents a striking paradox. Alice is a little girl who doesn’t understand books ‘without pictures’. What Alice doesn’t realize is that the words give you the pictures – but only if you have the imagination to create one from the other. Alice appears in her waking life to be an unimaginative child, yet, and here is the paradox, her dream is one of the most vivid stories ever imagined. One could say Alice is being sent into an inventive dream world in order to bring to life her dormant imagination.
In effect what Lewis Carroll is doing is sending Alice to sleep in order to wake her up!
Alice’s Wonderland will be her special world of invention and creativity. She must become the stuff that dreams are made of. And once her imagination is awoken she will have the ability to read books and create her own pictures from the words on the page.
Alice’s reawakening of the imagination is a main theme of Steve Nallon’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nallon’s take on the story is that there is a need for the mind to play, to be inventive and to imagine, whether the mind be that of a child or of an adult. We all need a playtime for the mind.
When you dream, the rational, cognitive and reflective parts of the brain are put on hold whereas the intuitive, instinctive and creative parts of the brain go into overdrive. The conscious need to rationalize the experience of daily life is switched off during sleep and dreams. What is switched on though is our unrestricted instinct to explore the impossible. In our virtual reality world of dreams we create scenarios that would be impossible in our waking existence. In a way, dreams are sane people’s way of going insane in safety. Reason goes offline and in comes madness.
The imagination is merely another form of dreaming. In the imagination rational thought is replaced by unfettered motivations and instinct. Call ‘imagination’ what you will – the fumes of fancy, sideways logic, wants as action, out-to-lunch reasoning – few writers have ever matched the fantastical imaginative vision of Lewis Carroll.
