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Charles Dulce
Professor Lewis
English 114B
4-1-14
Is This Real Life?
In Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll,
the semi-intelligent but ignorant girl, Alice, is literally dropped into a world that seems to be
created through complete imagination. Wonderland is a world that is created through the mind of
Lewis Carroll, an author with a conscious idea for a story for the girls he knew, but with a deeper
and subconscious meaning to it. Carrolls intentions for this story were to entertain the girls of
the family, the Liddells, he befriended, specially a little girl named Alice Liddell who the
character Alice is based off of. If read through a literal sense, Alice goes through her
adventures of identity and etiquette, they have a more embedded meaning to them. The multiple
meanings reside in Carrolls/Alices unconscious, are not be intentional like the dreams in the
person may have. Alice is a little girl who falls into an endless hole that seems to have no end,
but leads to a world that is filled with the unimaginable types of characters that are completely
mad. In part two of Lewis Carrolls story Through the Looking-Glass Alice finds herself in
another world with the same type of characters that are in an environment that match a chess
game. Both of Carrolls stories represent why the conscious and unconscious, despite their
differences, which can be shown through Alices encounters with other characters, are all one
and interact with Alice in ways that expresses their similarities.
Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, meaning a type of therapy that observes
the conscious and unconscious while giving meaning to them to help explain repressed ideas. In
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Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious by Ronald R. Thomas, dreams
are one of the few things Freud analyzes during a psychoanalysis and states:
The fundamental claim Freud would make about the origin of dreams is that they
are expressions by the dreamer of a wish. The wish may be repressed and hence
not immediately recognizable as a wish, and its expression may be disguised for a
number of important reasons. But the dream is nevertheless an expression of the
dreamers desires. (61)
This means that the world Alice is in all of her wishes, but a person cannot wish for something to
happen unless they are aware of a wish to make them happen. The conscious and unconscious
are two separate ideas that relate to the adventures of Alice and her interactions with many
characters. The unconscious, being the dream state Alice may be in, is separated from the
conscious thought which has more control to it. Control in a sense of combining two worlds
together where these worlds are the one with an adult lifestyle and a world with a childlike
lifestyle. Alice is a merge of the two because when Alice is unconscious, same as living a child
lifestyle, she becomes careless. Alice is careless in the ways she communicates to others. Alice
has no sense or thought of what she says in the unconscious. An example is when she is speaking
to a mouse and keeps on bringing up her pet cat Dinah to continue the conversation. This
obviously scares the mouse, but when Alice is aware and in a conscious state, same as an adult
lifestyle, she holds her tongue. The conscious is described as being aware of a surrounding, while
the unconscious is to exist without realizing. Through her adventures in Wonderland, Alice
learns to say what is appropriate, by speaking when spoken to during an encounter with
characters of higher power. A person is described as awake when they are conscious and when a
person is unconscious they are asleep in a dream state.
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The unconscious is shown through the event of the Mad Tea Party in Alices Adventure
in Wonderland. This is a Mad Tea Party because of the pattern of movement, where guests
must constantly switch places until Alice interrupts a Dormouse, Mad Hatter, and a March Hare
from their insane routine. This starts Alices dream where they change the subject to stop the
routine and the subject changes to where the three ask Alice to tell a story. In this time Alice
cannot think of a story which represents a state of dreaming because she cannot make a story
since Alice is not aware enough to create a story. Alice cannot create a story to entertain the
three, so the Dormouse volunteers and makes a story that seems to have no point to it. This story
is awfully similar to the way Lewis Carroll created his story for the original Alice Liddell. This
mouses story begins with three children, like the Liddells three little girls, where one girl falls
down a well and this girls adventure begins. Then the mouse begins to speak nonsense, but all
of this nonsense even has a deeper meaning to it. The mouse goes on and on about words that
begin with M and the most important to remember is memory. The entire time this mouse was
saying his story it all comes from Alices memory. It is said that a dream is a recollection of your
memory. Although Alice does not realize that the story is a coded message of her memory so
Alice leaves this party to continue her journey into Wonderland. Alices dream is still her own to
master and tell.
In the story there is eventually a trial although all the characters Alice encountered show
up it is between mainly the queen, king, Alice and a thief who has stolen the queens tarts which
is what the trial is revolved around, stolen tarts. This trial is another merge of the unconscious
and conscious that later results in Alice literally waking up from a dream. Alice is a witness to
this so called crime and is unsure of any evidence to prove. This entire trial does not make any
sense at all actually. In this trial the King who makes up rules as the trial goes and the Queen
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who would decapitate anyone who she believes to be disobedient. All of the nonsense represents
a nightmare, because the trial is complete chaos. This dream has power over Alice, because she
is the one being controlled through her frustration. All of the frustration is from many characters
telling her what she can and cannot do. In the trial Alice begins to randomly grow and the
Dormouse says, Youve no right to grow here (129). She responds with a statement that means
everyone grows and now the trial seems to become revolved around Alices growth. Her
frustration is slowly building to a point where she awakens from her dream. Carroll creates a
distinction at the end of Alices Adventures in Wonderland being that Wonderland is a dream and
Alice was simply sleeping. All of that madness lead to just a little girl sleeping on her sisters
lap, but a realization from the sister Alice slept on. The more Alices sister became aware of
what just happen to Alice she tried to put herself in what Alice went through, ...the whole place
around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sisters dream (143). Alices
interactions with people make them see that the unconscious can become the conscious or the
other way around too.
