In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll brings Alice’s second adventure in Wonderland to conclusion by mirroring the dream frame of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Chapter X “Shaking,” Alice shakes the Red Queen who is “the cause of great mischief” (235) only to realize in Chapter XI “Waking” that she is not holding the Queen in her hands, but is instead chastising her mischievous black cat “Kitty” (236). Alice tells Kitty, “You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream!” (238).
In our last discussion on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we touched on the relationship between dreams and reality when Alice’s sister imagines Wonderland from the noises of nature surrounding her (108-109). However, we didn’t get to explore the nineteenth-century contexts of sleeping and dreaming. The role sleep and dreams play within the two Alice stories made me wonder how science was exploring different states of consciousness when Carroll was writing and publishing the Alice books.
Turning our attention to note eight in the Penguin edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (see page 310), it is apparent that Carroll was interested, as many nineteenth-century men and women were, in the relationship between our world (the physical world) and the dream world. In his diary for February 9, 1856, Carroll ponders the relationship between madness and dreams and dreams and reality/unreality:
Query: when we are dreaming, and as it often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking like would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other (Diaries vol. 1, p. 76)
Earlier philosophical inquiries into the mind and its relationship to the body by men like Descartes and Locke were, for the first time in the nineteenth-century, being treated scientifically and were viewed as being able to be tested through observation and experimentation. As J. Allan Hobson recounts in his The Dreaming Brain, scientists across Europe were testing their own theories about the nature of human consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1845, Johannes Muller and four of his students, including the young Helmholtz and Brucke (Brucke would later be a mentor and teacher to Breuer and Freud) “signed a pact against vitalism, the notion of a life force explainable through analytical science” (Hobson 25).
By the time Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865-66, one of the first works on the scientific experimentation of the dream state and the dreamer’s perception had been published. In 1861, Alfred Maury, a French scientist, published Sleep and Dreams. His work described the experiments he and his research assistants conducted. Maury describes experiments in which he was allowed to fall asleep in his laboratory, and once asleep, his research assistant would introduce an environmental stimulus. The assistant did everything from lighting matches under Maury’s nose, to opening the scientist’s eyelids while asleep and introducing visual stimuli, to playing music close to Maury’s ear. The assistant would then wake up Maury, who would then report and record his findings. Hobson summarizes the heart of Maury’s scientific inquiry: “Maury was interested in the possible primacy of the sensory event in triggering the subsequent chain of associations and images” (33).
Scholars may not be able to determine whether Carroll was familiar with the scientific work being done on sleep and dreams during his era, but his Alice stories, his diary, and even Symbolic Logic (see note ten on page 341) indicate that he was interested in the relationship between sleep and dreams and between dreams and reality. The concluding passages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland parallel Maury’s theories about the role of environmental influence in hypnagogic experiences. After Alice details her dream of Wonderland to her sister, her sister closes her eyes and listens to the sounds around her, and “the whole place around her became alive the strange creatures of her little sister's dream” (108). With her eyes closed, she
half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs (109)
Thus, Alice’s older sister discounts the reality of Alice’s strange dream. She explains it away—it is merely a product of her sensory perceptions of the environment surrounding her when she was asleep. Her sister grounds the imaginative power of Alice’s sleeping mind in the reality of the physical world. But in Through the Looking Glass, questions about the dream world are not as easily answered.
Through the Looking Glass is a denser metaphysical text than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At the end of her dream, her sister is not there to connect the experience of the dream world to the reality of the physical world. Alice’s second adventure in Wonderland is characterized by an anxiety about the relationship between body and mind. Through Alice’s interaction with the Underworldians, a series of very complicated questions arise. Do we exist when we are asleep? How do we describe the people and things we dream about: are they real? do they exist? Is there a separation between the body and the mind? Who are we when we dream? Is our identity grounded in the physical world or the mental world? Can we know what others are dreaming? What if we are the figments in the dreams of others and how does that affect our perception of reality?
Between the publishing of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, scientific minds were also inquiring and attempting to answer these many questions. Alfred Maury’s good friend and colleague, the Marquis Léon Harvey de Saint-Dénis was experimenting and documenting the processes of the mind in a dream state. The Marquis’ theory was that dreams often reflected the mind’s work in abstraction. He kept extensive dream journals about his own dreams and the experiments he conducted. In 1867, he published Dreams and How to Control Them, making him one of the first recorded lucid dreamers. He also “believed that in dreaming one could accomplish practical problem solving. Dreaming was to him characterized by a kind of intellectual enhancement in which, for instance, a chess player might find the solution to an otherwise insoluble problem; a poet might come up with the most apt image for a verse; and a mathematician might find the solution to a difficult intellectual problem” (Hobson 38).
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice has conversations with the Underworldians that prompts her to explore the nature of sleep, dreams, reality, and existence. This often manifests as anxiety over her identity and the state of her existence. In the chapter on Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Tweedledee leads Alice to the sleeping form of the Red King. He asks her what she thinks he is dreaming about:
“Why, about YOU!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’M only sort of thing in his dream, what are YOU, I should like to know?” (165).
Alice begins to cry at Tweedledum’s suggestion that her existence is rooted in the mind of another, and that should his dream state cease, her existence would likewise end. Later, she suggests a theory: that she and all the characters are “all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s MY dream, and not the Red King’s!” (205). She admits to herself that she doesn’t like “belonging to another person’s dream,” and although she says she has “a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens,” she never attempts it. Perhaps she is fearful of answering the question she poses in her first adventure, “where does the flame go when a candle is put out,” when she is the guinea pig which might wholly disappear (205).
Mentioning one more thing (I know this post is long), the White Knight makes an interesting comment about the separation between body and mind: “What does it matter where my body happens to be?...My mind goes on working all the same” (213). This is interesting in light of Alice’s questions about the existence (or reality) of people and things inside dreams. If her body is in the physical world, where is her mind? Is there a separation between body and mind, as the White Knight suggests it? Is the separation spatial? temporal? something indefinable?
Works Cited:
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. London: Penguin Books, 1998.
Hobson, J. Allan. The Dreaming Brain. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Steph
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