The Dream
Dreaming the Dream - Reason in Madness
“It’s my dream!
I don’t like belonging
to another person’s dream,” said Alice.
Dreams are rooted in the experiences of the real waking world. Steve
Nallon’s
Adventures in Wonderland, like all dreams, is made up of incongruous images
and impossible transitions yet these are all still created from the world around
us. There are always striking connections between the real world and the world
of dreams.
Occasionally, the show points up some of the ordinary origins of even the strangest elements of the Lewis Carroll’s original. Often seen as one of the oddest episodes is the forcing of the sleepy dormouse into a teapot. However, Carroll may just have been making a jokey reference to the tradition of children putting small pets in large teapots over winter for hibernation. Sometimes, as Freud observed, a cigar is just a good smoke.
The dream world of Carroll/Alice also has certain parallels with the Nallon version of Wonderland. Just as the Dodo in Alice’s dream has its origins with the real life personality of Lewis Carroll so too does the Dodo character in Steve Nallon’s show. His ‘Dodo’ is Kenneth Williams playing ‘Lewis Carroll’ and moaning about ‘this terrible modern adaptation’ that he finds himself in!
Lewis Carroll’s reworking of ‘real world’ into ‘dream world’ goes beyond just playing with the everyday or domestic images that Alice might have encountered. In his Wonderland story there is a perverse logicality to all the nonsense. Wonderland is a topsy-turvy world of up-side down thought where little girls who eat eggs are told by pigeons that they are serpents. In a law court the sentence comes before the verdict. At one level these ideas are just silly but in our modern world that loves categorizing people into ‘pigeon-holes’ and that has a justice system where incarceration comes even before one has even set foot in a court, one is aware of a certain contemporary significance to this reason in the madness.