There are times where Alice is aware of what is going on and even says, There ought to
be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, Ill write one (59). This
means that Alice is aware of what is going on in Wonderland that she wants to write about her
adventures to share with others. Her saying also describes that writing a book means adulthood.
If writing a story means becoming an adult, first Alice must take charge of the dream that she
is in and be conscious. She is simply a child still, but in order to awaken from a land where Alice
is physically growing and shrinking just by eating a simple cake, then she needs to know how to
control these tools at her fingertips. A person is conscious when they know that the decision they
are making is their own and not someone elses to create. The others who are constantly
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controlling Alice and making her feel as if she is not in control resemble the unconscious like the
Dormouse who tells a story about Alices life. This book that Alice must write is a metaphor for
her life so it can have meaning. Alice feels as if there is no point to anything in Wonderland
unless it is remembered and told to others in the form of a story.
In Through the Looking-Glass there is a chapter that focuses on Alice questioning
whether she is in a dream or not. This is in Tweedledum and Tweedledee where a pair of twins
test Alices patience through a tale about a Walrus, arguments, but most of all the Red King. The
two make Alice think whether she is in a dream, when they all notice the Red King sleeping.
Tweedledum makes the remark, since the king is sleeping, saying, Well its no use you're
talking about waking him, when youre the only one of the things in his dream (197). This
means that Alice is not real in this world, which only starts another argument whether Alice is
real or just a figment of the Red Kings dream. Alices evidence in her case of being a real
person and not in someones dream is to say that since she can cry then she must be a real
person. She is stating that since she can express her own emotions because of how she felt of
someone saying she is fake, that she is real. Alice is aware of what is going on, but yet she
cannot control the constant changes of this world. Alice reacting with her own emotions is all the
proof she needs to believe she is real, and not in another persons dream, no matter what the two
think. In Integration of the Cognitive and the Psychodynamic Unconscious by Seymour
Epstein, it states that, Emotions in everyday life are almost invariably produced by the
preconscious interpretation of events. This means that emotions are created through the daily
events of a persons life before they are even aware. Even before Alices interaction with the Red
King, she knew that it may not be a dream to her. Carroll always leaves the reader thinking
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whether Wonderland is real or not. Alice is not even sure, so it is best to leave the Wonderland as
a mix of the conscious and unconscious.
Carroll ends Through the Looking-Glass with a chapter titled Which Dreamed It?
meaning he is asking the reader if it was Alices dream or possibly someone elses, like the Red
King or even Carrolls dream. It could be either or, because based on the history of Carrolls life
you see many ideologies expressed in the novels. Although, this chapter is a transition from
Wonderland to back into her room in the blink of an eye Alice is unsure about what just happen.
She does not forget and is still using ideologies that she learned from Wonderland in her world.
She remembers all her interactions with the characters from Wonderland as if she was conscious
in what she clearly states to be a dream she just awoken from. Alice is also incorporating all she
has learned with her cats and speaking to them as if they were there with her in that Wonderland.
Proving that this world is both the unconscious and conscious.
Carroll wants the reader to decide what is real or not, but both were real experiences for
Alice. Her life is based around a dream from beginning to end. She is the transition of both the
unconscious and the conscious through the many experiences she had in Wonderland in both of
Carrolls stories. Whether Alice questioned what was going on in Wonderland, she was still
aware and at the end she has learned from a world that is clear representation of the unconscious.
Carroll ends the Through the Looking-Glass with a poem that its last line says, Life, what is it
but a dream? (137) Alices life truly answers that question with what she has done. Two
different ideas about the psychodynamic involving the conscious and unconscious with her
interactions with the Red King, Dormouse, Mad Hatter, and etc. creating a deeper meaning that
showed Alices growth through Wonderland.
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In the end, Carroll expressed his ideologies into a story that he created for Alice Liddell.
He did this through the interactions of the character Alice in his stories, while she struggled to
find out what was reality and the unconscious. This was shown through first the separation of the
ideologies where one has control and the does not. Then, Carroll expresses how they are similar
when the balance of power is being tipped in a trial between Alice and all the characters in the
first part of the novel. Even through her struggles with who she is as a person in this fictional
world, does it show how the reality is not that different from the unconscious. Overall, it was just
a dream, but the character Alice learned from her interactions with the many characters Carroll
created. Carroll did all this to represent that the unconscious and conscious are similar.















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Works Cited
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Woderland. Ed. Donald J. Gray. Second ed. New York: Barnes & Noble
Classics, 2004. Print
---. Through the Looking-Glass. Ed. Donald J. Gray. Second ed. New York: Barnes & Noble
Classics, 2004. Print
Epstein, Seymour. "Integration of the Cognitive and the Psychodynamic Unconscious."
American Psychologist 49.8 (1994): 709-724. Web. 30 March 2014.
Thomas, Ronald R. Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. New York:
Cornell University Press 1990. Print.