Frankly, I am tired of writing about how the University of Texas has been a reflection and point of departure for my being, so for this entry, instead of writing about direct connections like how my life has felt like some rabbit hole, which it hasn’t, I will try to indirectly coordinate my life and Lewis Carroll’s work.
Dreams have always been an extremely intriguing topic of discussion for me. As long as I can remember I can hear my mom telling me at the breakfast table that if I wanted a dream to come true, then
I must keep it a secret and not tell anyone or else it wouldn’t happen. Specifically I can recall a dream about some seals being lifted off the ground by helium balloons dating back to when I had to crawl up onto my chair to see over the kitchen table (like Alice!). So now, I will take you down a map of my dreams and how maybe they relate to the situations that Alice gets herself in.
“‘Wake up, Alice dear… It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea: it’s getting late.’ So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.[1]
Every morning that I wake up, I find myself reliving the sequence of events that procured throughout my mind during the last few hours of my slumber, and it is in these moments that I feel I experience the real eccentricities of life. Without this creative outlet, and living a world where one finds no rationale for action or even the basic rules of life, there would be nothing to live for, as far as I am concerned. I try to incite this sort of enthusiasm with my friends and family, but not many people find dreams as fascinating as I do. In addition to the dreaming process, I feel like I have too many déjà vu moments, and times that feel too much like something that I have actually encountered or dreamt before to be coincidental. It happens daily. I am a firm believer in the idea that those who have déjà vu have lived a previous life, and it is in those experiences that the vaguely familiar instances resound.
Back to the book. Alice Liddell’s dream worlds in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There are composed of the many different types of dreams that an individual may encounter. According to many researchers, there are five dominating types of dreams one may have: Ordinary Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Telepathic Dreams, Premonitory Dreams, and Nightmares.[2]
For the majority of my sleeping time, my dreams are dominated by what is called the Ordinary Dream or dreams consisting of everyday occurrences but grossly exaggerated. My most recent dream that I can recall happened last Monday. Tuesdays and Thursdays I have 
class at eight in the morning, and am therefore incessantly fearful of oversleeping, because of course you will be the embarrassment of the class walking in to a presentation putting yourself on display for everyone to know that you only had time to throw on a shirt and sprint to class. Similarly to the White Rabbit, who thinks “The Duchess will be savage if [he] keeps her waiting”, I, too, feel very compelled to show up on time as to not upset the Design and Visual Communications instructors. So last week, my roommate woke up and began getting ready at seven, thirty minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I was roused a little by his scurrying about and opening and closing of drawers and keys clinging against one another as he left the room, but wanted to capitalize on as much of the minutes I had left. When I fell asleep again, I had a dream that I was laying in bed, woke up, and looked at the clock to find that it was ten – making me two hours late. I went through a serious of thoughts on if I should even consider going in to studio, being so late, but decided that I should. Luckily, my alarm went off before anything else could happen and I was able to get to class on time.
The second type of dream one may have is the lucid dream, or the act of controlling your actions and realizing that you are in a dream sequence but deciding to stay asleep. For me, these types of dreams are the scariest. In Alice, this lucid state of being is mentioned in the second book when she stumbles upon the Red King who is asleep in the wood. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her that she is “only a sort of thing in his dream”[3], which she reconsiders when she wakes up at the end to question whether “He was part of [her] dream” or if she “was part of his dream, too”[4]. I think that these dreams are the most abundant because usually one wakes himself up during it, and the theory is that you only remember the dreams that you wake up to. I ALWAYS dream that I am driving down a road, but have no ability or concept of how to correctly drive a vehicle, and everything that I try to do is wrong. After having so many of these same kinds of dreams, when I have them now I repeat to myself how it is only a dream, but continue nonetheless. Cars and the art of driving are a really big fear of mine, so these dreams prove to be rather traumatizing. I completely demolish other automobiles as I monster mash over them, and in the process destroy my own car, which I have a lot of pride for.
Another type of dream is the Telepathic Dream: the “language of angels” where the living and dead converse together. I cannot find a point in Carroll’s story where her dream state has been affected through telepathy, but I have had only a few encounters with such events. After my father passed away, I would consistently dream about having conversations with him, which always made waking up and the realization of his departure a little bit difficult. Over time, however, these dreams keep me grounded, and remind me every time how lucky I am to have the people around me, and what a prominent figure in my life that my father was, and keeps the relationship strong… you could say.
Now, here is where the world of dreaming and reality coincide, and frankly freak me out. The Premonitory Dream is where your body acts in a way that plays out the future, and if you are lucky, can give you insight in how to steer your actions. There are two occasions in Alice that have some resounding truth to premonitory dreaming. In Looking Glass, there is a point where the black crow of eclipse evades the land, and Alice meets the White Queen who practices the idea of living backwards, and the chapter following this engagement she comes into contact with Humpty Dumpty, whom she recites the child’s rhyme to revealing his ultimate fate of falling off the wall. Last week I had one of the most vivid premonitory dreams that I can remember. It was Thursday evening, before Design on Friday morning where we had our first formal review of a project one-on-one with an instructor whom had not given critique to us before. I never felt overwhelmed by the upcoming review, but my dreams revealed otherwise. In my dream, I went into review to find Elizabeth Danze, the one instructor that from the beginning I have felt very intimidated by, and in the dream she went on to harshly judge what I had created and told me that I was overanalyzing and over designing the project. When the review session came, who did I have? No other than Elizabeth Danze, who did in fact tell me that simplifying my design would make my project and presentation more cohesive. Her critique, however, was very positive and constructive and I walked away feeling relieved and proud.
Nightmares are something that everyone is familiar with. Lewis Carroll’s story could be considered an epic nightmare for some, and trying to imagine being in Alice’s place during this sequence of events would be quite fearful. Mysterious creatures like ugly duchesses, griffins, talking doorknobs and literally everything within the story have the ability to be play
ed up into a sweaty mess of a dream. Personally, the nightmare that I am able to recall over and over looks much like the picture of Alice being dragged by the Red Queen on page 164 of Annotated Alice. In my dream, I was being stalked by this wicked witch through a ghost town of cowboys in a shootout as I scrambled to run between barrels of hay and houses on stilts through saloons and the like.
Lewis Carroll’s two stories involving Alice Liddell are depictions of dreams where reality is exposed to the creativity of the mind, and is something that resounds clearly in my life. Though at times there are unexpected events and daunting creatures, it is this world that enlivens me daily, and a place of refuge from the mundane everyday occurrences.
[1] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, pg. 124-125
[2] The Five Types of Dreams, Gillian Kemp http://www.enotalone.com/article/3836.html
[3] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, pg. 189
[4] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, pg. 271
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