Blogpost 7: Alice in Wonderland: Truth in A Dream?

Alice, The White Rabbit, The Queen of Hearts, The King of Hearts, The Chesire Cat, The Duchess, The Catterpillar, The Mad Hatter & The March Hare... These are some characters from the popular American animated fantasy-adventure film, Alice in Wonderland. It was produced by Walt Disney Productions and it was primarily based on Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass. It's about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world with peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. She went to so much adventures but in the end, her sister wakes her up and she realizes that everything was just a dream.

I was never a fan of this movie but I've always find the main character, Alice, so cute & adorable. I've always been scared of it's story, being alone somewhere and meeting weird talking creatures. I never even watched the whole film until now but I always thought there may be something else behind the characters and the story because it's just too weird. I kept thinking that there must be a mystery or another meaning behind it or it might also represent something and after doing some research, I guess I was right.

There are a lot of things that people claim about the meaning of Alice in Wonderland but I found this article entitled A Dream That Tells The Truth: Alice in Wonderland by Hayden Butler in the site called Evangelical Outpost. In this article, you will find out about how the movie offers a fanciful study in dreaming. According to the author, as Alice roam around the strange world, she wondered if what she was seeing is real or it was just a figment of her imagination. The Mad Hatter helped resolve this paradox when he said to Alice "Well, if I'm part of your dream, and I'm half mad, that means that you must be half-mad to have dreamt me up!". Having said this, we come to understand that Wonderland is a dream that tells Alice something true about herself. By this, Alice is exhorted to find her imagination and be willing to dream. Another fascinating theme in the film that the author discussed is in the 'Oraculum', a scroll that shows what will happen during each day of Wonderland, past, present, and future. It's fascinating because of its allusion to a long-standing tradition of dream-theory. In the middle ages, a philosopher name Macrobius wrote a treatise about dreams, categorizing them according to their varying characteristics. One such category was termed 'Oraculum'—from the same roots as our term 'oracle'—and referred to a dream that tells accurate information of the future. As such, when the films refers to this idea, it is making the provocative claim to it's audience that not all dreams are fictions. In the world of the film, prophecy is portrayed as a type of dreaming, but a dream that tells true things about the world.

"The film ends with the sentiment that all the greatest people of history were dreamers, were half-mad, were willing to live with one foot in our world and one in Wonderland."

I really find this quote very nice. For me, it means to be a great dreamer you should be willing to take risks, you should think that a thing that may seem impossible may actually be possible, something unreachable may actually be reachable just like what it's like in Wonderland but at the same time, you should also think about reality or our real world.

I guess some people may think cartoons or films like these are just for kids but sometimes, we should care to look deeper or try to understand what they really mean or what they may represent and we would really be amazed on the things we may found out.